Posted by participant3 1 day ago
What I found surprising is I didnt even have one sale. Somehow someone had notified Nintendo AND my shop had been taken down, to sell merch that didn't even exist for the market and if I remember correctly - also it didnt even have any imagery on it or anything trademarkable - even if it was clearly meant for pokmeonGo fans.
Im not bitter I just found it interesting how quick and ruthless they were. Like bros I didn't even get a chance to make a sale. ( yes and also I dont think I infringed anything).
A possible (probably already exists) business is setting up truly balanced learning sets, that is, thousands of unique images that match the idea of an italian plumber, with maybe 1% of Mario. But that won't be nearly as big a learning set as the whole internet is, nor will it be cheap to build it compared to just scraping the internet.
I thought that a lot of the issues were the opposite of this, where Google put their thumb on the scale to go against what the prompt asked. Like when someone would ask for a historically accurate picture of a US senator from the 1800s and repeatedly get women and non-white men. The training set for that prompt has to be overwhelmingly white men so I don't think it was just a matter of following the training data.
Of course the irony is that if the people who get offended whenever they see images of non-white people asked for a picture of "Vikings being attacked by Godzilla" , they'd get worked up if any of the Vikings in the picture were Asian (how unrealistic!). It's a made-up universe! The image contains a damn (Asian) Kaiju in it, and everyone is supposed to be pissed because the Vikings are unrealistic!?
A human, even one whose only experience of an Italian plumber is Mario will be able to draw an Italian plumber who is not Mario. That's because he knows that Mario is just a video game character and doesn't even do much plumbing. He knows however how an actual non-Italian plumber looks like, and that a guy doing plumbing work in Italy is more likely to look like a regular Italian guy equipped like a non-Italian plumber than to a video game character.
And if asked to draw a Viking, he knows that Vikings are people originating from Scandinavia, so they can't be Asian by definition, even in an Asian context. A human artist can adjust things to the unrealistic setting, but unless presented with a really good reason, will not change the core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking.
But it requires reasoning. Which current image generating AIs don't have.
No, I would not be pissed if a human artist drew an Asian Viking. Do you get pissed when a human artist draws a white Jesus? Why are we justifying internet outrage over an Asian Viking when people have been drawing this middle-eastern Jew as white for centuries?
> A human artist can adjust things to the unrealistic setting, but unless presented with a really good reason, will not change the core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking.
If you asked Matt Stone and Trey Parker to draw a Viking, are you sure it would contain the "core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking?" What if you asked Picasso to draw a Viking? The Vikings in The Simpsons would be yellow, and nobody would complain. Would you be offended if you asked Hokusai to draw a Viking and it came out looking Asian? Vikings didn't even have those stupid horned helmets that everyone draws them with! Is their dumb, historically inaccurate horned helmet a core part of what makes a Viking a Viking? What the hell are we even talking about? It's crystal clear that all of these "historical accuracy" drums are only ever beaten when some white person is offended that non-white people exist. Otherwise, nobody gives a shit about historical accuracy. There's a fucking Kaiju in the image!
Like any artist, Gemini had a particular style. That style happened to be a multi-cultural one, and what we learned is that a multi-culture style is absolutely enraging to people unless it results in more Whiteness.
Consider elves instead of Vikings. People would also be offended if an AI drew elves as black people with pointy ears. There's no "a human artist should know that elves have to be white" bullshit defense there. There's no historical accuracy bullshit. There's only racism.
Unsurprisingly, people don't like being so nakedly herded in their opinions. When the "nudges" become "shoves" people object.
The Gemini prompt was something like "make sure any images of people show a diverse range of humans", or something. Yes, it was totally ham-handed, but that's not what people were pissed about. It's also ham-handed that we can't generate a nipple, or a swear word, or violence. Why does "make sure images do not contain excessive violence" not piss people off? The Vikings were fucking brutal. It would be very historically accurate to show them raping women and cutting people's limbs off. Are we all supposed to be pissed that AI does not generate that image? It's just as ham-handed as "make sure humans are diverse". No, it was not the ham-handedness that enraged people. It was not the historical inaccuracy. It was the word "diverse".
In a work of fiction -- which you're automatically asking for when you ask an AI to generate an image -- in a work of fiction, would you be offended if you saw a white Ninja? A white Samurai? A white Middle-Eastern Jew born in Roman times? Would there have been internet outrage over pictures of white Samurai? We all know the answer: no, of course not. So why is an Asian Viking offensive when a white Samurai is not? Why are we supposed to get angry about an Asian Viking, but a white Jesus is just A-OK? What could the difference possibly be? Anyone?
They'll eventually have open source competition too. And then none of this will matter.
OmniGen is a good start, just woefully undertrained.
The VAR paper is open, from ByteDance, and supposedly the architecture this is based on.
Black Forest Labs isn't going to sit on their laurels. Their entire product offering just became worthless and lost traction. They're going to have to answer this.
I'd put $50 on ByteDance releases an open source version of this in three months.
It was removed on Copyright claims before I could order one item myself. After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let me buy one item for personal use.
My point is: Doesn't have to be Sony, doesn't have to be a snitch - overzealous anticipatory obedience by the shop might have been enough.
I used Spreadshirt to print a panel from the Tintin comic on a T-shirt, and I had no problem ordering it (it shows Captain Haddock moving through the jungle, swatting away the mosquitoes harassing him, giving himself a big slap on the face, and saying, 'Take that, you filthy beasts!').
The big advertisers had all furnished us a list of their trademarks and acceptable domains. Any advertiser trying to use one that wasn’t on the allow-list had their ad removed at review time.
I suspect this could be what happened to you. If the platform you were using has any kind of review process for new shops, you may have run afoul of pre-registered keywords.
Nintendo is also famously protective of their IP: to give another anecdote, I just bought one of the emulator handhelds on Aliexpress that are all the rage these days, and while they don't advertise it they usually come preloaded with a buttload or ROMs. Mine did, including a number of Nintendo properties — but nary an Italian plumber to be found. The Nintendo fear runs deep.
Is this correct? I would guess Nintendo has some automation/subscription to a service that handles this. I doubt it was some third party snitching.
A couple years ago, he noticed that the merchandise trademark for "Mythbusters" had lapsed, so he bought it. He, now the legal owner of the trademark Mythbusters for apparel, made shirts that used that trademark.
Discovery sent him a cease and desist and threatened to sue. THEY had let the trademark lapse. THEY had lost the right to the trademark, by law. THEY were in the wrong, and a lawyer agreed.
But good fucking luck funding that legal battle. So he relinquished the trademark.
Buy a walrus plushy cause it's funny: https://allen-pan-shop.fourthwall.com/en-usd/
Note the now "Myth Busted" shirts instead.
Hilariously, a friend of Allen Pan's, from the same "Finding the next mythbuster" show; Kyle Hill, is friends enough with Adam Savage to talk to him occasionally, and supposedly the actual Mythbusters themselves were not empathetic to Allen's trademark claim.
Usually there are lawyers letters involved first?
I think the problem there was being dependent on someone who is a complete pushover, doesn't bother to check for false positives and can kill your business with a single thought.
For further info it was Redbubble.
>Redbubble is a significant player in the online print-on-demand marketplace. In fiscal year 2023, it reported having 5 million customers who purchased 4.8 million different designs from 650,000 artists. The platform attracts substantial web traffic, with approximately 30.42 million visits in February 2025.
That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation and they'll never create.
Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.
There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.
For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.
That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can.
And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince the average person that ideas are in fact property. That the first person to think something and write it down rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are "stealing."
This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.
(Trademarks aside) Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to create a profitable game for them.
If they all go bankrupt today I won't lose any sleep over it.
People also try to make a living selling bananas and apples. Should we create an elaborate scheme for them to make sure they survive? Their product is actually important to have. Why can't they own the exclusive right to sell bananas similarly? If anyone can just sell apples it would hurt their profit.
It is long ago but that is how things use to work. We do still have taxi medallions in some places and all kinds of legalized monopolies like it.
Perhaps there is some sector where it makes sense but I can't think of it.
If you want to make a movie you can just do a crowd funder like Robbert space industry.
Do you want more games (movies, books...)? Then you want studios to make money in that type of game. Because and if they make money they have incentive to do so. Now if you are happy with the number and quality of free games a few hard core people who will do it even if they make nothing then you don't care. However games generally take a lot of effort to create and so by paying people to make them we can ensure people who want to actually have the time - as opposed want to but instead have to spend hours in a field farming for their food.
Now it is true that games often do look alike and many are not worth making and such. However if you want more you need to ensure they make money so it is worth investing.
We can debate how much they should make and how long copyright should be for. However you want them to make money so they make more.
> "On platforms like Steam, indie games constitute the vast majority of new titles. For instance, in 2021, approximately 98% of the 11,700 games released on Steam were from indie developers. This trend has continued, with indie games accounting for 99% of releases on gaming platforms between 2018 and 2023."
Written content:
> "Every year, traditional publishers release around half a million to a million new books in the U.S., but that number is dwarfed by the scale of independent writing online: WordPress users alone publish over 70 million blog posts per month, Amazon sees over 1.7 million self-published books annually, and platforms like Medium, Substack, and countless personal websites generate millions more articles and essays. While the average quality of traditional publishing remains high due to strict editorial standards, consumer behavior has shifted dramatically—people now spend far more time reading informal, self-published content online, from niche newsletters to Reddit posts, often favoring relevance, speed, and authenticity over polish. This shift has made the internet the dominant source of written content by volume and a major player in shaping public discourse."
Video content:
> "Today, the overwhelming majority of video content is produced not by Hollywood or television studios, but by individuals on the internet. YouTube alone sees over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute—more than 260 million hours per year—vastly outpacing the combined annual output of all major film studios and TV networks, which together produce only a fraction of that volume. Despite questions about quality, consumer habits have shifted dramatically: people now watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube content per day, and platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch are growing rapidly, especially among younger audiences. While Hollywood still commands attention with high-budget blockbusters and prestige series, user-generated content dominates the daily media diet in both time spent and engagement."
Big budget studios are AMAZING at distribution. They blow indie devs out of the water, who focus almost all their effort on just product.
Do big budget studios often make great games? Yes! But they often produce total garbage, too, just like indie devs. I think the biggest difference between them is distribution.
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...
If I was running the trade emergency room in any European state right now, I'd have "stop enforcing US copyright" up there next to "reciprocal tarrifs".
* You actually have a lot to lose, but it's not tangible or very directly measurable, and the effects compile over a long time, so the results are not easy to see.
Maybe. In my microcosm even before big AI, 100% of my tech acquaintances were against IP laws, 0% of my art acquaintances were, and authors I know had varied opinions based on their other backgrounds.
Artists do seem to have had a mindset shift. Previously they supported IP protection because it was "right" (or they'd at least concede that in practice it's not helping them personally), but with the AI boom most of them are pro-IP laws because of more visceral livelihood fears.
Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use, which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own profit.
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-faqs#...
[2] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset.
If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years.
The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that goes public domain after 20.
Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I don’t know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But 120->20? Maybe not.
A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist.
In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn’t have the LOTR movies.
Not so, because of net present value.
The return from investing in normal stocks is ~10%/year, which is to say ~670% over 20 years, because of compounding interest. Another way of saying this is that $1 in 20 years is worth ~$0.15 today. A dollar in 30 years is worth ~$0.05 today. A dollar in 40 years is worth ~$0.02 today. As a result, if a thing generates the same number of dollars every year, the net present value of the first 20 years is significantly more than the net present value of all the years from 20-120 combined, because money now or soon from now is worth so much more than money a long time from now. And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.
The reason corporations lobby for copyright term extensions isn't that they care one bit about extended terms for new works. It's because they don't want the works from decades ago to enter the public domain now, and they're lobbying to make the terms longer retroactively. But all of those works were already created and the original terms were sufficient incentive to cause them to be.
50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue. Today, it’s $25. That’s a 50x increase… a dollar in 50 years might be worth $0.02 today, but a movie ticket in 50 years is worth about a movie ticket today.
For the crown jewel IP that the studios are most interested in protecting, the opposite of this assumption is true. Star Wars, for example, is making more money than ever. Streaming revenues will probably invalidate that assumption for an even wider pool of back catalog properties.
Maybe even some sort of gradual opening of the IP, where after say 10 years, broad categories are opened (think things like “the Jedi” or “the Empire” or “Endor”), but specific characters and their representations aren’t (so no Darth Vader or Luke Skywalkers), then after 20 years you open the characters themselves but only derivative works. And then finally after 30 years or so you open the originals as well for things like translations or “de-specialized” editions or what have you. Then finally 50 years puts the raw originals in the public domain as well.
Make copyright last for a fixed term of 25 years with optional 10-year renewals up to 95 years on an escalating fee schedule (say, $100k for the first decade and doubling every subsequent decade) and people—and studios—would have essentially the same incentive to create as they do now, and most works would get into the public domain far sooner.
Probably be fewer entirely lost works, as well, if you had firmer deposit requirements for works with extended copyrights (using the revenue from the extensions to fund preservation) with other works entering the public domain soon enough that they were less likely to be lost before that happened.
That would be fine, if the studios didn't want to have it both ways. They want to retain full copyright control over their "asset", but they also use Hollywood Accounting [1] to both avoid paying taxes and cheat contributors that have profit-sharing agreements.
If studios declare that they made a loss on producing and releasing something to get a tax break, the copyright term for that work should be reduced to 10 years tops.
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-peter-j...
It would have been an even bigger gamble if they weren’t able to bank on any long term revenue (I’m certain Netflix continues to pay for the rights to stream the trilogy after 2021).
Producers don't invest in movies for hypothetical revenues in 20 years time. If it doesn't pay off soon after release, it's written off as a loss. Revenues in 100 years time are completely irrelevant.
That they are valuable speaks to market inefficiency. Where is the consumer surplus?
Seinfeld wasn't greenlit due to Netflix streaming rights. Better Lion King adaptations might have been made instead.
Movies for instance make most of their revenue in the 2 week following their release in theater. Beyond, peoole who wanted to see it had already seen it and the others don't care.
I'd argue it's similar for other art form, even for music. The gain at the very end of the copyright lifetime is extremely marginal and doesn't influence spending decision, which is mostly measured on a return basis of at most 10 years.
Due to the fairy high cost of capital right now, pretty much anything more than 5 years away is irrelevant. 10 years max, even for insanely high returns on investment.
Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of the threat.
> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property.
In Europe, particularly France, copyright arose for a very different reason: to protect an author's moral rights as the creator of the work. It was seen as immoral to allow someone's work -- their intellectual offspring -- to be meddled with by others without their permission. Your work represents you and your reputation, and for others to redistribute it is an insult to your dignity.
That is why copyrights in Europe started with much longer durations than they did in the United States, and the US has gradually caught up. It is not entirely a Disney effect, but a fundamental difference in the purpose of copyright.
Are the origins the same when looking at other intellectual property like patents?
How did they deal with quoting and/or critiquing other's ideas? Did they allow limited quotation? What about parody and satire?
Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works.
So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court asking "how is this not simply laundering someone's likeness through a third party which claims to not have an image / filter / app / artist reproducing my client's likeness?"
All seemingly complicated scams come down to a very basic, obvious, even primitive grift. Someone somewhere in a regulatory capacity is either fooled or paid into accepting that no crime was committed. It's just that simple. This, however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the illegality of it. I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley. I think there are legal grounds here to force all of these models to be taken offline.
Additionally, "guardrails" that prevent 1:1 copies of film stills from being reprinted are clearly not only insufficient, they are evidence that the pirates in this case seek to obscure the nature of their piracy. They are the evidence that generative AI is not much more than a copyright laundering scheme, and the obsession with these guardrails is evidence of conspiracy, not some kind of public good.
No, you can't! But it shouldn't be the tool that prohibits this. You are not allowed to use existing images of Harrison Ford for your commercial and you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?
The justification so far seems to have been loosely based on the idea that derivative artworks are protected as free expression. That argument loses currency if these are not considered derivative but more like highly compressed images in a novel, obfuscated compression format. Layers and layers of neurons holding a copy of Harrison Ford's face is novel, but it's hard to see why it's any different legally than running a JPEG of it through some filters and encoding it in base64. You can't just decode it and use it without attribution.
If ChatGPT generates an image of Indiana Jones and distributes it to an end user that is precisely one violation of copyright. A violation that no one but ChatGPT and that end user will know about. From a legal perspective, it's the equivalent of taking a screenshot of an Indiana Jones DVD and sending it to a friend.
ChatGPT can hold within its memory every copyrighted thing that exists and that would not violate anyone's copyright. What does violate someone's copyright is when an exact replica or easily-identifiable derivative work is actually distributed to people.
Realistically, OpenAI shouldn't be worried about someone generating an image of Indiana Jones using their tools. It's the end user that ultimately needs to be held responsible for how that image gets used after-the-fact.
It is perfectly legitimate to capture or generate images of Indiana Jones for your own personal use. For example, if you wanted to generate a parody you would need those copyrighted images to do so (the copyright needs to exist before you can parody it).
If I were Nintendo, Disney, etc I wouldn't be bothered by ChatGPT generating things resembling of my IP. At worst someone will use them commercially and they can be sued for that. More likely, such generated images will only enhance their IP by keeping it active in the minds of people everywhere.
Formulated this way, I see your point. I see the LLM as a tool, just like photoshop. From a legal standpoint, I even think you're right. But from a moral standpoint, my feeling is that it should even be okay for an artist to sell painted pictures of Harrison Ford. But not to sell the same image as posters on ebay. And now my argument falls apart. Thanks for leading my thoughts in this direction...
But that's all known. My argument for why me selling that painting is okay, and why an AI company with a neural network doing the same thing and selling it would not be okay, is a lot more subtle and goes to a question that I think has not been addressed properly: What's the difference between my neurons seeing a picture of Harrison Ford, and painting it, and artificial neurons owned by a company doing the same thing? What if I traced a photo of Ford and painted it, versus doing his face from memory?
(As a side note, my friend in art school had an obsession with Jewel, the singer. He painted her dozens of times from memory. He was not an AI, just a really sweet guy).
To answer why I think it's ok to paint Jewel or Ford, and sell your painting, I kind of have to fall back on three ideas:
(1) Interpretation: You are not selling a picture of them, you're selling your personal take on your experience of them. My experience of watching Indiana Jones movies as a kid and then making a painting is not the same thing as holding a compressed JPEG file in my head, to the degree that my own cognitive experience has significantly changed my perceptions in ways that will come out in the final artwork, enough to allow for whatever I paint to be based on some kind of personal evolution. The item for sale is not a picture of Harrison Ford, it's my feelings about Harrison Ford.
(2) Human-centrism: That my neurons are not 1:1 copies of everything I've witnessed. Human brains aren't simply compression algorithms the way LLMs or diffusers are. AI doesn't bring cognitive experience to its replication of art, and if it seems to do so, we have to ask whether that isn't just a simulacrum of multiple styles it stole from other places laid over the art it's being asked to produce. There's an anti-human argument to be made that we do the exact same thing when we paint Indiana Jones after being exposed to Picasso. But here's a thought: we are not a model. Or rather, each of us is a model. Buying my picture of Indiana Jones is a lot like buying my model and a lot less like buying a platonic picture of Harrison Ford.
(3) Tools, as you brought up. The more primitive the tools used, the more difficult we can prove it to be to truly copy something. It takes a year to make 4 seconds of animation, it takes an AI no time at all to copy it... one can prove by some function of work times effort that an artwork is, at least, a product of one's own if not completely original.
I'm throwing these things out here as a bit of a challenge to the HN community, because I think these are attributes that have been under-discussed in terms of the difference between AI-generated artwork and human art (and possibly a starting point for a human-centric way of understanding the difference).
I'm really glad you made me think about this and raised the point!
[edit] Upon re-reading, I think points 1 and 2 are mostly congruent. Thanks for your patience.
Where I’m going is I don’t think it makes sense for the moral / legal acceptability of a in image to depend on the mechanical means which created it. I think we have to judge based on the image itself. If the human-generated version and AI-generated version both show the same level of interpretation when viewed, I don’t think point 1 supports treating them differently.
And, as you say, point 2 is mostly congruent, but I have to point out that LLMs are not merely compressed versions of the training material, but instead generalized learnings based on the training data.
ML “neurons” may function differently than our own, and transformer architecture is likely different from the way we think, but the learning of generalized patterns plus details sufficient to reconstitute specific instances seems pretty similar.
Think about painting Indiana Jones; I’ll bet you could paint the handle of the whip in great detail. But it’s likely that’s because you remember a specific image of his whip handle; it’s because you know what whip handles look like in general. ML models work similarly (at some level of abstraction).
I’m left unconvinced that there is anything substantially different about human and AI generated art, and also that we can only judge IP position of either based on the work itself.
I'm a bit of a home moonshiner, too, so love that you're coming up with labels and using these tools to help out! If I could offer one piece of advice, whether for writing prompts or making your own final art, it would be: History is so rich with visual ideas you can riff from. The history of beer and wine bottles itself is unbelievable. If aliens came here a thousand years after we're gone, and all that was left were liquor labels, they could understand most of our culture. The LLMs always go to the most obvious thing, unless you tell them specifically otherwise. Use the tool but also get funky and mix up the ideas you love the most, adding your own flavor. Just like being a brewer or a chef. That's the essence of being an artist, and making something that at the end of the day is unique and new. Love it. Send me a beer please.
All of that is entirely separate from trademark law, which would prevent you from using any representation of a trademarked character unless e.g. you can reasonably argue that you are engaged in parody.
If the AI prompt was "produce a picture of Micky Mouse", I'd agree with you.
The creators of AI claim their product produces computer-generated images, i.e. generated/created by the computer. Instead it's producing a picture of a real actual person.
If I contract an artist to produce a picture of a person from their imagination, i.e. not a real person, and they produce a picture of Harrison Ford, then yeah I'd say that's on the artist.
The thing is though, there is also a human requesting that. The prompt was chosen specifically to get that result on purpose.
The corporate systems are trying to prevent this, but if you use any of the local models, you don't even have to be coy. Ask it for "photo of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones" and what do you expect? That's what it's supposed to do. It does what you tell it to do. If you turn your steering wheel to the left, the car goes to the left. It's just a machine. The driver is the one choosing where to go.
The way AI is coded and trained pushes it constantly towards a bland-predictable mean, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way.
That said:
> I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley.
If you're framing the sides like that, it's pretty clear which I'm on. :)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/1517ldjmv
Loads of lawsuits have been filed by celebrities and their estates over the unauthorized use of their likeness. And in fact, in 2022, Las Vegas banned Elvis impersonators from performing weddings after a threat from the Presley estate's licensing company:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10872855/Elvis-imag...
But there are also a couple key differences between putting on a costume and acting like Elvis, and using a picture of Elvis to sell soap.
One is that a personal artistic performance could be construed as pastiche or parody. But even more importantly, if there's a financial incentive involved in doing that performance, the financial incentive has to be aligned more with the parody than with drawing an association to the original. In other words, dressing up as Elvis as a joke or an act, or even to sing a song and get paid to perform a wedding is one thing if it's a prank, it's another thing if it's a profession, and yet another thing if it's a mass-marketing advertisement that intends for people to seriously believe that Elvis endorsed this soap.
Now of course that leaves out concerns over how much of advertisement is making money off of unreasonable people, which is a concern Congress occasionally pays attention to.
If you have to explain "laundering someone's likeness" to them maybe not, I think it's a frankly bizarre phrase.
An artist who works professionally has family members, family members who are dependent on them.
If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two seperate copyrights).
Those laws are effectively attempting to make information behave as physical objects, by giving them simulated "mass" through a rent-seeking structure. The case you describe is where this simulated physical substrate stops behaving like physical substrate, and choice was made to paper over that with extra rules, so that family can inherit and profit from IP of a dead creator, much like they would inherit physical products of a dead craftsman and profit from selling them.
It's a valid question whether or not this is taking things too far, just for the sake of making information conform to rules of markets for physical goods.
So the question to ask is whether the artist would have created the work and published it, even knowing that it isn't an insurance to their family in case of their early death.
Also it seems you assume inheritance is a good think. Most people do think the same on a personal level, however when we observes the effect on a society the outcome is concentration of wealth on a minority and barriers for wealth hand change === barriers for "American dream".
I heard this explained once as the art in some writing is explaining how people feel in a situation that is still too new for many to want to pay to have it illustrated to them. But once the newness has passed, and people understand or want to understand, then they enjoy reading about it.
As a personal example, I could enjoy movies about unrequited love before and long after I experienced it firsthand, but not during or for years after. People may not yet have settled feelings about an event until afterward, and not be willing to “pick at the scab”.
The other, more statistical explanation is that it just takes a lot of attempts to capture an idea or feeling and a longer window of time represents more opportunities to hit upon a winning formula. So it’s easier to capture a time and place afterward than during.
Really? Because there are a lot of very stupid laws out there that should absolutely be broken, regularly, flagrantly, by as many people as possible for the sake of making enforcement completely null and pointless. Why write in neutered corporate-speak while commenting on a casual comment thread while also (correctly) pointing out the absurdity of certain laws.
If the work is popular it will make plenty of money in that time. If it isn't popular, it probably won't make much more money after that.
I think life of creator + some reasonable approximation of family members life expectancy would make sense. Content creators do create to ensure their family's security in some cases, I would guess.
they went down the rabbit hole on trademark laws, which are not only not copyright related, they are an entirely different federal agency at the Patent Office
gave me a giggle and the last time I used cheapo prepaid lawyers
For example, Aspirin is known as an adult dose of acetylsalicylic acid by almost every consumer, and is Trademarked to prevent some clandestine chemist in their garage making a similarly branded harmful/ineffective substance that damages the Goodwill Bayer earned with customers over decades of business.
Despite popular entertainment folklore, sustainable businesses actually want consumer goodwill associated with their products and services.
While I agree in many WIPO countries copyright law has essentially degenerated into monetized censorship by removing the proof of fiscal damages criteria (like selling works you don't own.) However, Trademarks ensure your corporate mark or product name is not hijacked in local Markets for questionable purposes.
Every castle needs a moat, but I do kind of want to know more about the presidential "Tesler". lol =)
If you torrent a movie right now, you'll be fined in many advanced countries.
But a huge corporation led by a sociopath scrapes the entire internet and builds a product with other people's work ?
Totally fine.
It seem most of the discussion is emotionally loaded, and people lost the plot of both why copyright exists and what copyright protects and are twisting that to protect whatever media they like most.
But one cannot pick and choose where laws apply, and then the better question would be how we plug the gap that let a multibilion Corp get away with distribution at scale and what derivative work and personal use mean in a image generation as a service world, and artist should be very careful in what their wishes are here, because I bet there's a lot of commission work edging on style transfer and personal use.
Why am I wrong?
That oughtta be enough to incentivize people to work and build their wealth.
Anything more than that is unnecessary.
What problem are you trying to solve?
So how about we go back to how it used to be and just remove this entire concept.
You can own things you can't own an idea.
Patents are for ideas. Patents do in fact expire far faster than copyrights in the USA. The main problem with patents is patent trolling in the area of software patents.
Also, can you wash this not-my car I'm driving, that happens to be registered in my name?
Let me know if you will be requiring compensation for not-your time and not-your effort.
You will find the needed cleaning materials at the household goods store down the street. Just walk in, grab whatever you need, and walk out.
I really, really hope the multimedia-megacorps get together and class-action ChatGPT and every other closed, for-profit LLM corporation into oblivion.
There should not be a two-tier legal system. If it's illegal for me, it's illegal for Sam Altman.
Get to it.
That’s a fine philosophical debate, but the law is designed by the rich to favor the rich and while there are a number of exceptions there is little you can do with the legal system without money and lots of it. So while having a truly just system would be neat it just isn’t in the cards for humanity (IMHO) so long as we allow entities to amass “fuck you” money and wield it to their liking.
There is a lack of consent here that runs even deeper than what copyright was traditionally made to protect. It goes further than parody. We can't flip our standards back and forth depending on who the image is made to reproduce
Large corporations and their execs live by different laws than the rest of us.
That’s how it is.
Anything is else is, unfortunately, a fiction in this country.
I’m just stating a fact. No discussion of wrong or right or whatever.
Just pointing out how there is no more rule of law in the US. Idk when exactly it disappeared, but it’s definitely not present anymore
I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with something that at least feels new.
In the end, other than for copyright-washing, why wouldn't I just use the original movie still/photo in the first place?
To me, this article is further proof that LLMs are a form of lossy storage. People attribute special quality to the loss (the image isn't wrong, it's just got different "features" that got inserted) but at this point there's not a lot distinguishing a seed+prompt file+model from a lossy archive of media, be it text or images, and in the future likely video as well.
The craziest thing is that AI seems to have gathered some kind of special status that earlier forms of digital reproduction didn't have (even though those 64kbps MP3s from napster were far from perfect reproductions), probably because now it's done by large corporations rather than individuals.
If we're accepting AI-washing of copyright, we might as well accept pirated movies, as those are re-encoded from original high-resolution originals as well.
A new MCU movie is released, its 60 second trailer posted on Youtube, but I don't feel like watching the movie because I got bored after Endgame.
Youtube has very strict anti-scraping techniques now, so I use deep-scrapper to generate the whole trailer from the thumbnail and title.
I use deep-pirate to generate the whole 3 hour movie from the trailer.
I use deep-watcher to summarize the whole movie in a 60 second video.
I watch the video. It doesn't make any sense. I check the Youtube trailer. It's the same video.
To a viewer, a human-made work and an AI-generated one both amount to a series of stimuli that someone else made and you have no control over; and when people pay to see a movie, generally they don't do it with the intent to finance the movie company to make more movies -- they do it because they're offered the option to spend a couple hours watching something enjoyable. Who cares where it comes from -- if it reached us, it must be good, right?
The "special status" you speak of is due to AI's constrained ability to recombine familiar elements in novel ways. 64k MP3 artifacts aren't interesting to listen to; while a high-novelty experience such as learning a new culture or a new discipline isn't accessible (and also comes with expectations that passive consumption doesn't have.)
Either way, I wish the world gave people more interesting things to do with their brains than make a money, watch a movies, or some mix of the two with more steps. (But there isn't much of that left -- hence the concept of a "personal life" as reduced to breaking one's own and others' cognitive functioning then spending lifetimes routing around the damage. Positively fascinating /s)
[0] https://imgur.com/a/wqrBGRF Image captions are the impled IP, I copied the prompts from the blog post.
Recent benchmark on unseen 2025 Math Olympiad shows none of the models can problem solve . They all accidentally or on purpose had prior solutions in the training set.
Certainly there's an aspect of people using the chat interface like they use google: describe xyz to try to surface the name of a movie. Just in this case, we're doing the (less common?) query of: find me the picture I can vaguely describe; but it's a query to a image /generating/ service, not an image search service.
So I asked it to make 4 random and generic superheroes. It created Batman, Supergirl, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman. Then at about 90% finished it deleted the image and said I was violating copyright.
I doubt the model you interact with actually knows why the babysitter model rejects images, but it claims to know why and leads to some funny responses. Here is it's response to me asking for a superhero with a dark bodysuit, a purple cape, a mouse logo on their chest, and a spooky mouse mask on their face.
> I couldn't generate the image you requested because the prompt involved content that may violate policy regarding realistic human-animal hybrid masks in a serious context.
(hard to formulate why I was too lazy to test myself :) )
I have a strong suspicion that many human artists would behave in a way the chat bot did (unless they start asking clarifying questions. Which chatbots should learn to do as well)
I wonder if it's a fine tuning issue where people have overly provided archetypes of the thing that they were training towards. That would be the fastest way for the model to learn the idea but it may also mean the model has implicitly learned to provide not just an instance of a thing but a known archetype of a thing. I'm guessing in most RLHF tests archetypes (regardless of IP status) score quite highly.
ClosedAI doesn't seem to be OK with it, because they are explicitly censoring characters of more popular IPs. Presumably as a fig leaf against accusations of theft.
The question is "should we define it as such?"
But because a computer, and not a human does it, they get to launder their responsibility.
For humans it doesn't make sense because we have generation and filtering in a single package.
Overall the model is tra
So the criminal party here would be OpenAI, since they are selling access to a service that generates copyright-infringing images.
Ironically that's probably because the errors and flaws in those generations at least made them different from what they were attempting to rip off.
Overfitting is if you didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones and then it still gave Indiana Jones.
It didn't though, it just spat out what is basically a 1:1 copy of some Indiana Jones promo shoot. No where did the prompt ask for it to look like Harrison Ford.
If we were playing Charades, just about anyone would have guessed you were describing Indiana Jones.
If you gave a street artist the same prompt, you'd probably get something similar unless you specified something like "... but something different than Indiana Jones".
That's not overfitting. That's either just correct or underfitting (if we say it's never returning anything but 2)!
Overfitting is where the model matches the training data too closely and has inferred a complex relationship using too many variables where there is really just noise.
But if you look at it from the perspective that there is only one example to learn, from it is maybe not over it.
How can you express, in term of AI training, ignoring the existence of something that's widely present in your training data set? if you ask the same question to a 18yo girl in rural Thailand, would she draw Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones? Maybe not. Or maybe she would.
But IMO an AI model must be able to provide a more generic (unbiased?) answer when the prompt wasn't specific enough.
Maybe it would have some point if you are targetting users in a substantially different social context. In the case, you would design the model to be familiar with their tropes instead. So when they describe a character iconic in their culture, by a few distinguishing characteristics, it would produce that character for them. That's no different at all.
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
“Copyright does not protect • Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, or discoveries”
Not sure why this is even controversial, this has been the case for a hundred years.
One thing I would say, it's interesting to consider what would make this not so obviously bad.
Like, we could ask AI to assess the physical attributes of the characters it generated. Then ask it to permute some of those attributes. Generate some random tweaks: ok but brawy, short, and a different descent. Do similarly on some clothing colors. Change the game. Hit the "random character" button on the physical attributes a couple times.
There was an equally shatteringly-awful less-IP-theft (and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations).... An equally shattering recent incident for me. Having trouble finding it, don't remember the right keywords, but an article about how AI has a "default guy" type that it uses everywhere, a super generic personage, that it would use repeatedly. It was so distasteful.
The nature of 'AI as compression', as giving you the most median answer is horrific. Maybe maybe maybe we can escape some of this trap by iterating to different permutations, by injecting deliberate exploration of the state spaces. But I still fear AI, worry horribly when anyone relies on it for decision making, as it is anti-intelligent, uncreative in extreme, requiring human ingenuity to budge off its rock of oppressive hypernormality that it regurgitates.
Are you telling me that our culture should be deprived of the idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset?
Indiana Jones is 44 years old. When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done since humans first started sitting down next to a fire and telling stories?
edit: this reminds of this iconic scene from Dr. Strangelove, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ9B7owHxMQ
Mandrake: Colonel... that Coca-Cola machine. I want you to shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.
Guano: That's private property.
Mandrake: Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame, outlook, way of life, and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of the United States? Can you imagine? Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twit!
Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what's gonna happen to you?
Mandrake: What?
Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.
Some great video games to feature adventurer archaeologists:
* NetHack (One of the best roles in the game)
* Tomb Raider series (Lara Croft is a bona fide archaeologist)
* Uncharted series (Nathan Drake is more of a treasure hunter but he becomes an archaeologist when he retires from adventuring)
* Professor Layton series
* La-Mulana series (very obviously inspired by Indiana Jones, but not derivative)
* Spelunky (inspired by La-Mulana)
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventurerArchae...
IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively. Make copyright law to be what is best for society and creators as a whole, not for lobbyists representing already copyrighted material.
Careful, if we were to shorten copyright, not doing so retroactively would give an economic advantage to franchises already published over those that would get published later. As if the current big studios needed any further advantages over newcomers.
This is a kind of strange comment for me to read. Because imby tone it sounds like a rebuttal? But by content, it agrees with a core thing I said about myself:
> and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations
What's just such a nightmare to me is that the tech is so normative. So horribly normative. This article shows that AI again and again reproduced only the known, only the already imagined. Its not that it's IP theft that rubs me so so wrong, it's that it's entirely bankrupt & uncreative, so very stuck. All this power! And yet!
You speak at what disgusts me yourself!
> When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done
The machine could be imagining all kinds of Indianas. Of all different remixed recreated expanded forms. But this pictures are 100% anything but that. They're Indiana frozen in Carbonite. They are the driest saddest prison of the past. And call into question the validity of AI entirely, show something greviously missing.
You are completely ignoring the fact that you can provide so much more information to the LLMs to get what you want. If you truly want novel images, ChatGPT can absolutely provide them, but you have to provide a better starting point than "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip".
If you just provide a teensy bit more information, the results dramatically change. Try out "An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". Or give it an input image to work with.
From just adding a couple words, ChatGPT produces an entirely new character. It's so easy to get it to produce novel images. It is so easy in fact, that it makes a lot of posts like this one feel like strawmen, intentionally providing so little information to the LLMs that the generic character is the only obvious output that you would expect.
Now, would it be better if it didn't default to these common movie tropes? Sure. But the fact that it can follow these tropes doesn't mean that it cannot also be used to produce entirely new images filled with your imagination as well. You just have to actually ask it for that.
So yes, the models are not creative on their own. But equally, these models are definitely capable of helping people to express their own creativity, and so calling them "uncreative", and especially "bankrupt", rings hollow. It speaks like you are expecting the models to be artists, when in fact they are just tools to be used however people see fit.
And so, the "default guy" or "default style" that ChatGPT outputs will become recognisable and boring. But anyone who wants to inject their own style into their prompts, either using text or input images, can do so. And in doing so, they skip over all of your concerns.
If AI is just compression, then decompressing a generic pop-culture-seeking prompt will yield a generic uninspired image.
Sure, assuming the artist has the proper license and franchise rights to make and distribute copies. You can go buy a picture of Indy today that may not be printed by Walt Disney Studios but by some other outfit or artists.
Or, you mean if the artist doesn't have a license to produce and distribute Indiana Jones images? Well they'll be in trouble legally. They are making "copies" of things they don't own and profiting from it.
Another question is whether that's practically enforceable.
> Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or other) laws?
When they took payment and profited from making unauthorized copies.
> It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not the copyrighted IP.
Exactly, that's why LLMs and the companies which create them are called "theft machines" -- they are reproducing copyrighted material. Especially the ones charging for "tokens". You pay them, they make money and produce unauthorized copies. Show that picture of Indy to a jury and I think it's a good chance of convincing them.
I am not saying this is good or bad, I just see this having a legal "bite" so to speak, at least in my pedestrian view of copyright law.
If they traced a photo they might be violating the copyright of the photographer.
But if they are drawing an archaeologist adventurer with a whip and a hat based on their consumption and memory of Indiana Jones imagery there is very little anyone could do.
If that image was then printed on an industrial scale or printed onto t-shirt there is a (albeit somewhat theoretical) chance that in some jurisdictions sale of those products may be able to be restricted based on rights to the likeness. But that would be a stretch.
If they show that image to a jury they’ll have no issues convincing them the LLM is infringing.
Moreover if the LLM creators are charging for it, per token or whatever, they are profiting from it.
Yes are there jurisdictions were this won’t work and but I think in US Disney lawyers could make viable argument.
With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it would be to do with the copyright in the image, the film, video or photograph. The image captures the likeness but the infringement would not be around the likeness.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was thinking of LLMs mostly.
> With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it would be to do with the copyright in the image
I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be about a character's likeness. It's not just a generic stock character, as an idea but it has enough distinctive characteristics, has a particular style hat, uses a whip. Showing that image to any jury and they'll say this is Indy. Yeah there are trademarks as well and both can apply to characters.
Ok, my sister can draw, and she gifts me an image of my favorite Marvel hero she painted to hang on my wall. Should that be illegal?
The likeness of the character is owned by Marvel. Does it mean there aren’t vendors selling unlicensed versions? No. I am sure there are. But just because not everyone is being sued doesn’t mean it’s suddenly legal.
Commissioned work is owned by the commissioner unless otherwise agreed upon by contract.
So long as the work is not distributed, exhibited, performed, etc, as in the example of keeping the artwork on their refrigerator in their home, then no infringement has taken place.
I think the LLM example is closer to the LLM and its creator being like a vendor selling pictures of Indiana Jones on the street corner than hiring someone and performing work for hire. Yes, if it was a human artist commissioned to create an art piece, then yeah, the commissioner owns it.
I'd like to push back on this: Is that legally true, or is it infringement which just happens to be so minor and under-the-radar that nobody gets in trouble?
Suppose there's a printer in my room churning out hundreds of pages of words matching that of someone's copyrighted new book, without permission.
That sure seems like infringement is happening, regardless of whether my next step is to: (A) sell it, (B) sell many of it, (C) give it away, (D) place it into my personal library of other home-printed books, or (E) hand it to someone else who paid me in advance to produce it for them under contract.
If (A) is infringement, why wouldn't (E) also be?
Just because I own my car doesn’t mean I can break the speed limit, these are orthogonal concepts legally.
If you make money off it, it's no longer fair use; it's infringement. Even if you don't make money off it, it's not automatically fair use.
My own favorite crazy story about copyright violations:
Metallica sued Green Jello for parodying Enter Sandman (including a lyric where it says "It's not Metallica"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Harley_House_(of_Love...
They lost that case. The kicker? Metallica were guest vocalists on that album.
That's my take as well.
Gen AI is turning small potatos, "artisanal" infringement into a potentially large scale automated process.
What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones but he's carrying a bow and arrow instead of a whip? Is it infringement?
What if it's a really bad drawing of Indiana Jones, so bad that you can't really tell that it's the character? Is that infringement?
What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones, but in the style of abstract expressionism, so doesn't even contain a human shape? Is it infringement?
What if it's a good drawing that looks very much like Indiana Jones, but it's not! The person's name is actually Iowa Jim. Is that infringement?
What if it's just an image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, but otherwise doesn't look anything like Indiana Jones? Is it infringement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...
I don't think this is about reproduction as much as how you got enough data for that reproduction. The riaa sent people to jail and ruined their lives for pirating. Now these companies are doing it and being valued for hundreds of billions of dollars.
A human friend can get tired and there's so many request he/she can fulfill and at a max rate. Even a team of human artists have a relatively low limit.
But Gen AI has very high limits and speeds, and it never gets tired. It seems unfair to me.
You also can’t sell a machine that outputs such material. And that’s how the story with GenAI becomes problematic. If GenAI can create the next Indiana Jones or Star Wars sequel for you (possibly a better one than Disney makes, it has become a low bar of sorts), I think the issue becomes obvious.
Nobody can prevent you from drawing a photo realistic picture of Indy, or taking a photo of him from the internet and hanging it on your fridge. Or asking a friend to do it for you. And let's be honest -- because nobody is looking -- said friend could even charge you a modest sum to draw a realistic picture of Indy for you to hang on your fridge; yes, it's "illegal" but nobody is looking for this kind of small potatos infringement.
I think the problem is when people start making a business out of this. A game developer could think "hey, I can make a game with artwork that looks just like Ghibli!", where before he wouldn't have anyone with the skills or patience to do this (see: the 4-second scene that took a year to make), now he can just ask the Gen AI to make it for them.
Is it "copyright infringement"? I dunno. Hard to tell, to be honest. But from an ethical point of view, it seems odd. And before you actually required someone to take the time and effort to copy the source material, now it's an automated and scalable process that does this, and can do this and much more, faster and without getting tired. "Theft at scale", maybe not so small potatos anymore.
--
edit: nice, downvotes. And in the other thread people were arguing HN is such a nice place for dissenting opinions.
Indy, with its logo, whiplash, and hat, is a trademark from Disney. I don't know the specific stuff; but if you sell a t-shirt with Indiana Jones, or you put the logo there... you might be sued due to trademark violation.
If you make copies of anything developed, sold, or licensed by Disney (movies, comics, books, etc) you'll have a copyright violation.
The issue we have with AI and LLM is that: - The models compress information and can make a lot of copies of it very cheaply. - Artist wages are quite low. Higher that what you'd pay OpenAI, but not enough to make a living even unless you're hired by a big company (like Marvel or DC) and they give you regular work ($100-120 for a cover, $50-80/page interior work. One page needs about one day to draw.) - AI used a lot of images from the internet to train models. Most of them were pirated. - And, of course, it is replacing low-paying jobs for artist.
Also, do not forget it might make verbatim copies of copyrighted art if the model just memorized the picture / text.
Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom should be included there.
Regardless, those games required the hard work and countless hours of animators. Gen AI doesn't.
Ah, I thought I knew this account from somewhere. It seems surprisingly easy to figure out what account is commenting just based on the words used, as I've commented that only a few active people on this site seem to use such strong words as shown here.
If you describe an Indiana Jones character, but no sex, 50/50 via internal call to rand() that it outputs a woman.
I hate how it is common to advance a position to just state a conclusion as if it were a fact. You keep repeating the same thing over and over until it seems like a concensus has been reached instead of an actual argument reasoned from first principle.
This is no theft here. Any copyright would be flimsier than software patents. I love Studio Ghibli (including $500/seat festival tickets) but it's the heart and the detail that make them what they are. You cannot clone that. Just some surface similarity. If that's all you like about the movies... you really missed the point.
Imagine if in early cinema someone had tried to claim mustachioed villian, ditsy blonde, or dumb jock? These are just tropes and styles. Quality work goes much much much deeper, and that cannot be synthesised. I can AI generate a million engagement rings, but I cannot pick the perfect one that fits you and your partners love story.
PS- the best work they did was "When Marnie was There". Just fitted together perfectly.
If engagement rings were as ubiquitous and easy to generate as Ghibli images have become, they would lose their value very quickly -- not even just in the monetary sense, but the sentimental value across the market would crash for this particular trinket. It wouldn't be about picking the right one anymore, it would be finding some other thing that better conveys status or love through scarcity.
If you have a 3d printer you'd know this feeling where abundance diminishes the value of something directly. Any pure plastic items you have are reduced to junk very quickly once you know you can basically have anything on a whim (exceptions for things with utility, however these are still printable). If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner wouldn't want any of them as a show of my undying love. Something more special and rare and thoughtful would have to take its place.
This isn't meant to come across as shallow in any way, its just classic supply and demand relating to non monetary value.
And now I think this serves the opposite argument better. Downloading some random ring from the internet would not show your undying love. Designing a custom ring just for your partner, even if it is made from plastic, and even if you use AI as a tool in the process, is where the value is generated.
As an aside, my partner detests the things I 3d print unless they have a very specific purpose, even when they are random semi artistic pieces I'm tinkering with (and I typically agree, they are junk). She loves the first thing i ever printed her though, a triceratops model, despite being randomly downloaded.
Anything made with intent from one individual to another will have some level of sentimental value, but I don't feel like making a ghibli image with AI specifically tailored to a friends tastes would have quite as much value as leveraging your own talent to do it yourself.
On the flip side, I do believe that "doing it yourself" has less value than it used to. It's a very sad reality and in my opinion a strong argument against blind "progress". We gain the ability to mass produce art but lose the ability to perceive it as art?
It doesn't matter if the ring was hand crafted or not. It's whether it has hand selected. If you find the perfect ring, even if it was generated by an AI, it's your selection that matters. It's the correspondence that matters. The way it reflects elements of your relationship. It's you recognising those elements in the ring. Your partner recoginising them in the ring. And your partner recognising you recognising them. That is what makes itself.
Not to dox myself, but I am not Grace Abrams. I met my partner long before her song "Risk" was written, but when I heard it I immediately played it for my partner and said "This describes the feelings I had when I met you". I played it for her, she cried. I didn't have to write the song or own or pay a cent for it. It's the curation that made an emotional connection and had value. The song itself has no value, and she might have even heard it and never made the connection, it was me embuing that had value.
To go back to Miyazaki, it's the connections between elements in his films. The attention to detail and tone between relationships that make his films amazing. It's all about the handyman's invoice [0]. By the time there are enough examples for AI to learn something, it ceases to be a novel insight and have value. It's the curation and application that have value and are human and cannot be stolen.
You absolutely can and these theft machines are proving that, literally cloning those details with very high precision and fidelity.
You can easily steal the style of a political cartoon or especially XKCD but you cannot steal or generate genuine fresh insight or poignant relevant metaphor for the current moment.
Wouldn’t the more appropriate solution in the case of theft be to remunerate the victims and prevent recidivism?
Instead of making it “not so obviously bad” why not just… make it good? Require AI services to either prove that 100% of their training corpus is either copyright free or properly licensed, or require them to compensate copyright holders for any infringing outputs.
Not sure I understand this part. Because creators would be getting paid for their works being used for someone else’s commercial gain?
I mean... If I go to Google right now and do an image search for "archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip," the first picture is a not-even-changed image of Indiana Jones. Which I will then copy and paste into whatever project I'm working on without clicking through to the source page (usually because the source page is an ad-ridden mess).
Perhaps the Internet itself is the hideous theft machine, and AI is just the most efficient permutation of user interface onto it.
(Incidentally, if you do that search, you will also, hilariously, turn up images of an older gentleman dressed in a brown coat and hat who is clearly meant to be "The Indiana Jones you got on Wish" from a photo-licensing site. The entire exercise of trying to extract wealth via exclusive access to memetic constructs is a fraught one).
The hypocrisy is much of the problem. If we're going to have IP laws that severely punish people and smaller companies for reselling the creative works of others without any compensation or permission then those rules should apply to powerful well-connected companies as well.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=137674209419772...
> Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.
It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.
A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.
AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.
In the first case, there's only one static image for an entire scene, scrolled and zoomed, and if they feel generous, there would be an overlay with another static image that slides over the first at a constant speed and direction. It feels dead.
In the second case, each frame is different. There's chaotic motions such as wind and there's character movement with a purpose, even in the background, there's always something happening in the animation, there's life.
I bet that a good animator could make a really impressive 4-second scene if they were given a month, instead of a year. Possibly even if they were given a day.
So if we assume that there is not a binary "cheap animation vs masterpiece" but rather a sort of spectrum between the two, then the question is: at what point do enough people stop seeing the difference, that it makes economic sense to stay at that level, if the goal is to create as much high-quality content as possible?
That lowest-accepted quality also declines over time, as generations after generations of people become used to rock-bottom quality. In the end, there's only slop and AI will make the cheapest slop ever. Welcome to a brave new world. We don't even need people anymore. They're too expensive.
It's not inevitable that it's a race to the cheapest and shittest. That's just one (fairly strong) commercial force amongst many.
To be clear, I am not saying it's not valuable, only that to the vast majority, it's not.
Social media and generative AI may be good business because the capture the attention of the majority, but maybe they are not valuable to anyone.
On the right side, you have the minority of connoisseurs. And on the left, there is a minority who really don't care at all. And then the middle majority who can tell bad from good, but not good from great.
Perhaps it's not for everyone.
Although only a few will really appreciate why it's different I definitely think the difference has a heavy effect on the vibe of a movie.
Same with shooting on film vs digital, not that digital is worse it has it's own feeling which can be used with intent.
This is art.
There are many valid answers.
Maybe you want to create it to tell a story, and you have an overflowing list of stories you're desperate to tell. The animation may be a means to an end, and tools that help you get there sooner mean telling more stories.
Maybe you're pretty good at making things people like and you're in it for the money. That's fine, there are worse ways to provide for your family than making things people enjoy but aren't a deep thing for you.
Maybe you're in it because you love the act of creating it. Selling it is almost incidental, and the joy you get from it comes down to spending huge amounts of time obsessing over tiny details. If you had a source of income and nobody ever saw your creations, you'd still be there making them.
These are all valid in my mind, and suggest different reasons to use or not to use tools. Same as many walks of life.
I'd get the weeds gone in my front lawn quickly if I paid someone to do it, but I quite enjoy pottering around on a sunny day pulling them up and looking back at the end to see what I've achieved. I bake worse bread than I could buy, and could buy more and better bread I'm sure if I used the time to do contracting instead. But I enjoy it.
On the other hand, there are things I just want done and so use tools or get others to do it for me.
One positive view of AI tools is that it widens the group of people who are able to achieve a particular quality, so it opens up the door for people who want to tell the story or build the app or whatever.
A negative side is the economics where it may be beneficial to have a worse result just because it's so much cheaper.
If they didn't spend a year on it they wouldn't be copied now.
In this case, yes it is.
People do pay attention to the result overall. Studio Ghibli has got famous because people notice what they produce.
Now people might not notice every single detail but I believe that it is this overall mindset and culture that enables the whole unique final product.
Which might indicate an environment were quality is above quantity
The author is so generous... but Sam Altman literally has a Ghibli-fied Social profile and in response to all this said OpenAI chooses its demos very carefully. His primary concern is that Ghibli-fying prompts are over-consuming their GPU resources, degrading the service by preventing other ChatGPT tasks.
Doesn't he have a pretty bad disagreement with Elon?
I found apple's tool frustrating. I have a buzzed haircut, but no matter what I did, apple was unable to give me that hairstyle. It wants so bad for my avatar to have some longer hair to flourish, and refuses to do anything else.
Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new. Everything is simply a blend of prior work. I am not saying that this doesn't have economic value, but it means these AI models are closer to lossy compression algorithms than they are to AGI.
The following quote by Sam Altman from about 5 years ago is interesting.
"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we build this sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return."
That's a statement I wouldn't even dream about making today.
How could you possibly know this?
Is this falsifiable? Is there anything we could ask it to draw where you wouldn't just claim it must be copying some image in its training data?
We got brass bands with brass instruments, synth music from synths.
We know therefore, necessarily, that they can be nothing novel from an LLM -- it has no live access to novel developments in the broader environment. If synths were invented after its training, it could never produce synth music (and so on).
The claim here is trivially falsifiable, and so obviously so that credulous fans of this technology bake it in to their misunderstanding of novelty itself: have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.
Yet an artist which paints with a new kind of black pigment can, trivially so.
Or, as the kids might say, AI couldn't feel the vibe shift occurring in the world at the time.
> Everything is simply a blend of prior work.
I generally consider these two to be the same thing. If novelty is based on something else, then it's highly derivative and its novelty is very questionable.
A quantum random number generator is far more novel than the average human artist.
> have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.
Put someone in jail for the last 15 years, and ask them to make a smartphone. They obviously cannot do it either.
> I generally consider these two to be the same thing.
Sure words themselves bend and break under the weight of hype. Novelty is randomness. Everything is a work of art. For a work of art to be non-novel it can only incorporate randomness.
The fallacies of ambiguity abound to the point where speaking coherently disappears completely.
An artist who finds a cave half-collapsed for the first time has an opportunity to render that novel physical state of the universe into art. Every moment which passes has a near infinite amount of such novel circumstances.
Since an LLM cannot do that, we must wreck and ruin our ability to describe this plain and trivial situation. Poke our eyes and skewer our brains.
To borrow Chomsky's framework: what makes humans unique and special is our ability to produce an infinite range of outputs that nonetheless conform to a set of linguistic rules. When viewed in this light, human creativity necessarily depends on the "linguistic rules" part of that; without a framework of meaning to work within, we would just be generating entropy, not meaningful expressions.
Obviously this applies most directly to external language, but I hope it's clear how it indirectly applies to internal cognition and--as we're discussing here--visual art.
TL;DR: LLMs are definitely creative, otherwise they wouldn't be able to produce semantically-meaningful, context-appropriate language in the first place. For a more empirical argument, just ask yourself how a machine that can generate a poem or illustration depicting [CHARACTER_X] in [PLACE_Y] doing [ACTIVITY_Z] in [STYLE_S] without being creative!
[1] Covered in the famous Chomsky v. Foucault debate, for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
As an example, let's talk about "vibe coding" - It's a new term describing heavy LLM usage in programming, usually associated with Generation Z.
If I am asking an LLM to generate a German translation for "vibe coder" it comes up with the neutral "Vibe-Programmierer". When asking it to be more creative it came up with "Schwingungsschmied" ("vibration smith"?) - What?
I personally came up with the following words:
* Gefühlsprogrammierer ("A programmer, that focuses on intuition and feeling.")
* Freischnauzeprogrammierer ("Free-mouthed programmer - highlighting straightforwardness and the creative expression of vibe coding." - colloquial)
Interesstingly, LLMs can describe both these terms, they just can't create them naturally. I tested this on all major LLMs and the results were similar. Generating a picture of a "vibe coder" also highlights more of a moody atmosphere instead of the Generation Z aspects that are associated with it on social media nowadays.
Your example disproves itself; that's a madlib. It's not creative, it's just rolling the dice and filling in the blanks. Complex die and complex blanks are a difference of degree only, not creativity.
Definitions are always up for debate on instrumental grounds, but I'm dubious of any definition of "creative" that excludes truly unique yet meaningful artifacts. The only thing past that is ineffable stuff, which is inherently not very helpful for scientific discussion.