An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

Posted by participant3 4/3/2025

An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip(theaiunderwriter.substack.com)

1503 points | 898 commentspage 4

amai 4/4/2025|

Have US companies ever cares about laws if there was money to be made? Move fast and break things!

briandear 4/4/2025|

What’s the law specifically say? Mickey Mouse and Pokemon are protected. A style or technique isn’t.

As far as the U.S., have you been to China or Korea and evaluated their views on IP?

TrackerFF 4/3/2025||

I found this older photo of myself and a friend, 25 years old now, in some newspaper scan.

The photo was of poor quality, but one could certainly see all the features - so I figured, why not let ChatGPT try to play around with it? I got three different versions where it simply tried to upscale it, "enhance" it. But not dice.

So I just wrote the prompt "render this photo as a hyper realistic photo" - and it really did change us - the people in the photo - it also took the liberty to remove some things, alter some other background stuff.

It made me think - I wonder what all those types of photos will be like 20 years from now, after they've surely been fed through some AI models. Imagine being some historian 100 years from now, trying to wade through all the altered media.

meatmanek 4/3/2025||

This is similar to my experience trying to get Stable Diffusion to denoise a photo for me. (AIUI, under the hood they're trained to turn noise into an image that matches the prompt.) It would either do nothing (with settings turned way down) or take massive creative liberties (such as replacing my friend's face with a cartoon caricature while leaving the rest of the photo looking realistic).

I've had much better luck with models specifically trained for denoising. For denoising, the SCUNet model run via chaiNNer works well for me most of the time. (Occasionally SCUNet likes to leave noise alone in areas that are full of background blur, which I assume has to do with the way the image gets processed as tiles. It would make sense for the model to get confused with a tile that only has background blur, like maybe it assumes that the input image should contain nonzero high-frequency data.)

For your use case, you might want to use something like Real-ESRGAN or another superresolution / image restoration model, but I haven't played much in that space so I can't make concrete recommendations.

gkanai 4/4/2025||

if all you want is a denoise plugin, you shouldnt be using a general purpose AI- you should be using a specific tool like DxO PureRAW

elpocko 4/3/2025|||

>hyper realistic photo

Never use the words "hyper realistic" when you want a photo. It makes no sense and misleads the generator. No one would describe a simple photograph as "hyper realistic," not a single real photo in the dataset will be tagged as "(hyper) realistic."

Hyperrealism is an art style and only ever used in the context of explicitely non-photographic artworks.

HenryBemis 4/3/2025||

I think that upon closer inspections the (current) technology cannot make 'perfect' fake photos, so for the time being, the historian of the future will have no issue to ask his/her AI: "is that picture of Henry Bemis, with Bruce Willis, Einstein, and Ayrton Senna having a beer real?" And the AI will say "mos-def-nope!"

dclowd9901 4/4/2025||

Someone explain to me how this wouldn't work: they seem to be able to tell when a prompt for copyrighted material is happening. Why couldn't we make it so prompts that yield copyrighted material pay a licensing fee to the owners?

taway789aaa6 4/4/2025|

well, because then open AI needs to pay out even more money than they're already losing...

torginus 4/5/2025||

I'm kind of puzzled by the way copyright is applied - an artist can create fanart of Captain America at their hearts content - as long as they don't use it for any commercial purpose. At least I haven't heard of fan pictures of famous characters getting taken down from art websites such as Artstation or Deviantart. But when I use ChatGPT imagegen to do the same, suddenly it goes against the guidelines - a rule very likely created to avoid litigationg from the IP holders of these characters.

Isn't the law being applies inconsistently here?

macleginn 4/3/2025||

With some work, works with politicians as well: https://chatgpt.com/share/67eefb1c-ceac-8012-ad90-3b64356744...

varun4 4/4/2025||

Is comprehending the plot of a movie theft if I can summarize it afterwards? What if I am able to hum a song pretty well after listening to it twenty times?

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.

revnode 4/4/2025||

Nobody cares about personal use. That's why we have concepts like fair use. It's when you turn around and try to make a business out of it.

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.

jMyles 4/4/2025||

The line of thinking you've displayed here is so obviously the inevitable trajectory of the internet; it's baffling that states are still clinging to denial.

> 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.

munk-a 4/4/2025||

The article ends with...

> 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.

sejje 4/4/2025|

> what else is AI but a tool for taking other people's work and reassembling it into a product for you

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.

munk-a 4/4/2025||

I have a fundamental issue with the concept of large platform social media. Companies like Meta love to complain about the impossibility of moderating such huge public spaces - and they aren't lying, it's an immense issue - if you ever moderated a small forum you're well aware of the pain that a troll or two can cause you.

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.

SLHamlet 4/3/2025||

Like actual creative person Ted Chiang (who moonlights at Microsoft) put it, you might be able to get an LLM to churn out a genuinely original story, but only after creating an extremely long and detailed prompt for it to work with. But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself!

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/09/ted-chiang-ai-new-yorker-c...

TeMPOraL 4/4/2025|

> But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself!

Nah, that's just restating the infamous 'how to draw an owl' advice:

https://casnocha.com/2010/11/how-to-draw-an-owl.html#comment...

The thing is, that "long-ass prompt" is step 1, and LLM then draws "the rest of the fucking owl" for you. That's quite a big difference to doing it all yourself.

dcow 4/4/2025||

Either, (1) LLMs are just super lossy compress/decompress machines and we humans find fascination in the loss that happens at decompression time, at times ascribing creativity and agency to it. Status quo copyright is a concern as we reduce the amount of lossiness, because at some point someone can claim that an output is close enough to the original to constitute infringement. AI companies should probably license all their training data until we sort the mess out.

Or, (2) LLMs are creative and do have agency, and feeding them bland prompts doesn't get their juices flowing. Copyright isn't a concern, the model just regurgitated a cheap likeness of Indiana Jones as Harrison Ford the world has seen ad nauseam. You'd probably do the same thing if someone prompted you the same way, you lazy energy conserving organism you.

In any case, perhaps the idea "cheap prompts yield cheap outputs" holds true. You're asking the model respond to the entirely uninspired phrase: "an image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". It's not surprising to me that the model outputs a generic pop-culture-shaped image that looks uncannily like the most iconic and popular rendition of the idea: Harrison Ford.

If you look at the type of prompts our new generation of prompt artists are using over in communities like Midjourney, a cheap generic sentence doesn't cut it.

sothatsit 4/4/2025||

You don't even need to add much more to the prompts. Just a few words, and it changes the characters you get. It won't always produce something good, but at least we have a lot of control over what it produces. Examples:

"An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzet1p8fjaa808bmqnvf7rk)

"An image of a fat Russian archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfk727erer98a6yexafe70)

"An image of a skeletal archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfnaz6fgqvgwqw8w4ntf6p)

Or, give ChatGPT a starting image. (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzf7vdweg4v5198aqfynjym)

And by further remixing the images ChatGPT produces, you can get your images to be even more unique. (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfzmbze0wa310m42f8j5yw)

GrantMoyer 4/4/2025|||

All four of those are dressed like Indiana Jones. They look like different versions of Indiana Jones you'd see in super hero multi-verse story.

sothatsit 4/4/2025||

So... ask it to dress them differently. You can just ask it to make whatever changes you want.

"An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip. He is wearing a top hat, a scarf, a knit jumper, and pink khaki pants. He is not wearing a bag" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzkh4z2fqctzr9k1jsfnrhy)

Want to get rid of the pose? Add that the archeologist is "fun and joyous" to the prompt. (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzksmjgfppbv5p51hw0xrzn)

You have so much control, it is up to you to ask for something that is not a trope.

jcheng 4/4/2025||||

Those are great, I would watch any one of those movies. Maybe even the "Across the Indiana-Verse" one where they are all pulled into a single dimension.

otabdeveloper4 4/4/2025|||

Archeologists don't actually wear fedora hats.

And the stereotypical meme "archeologist hat" is the pith helmet.

sothatsit 4/4/2025||

Here, I asked ChatGPT to generate an image using a pith helmet for you: https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzmab6hfxxtrt3atd0jgpg7

You can just ask for whatever changes you want.

otabdeveloper4 4/4/2025||

> You can just ask for whatever changes you want.

Yes, as long as what you're asking for is Indiana Jones.

sothatsit 4/4/2025|||

You just have to write the prompt in a way that is not so obviously pointing to Indiana Jones, and you get something that is not Indiana Jones...

"A nerdy archaeologist adventurer in a pith helmet, with glasses and a backpack, stumbling his way through a green overgrown abandoned temple. Vines reach for his heels" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr0yd810e8xsenp85xy2g47f)

"A nerdy archaeologist adventurer in a pith helmet, with glasses and a backpack, nervously sneaking her way through a green overgrown abandoned temple. She is wearing pink khaki pants, and a singlet" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr0z837jecpa770v009bs1m3)

Is it as creative as good humans? Not at all. It definitely falls into tropes readily. But we can still inject novel ideas into our prompts for the AI, and get unique results. Especially if you draw sketches and provide those to the AI to work from.

dcow 4/4/2025|||

So ask for one without a bull whip. Archeologists don’t wield bull whips either.

snowwrestler 4/4/2025|||

This is the opposite of how people have thought about creativity for centuries, though.

The most creative person is someone who generates original, compelling work with no prompting at all. A very creative person will give you something amazing and compelling from a very small prompt. A so-so creative person will require more specific direction to produce something good. All the way down to the new intern who need paragraphs of specs and multiple rounds of revision to produce something usable. Which is about where the multi-billion-dollar AI seems to be?

toddmorey 4/4/2025||

"Prompt artist" makes me sigh out loud

RataNova 4/4/2025|

The real tension isn't just about copyright, it's about what creativity means when models are trained to synthesize the most statistically probable output from past art.

camillomiller 4/4/2025|

Correct. I will say the following as a STEM person that was lucky enough to have an art bachelor as well. One side of the world, the STEM nerds that have never understood nor experienced the inherently inefficient process of making art for lack of talent and predisposition, have won the game of capitalism many times over thanks to the incredible 40-years momentum of tech progress. Now they're trying to convince everyone else that art is stoopid, as proven by the fact that it's just a probabilistic choice away from being fully and utterly replicable. They ignore, willfully and possibly sometimes just for lack of understanding, that art and the creativity behind it is something that operates on a completely different plane than their logical view of the world, and Gen AI is the fundamental enabler letting them unleash all of their contempt for the inefficiency of humanities.

rhubarbtree 4/4/2025|||

This post should be required reading on HN. Have you expanded it to a blog article?

KHRZ 4/4/2025|||

There was another concept trying to operate on a logical view of the world, called copyright. It tried to establish a few simple rules, with the goal to promote art and science. However copyright was long ago perverted by capitalism to instead promote corporate profits.

Generative AI exposes how broken copyright law is, and how much reform is needed for it to serve either it's original or perverted purpose.

I would not blame generative AI as much as I would blame the lack of imagination, forethought and indeed arrogance among lawmakers, copyright lobbyists and even artists to come up with better definitions of what should have been protected.

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