Posted by participant3 1 day ago
Mmm, kinda, but those image results only don't show 1,000 of the exact same image before showing anything else because they're tuned to avoid showing too many similar images. If you use one without that similarity-avoidance baked in, you see it immediately. It's actually super annoying if what you're trying to find is in fact variations on the same image, because they'll go way out of their way to avoid doing that, though some have tools for that ("show me more examples of images almost exactly like this one" sorts of tools)
The data behind the image search, before it goes through a similarity-classifier (or whatever) and gets those with too-close a score filtered out (or however exactly it works) probably looks a lot like "huh, every single adventurer with a hat just looks exactly like Harrison Ford?"
There's similar diversity-increasers at work on search results, it's why you can search "reddit [search terms]" on DDG and exactly the first 3 results are from reddit (without modifying the search to limit it to the site itself, just using it as a keyword) but then it switches to giving you other sites.
As far as the U.S., have you been to China or Korea and evaluated their views on IP?
https://chatgpt.com/share/67efebf4-3b14-8011-8c11-8f806c7ff6...
This suggests to me that its response is driven more by a leader's fame or (more charitably) influence, rather than a bias towards fascist ideology.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67eff74d-61f0-8013-8ce4-f07f02a385...
I'm not seeing anyone claiming that ChatGPT selects for mass-murderous dictators--the fact that it doesn't select for NOT mass-murderous dictators is damning enough.
I don't see why an AI can't generate IP, even if the AI is being sold. What's not allowed is selling the generated IP.
Style is even more permissive: you're allowed to sell something in any style. AFAIK the only things that can be restricted are methods to achieve the style (via patents), similar brands in similar service categories (via trademarks), and depictions of objects (via copyrights).
Note that something being "the original" gives it an intrinsic popularity advantage, and someone being "the original creator" gives their new works an intrinsic advantage. I believe in attribution, which means that if someone recreates or closely derives another's art or style, they should point to the original**. With attribution, IP is much less important, because a recreation or spin-off must be significantly better to out-compete the original in popularity, and even then, it's extra success usually spills onto the original, making it more popular than it would be without the recreation or spin-off anyways. Old books, movies, and video games like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Sonic have many "recreations" which copy all but their IP, and fan recreations which copy even that; yet they're far more popular than all the recreations, and when Warner Bros, Disney, or SEGA release a new installment, the new installment is far more popular too, simply because it's an original.
* IANAL, maybe there are some technicalities, but in practice this is true.
** Or others can do it. As long as it shows up alongside their work, so people don't see the recreation or close derivation without knowing about the original.
No you're not, not in general. The copyright holder has the exclusive right to prepare and distribute derivative works.
> You're allowed to screenshot and photoshop IP.
Again, no, not in general.
> You're allowed to sell tools that help others draw and photoshop IP*.
Sort of. You're allowed to sell tools that might be used for those purposes. You're not allowed to sell tools as "for that purpose" or advertise those use cases.
If I use a copy machine to reproduce your copyrighted work, I am responsible for that infringement not Xerox.
If I coax your novel out of my phones keyboard suggestion engine letter by letter, and publish it, it’s still me infringing on your copyright.
If I make a copy of your clip art in Illustratator, is Adobe responsible? Etc.
It seems that all of the big players in the industry are perfectly fine with disallowing output that infringes on copyright.
An artist, writer, whoever, could read all the copyrighted material in the world, even pirated material, unless their output is a copy or copyrighted artifact, then there is no infringement.
If you knowingly use pirated content for any purpose, that's not legal.
A copyright holders tort is with the infringing distributor, not the end user.
Copying without distribution is also an exclusive right under copyright -- the one for which the whole area of law is named -- and, as such, prohibited without a license or a specific exception in law.
> Reading, watching, listening, etc, it is not.
To the extent that reading, watching, listening, etc. involves copying, and that copying is neither explicitly licensed nor implicitly licensed by, e.g., a sale of copy where reading, watching, listening, etc., by means that inherently involve such an act of copying is clearly an intended use, is effectively prohibited because of the unauthorized copying involved.
> A copyright holders tort is with the infringing distributor, not the end user.
It is often with both, though the infringing distributor is (1) generally more likely to have ability to pay which makes tort action worth pursuing, (2) generally likely to be involved in more acts subject to liability increasing the tort liability, making tort action more worth pursuing, (3) less likely to be seen as a sympathetic figure by a jury should they invoke their right to a jury trial, (4) likely to be subject to greater liability per offense under the statutory damage alternative, even if the actual damages would be similar were that option pursued instead.
Where I live Studio Ghibli are known to be active on C2C marketplaces looking for counterfeit goods. If you were to list a home pressed Totoro pillowcase it would be taken down, sometimes proactively by the marketplace. From that perspective I struggle to see much discernable difference given OpenAI are offering a paid service which allows me to create similar items, and one could argue is promoting it too.
> Does the growth of AI have to bring with it the tacit or even explicit encouragement of intellectual theft?
And like, yes, 100% - what else is AI but a tool for taking other people's work and reassembling it into a product for you without needing to pay someone. Do you want an awesome studio ghibli'd version of yourself? There are thousands of artists online that you could commission for a few bucks to do it that'd probably make something actually interesting - but no, we go to AI because we want to avoid paying a human.
Well, what I'd like it to be is a tool for generating what I've asked it for, which has nothing to do with other people's work.
I've been asking for video game sprites/avatars, for instance. It's presumably trained on lots of images of video games, but I'm not trying to rip those off. I want generic images.
> we go to AI because we want to avoid paying a human.
No, I go to AI because I can't imagine the nightmare of collaborating with humans to generate hundreds of avatars per day. And I rely on them being generated very quickly. And so on.
But they chose to create such an unscalable line of business, it never existed before because everyone realized it wasn't possible. It might just be that some of the AI enabled businesses aren't realistic and profitable.
> This idea that they own the very idea of 'boy wizard who goes to school' is insane and plays right into this flawed and pernicious idea.
Copyright protects an expression of an idea, but not the idea itself. No one can legally stop you from writing your own story about a boy wizard who goes to school.
Nintendo fan games can be released (even sold) if they changed it up a bit so they're no longer associated with that IP.
> Copyright is important but does/should not extend to every time I want to print out a picture of a boy wizard for my kid.
You can. No one will sue you. No one will send you a cease and desist. It happens when you try to print Harry Potter and try to make a business out of it.
This is doing exactly that, except for an image. They didn't ask for a picture of Harry Potter, they asked for an image of a boy wizard and were prevented. The actual IP holder probably didn't implement these specific restrictions but it falls into the category I'm talking about, the idea that they own everything. It shouldn't be up to the image generator to say I can't get a picture of Harry Potter, it should be up to me whether or not I try to sell that image and risk getting busted for it. That's where copyright comes into play, as far I understand.
Harrison Ford's head is way too big for his body. Same with Alicia Vikander's and Daniel Craig's too. Daniel Craig is way too young too. Bruce Willis's just looks fake, and he's holding his lighter in the opposite hand from the famous photo.
So it's not reproducing any actual copyrighted images directly. It's more like an artist trying to paint from memory. Which seems like an important distinction.
Yes, making a copy or derivative work of something under copyright from memory is infringement, unless it falls under an exception in copyright law such as fair use (which does not categorically apply to everything with "memory" as an intermediary between the original work and the copy/derivative, otherwise, copyright law would never have had any effect other than on mechanical duplication.)
Web search seems divergent: the same keyword leads to many different kinds of results.
Gen AI seems convergent: different keywords that share the same semantics lead to the same results.
Arguably, convergence is a feature, not a bug. But on the macroscopic level, it is a self reinforcing loop and may lead to content degeneracy. I guess we always need the extraordinary human artists to give AI the fresh ideas. The question is the non-extraordinary artists might no longer have an easy path to become extraordinary. Same trap is happening to junior developers right now.
Now, what if I get the highest fidelity speakers and the highest fidelity microphone I can and play that song in my home. Then I use a deep learned denoiser to clean the signal and isolate the song’s true audio. Is this theft?
The answer does not matter. The genie is out of the bottle.
There’s no company like Napster to crucify anymore when high quality denoising models are already prior art and can be grown in a freaking Jupyter notebook.
You want to generate photos of copyrighted characters? Go for it. But OpenAI is making money off of that and that's the issue.
It seems like they made an effort to stop it, but their product is designed in such a way that doing so effectively is a sisyphean task.
> Now, what if I get the highest fidelity speakers and the highest fidelity microphone I can and play that song in my home. Then I use a deep learned denoiser to clean the signal and isolate the song’s true audio. Is this theft?
If the answer to this becomes "yes" for some motion down this spectrum, then it seems to me that it's tantamount to prohibiting general-purpose computing.
If you can evaluate any math of your fancy using hardware that you own, then indeed you can run this tooling, and indeed your thoughts can be repaired into something closely resembling the source material.