So, you would like an AI that can reasonably answer questions about various aspects of human culture, or at least to take said culture into account? At the same time, you want it to not use the most obvious, most relevant examples from the culture, because they are somehow verboten, and a less relevant, completely made-up character should be presented instead? Come on, computes have logic. If you ask the machine to produce a picture of a man who was sent to humans to save them, then was executed, and after that came back alive, who do you think the machine should show you, for Christ's sake?

Picture-based industries had a mild shock when "Photoshop" kind of software became widely available. Remixing visuals in ways that the copyright holders won't approve of became equally widespread. Maybe that added some grey hairs to the heads of some industry execs, the sky has not fallen. I suppose the same is going to happen this time around.

> It’s stealing, but also, admittedly, really cool. Does the growth of AI have to bring with it the tacit or even explicit encouragement of intellectual theft?

You answered your own question by explicitly encouraging it.

As a consumer, is it possible for me to opt out of seeing IP protected imagery?

I would be absolutely fine with not having pokemon, mickey mouse etc shoved down my .. eyeballs.

I know this is a ridiculous point. But I think I'm getting at something here - it ought not to be a one-way street - where IP owners/corporations etc endlessly push their nonsense at me - but then, if I respond in a personal way to that nonsense I am guilty of some sort of theft.

It is a perfect natural response to engage with what I experience - but if I cannot respond as I like to that experience because of artificial constructs in law - perhaps it ought to be possible (legally) to avoid that IP protected immersion in the first place. Perhaps this would also be technologically possible now.

Won't someone think of the consumers?

I need a Ghibli version of that terminator now.

If OpenAI is ok with this then they should be ok with sharing their code and models so that others can profit from their work (without giving anything back to OpenAI).

Interesting how the longer conversations here go into the familiar territory of whether copyright should exist. Meanwhile, the salient aspect is that these AI image generators were trained on copyrighted material. The typical hacker news discussion feels very different when talking about code generation. Yet, when it is images - then we question whether copyright should exist?

Soon, the only thing that will make "Ready Player One" a fiction is that, in the end of the movie, they agree to shut the thing down once in a while.

That will never happen under Silicon Valley's watch.

That's a really blatant lack of creativity. Even if obviously all of those prompts would make anyone think of exactly those iconic characters (except possibly a different version of James Bond or Lara Croft), any human artist could easily produce a totally different character that still fits the prompt perfectly. This AI can't, because it really is just a theft machine.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind if AI that just reproduces existing images like that would just be banned. Keep working on it until you've got something that can actually produce something new.