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 5

boredhedgehog 4/4/2025|

Skeletor might want to live in Castle Grayskull, but he actually lives in Snake Mountain.

swyx 4/3/2025||

reserving moral judgment and specifically explaining why gpt4o cant do spiderman and harry potter but can do ghibli: i havent seen anyone point it out but japan has pretty ai friendly laws

https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-...

CaptainFever 4/4/2025|

I thought it was because you can't copyright a style (e.g. the Ghibli style), but you can copyright characters (e.g. Spiderman and Harry Potter).

midtake 4/4/2025||

Turning everything into Ghibli has renewed my love of photography as I search my phone for the perfect pics to Ghiblify. I didn't even know there was a movie, The Boy and the Heron, released by Studio Ghibli in 2023, but now I am going to watch it (streaming on Max but I might as well buy it if it has replay value, which Studio Ghib movies tend to).

CaptainFever 4/4/2025|

This sounds similar to how piracy actually increases sales in the long run, even though IP holders hate it.

djha-skin 4/4/2025||

If I was asked to draw something based on such prompts, I would draw these too. Of course the prompter is talking about Indiana Jones. That's what we're all thinking, right? An artist wouldn't draw someone different by default, they'd have to try to deviate from what we're all thinking.

Indeed, this phenomenon among normal or true intelligences (us) is thought to be a good thing by copyright holders and is known as "brand recognition".

Intelligences -- the normal, biological kind -- are capable of copyright infringement. Why is it a surprise that artificial ones can help us do so was well?

This argument boils down to "oh no, a newly invented tool can be used for evil!". That's how new power works. If it couldn't be used for both good and evil, it's not really power, is it?

Vegenoid 4/4/2025|

Did you read the whole article? I don’t think he’s making that kind of argument. This is what he said:

> I only have one image in mind when I hear “an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip”.

> It would be unexpected and sort of amazing were the LLMs to come up with completely new images for the above prompts.

> Still, the near perfect mimicry is an uncomfortable reminder that AI is getting better at copying and closer to…something, but also a clear sign that we are a ways off from the differentiated or original reasoning/thinking that people associate with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

djha-skin 4/4/2025||

Thanks for this. I didn't read this part. But perhaps my comment still has use to those thinking about this, or who also haven't read the whole thing.

stevage 4/3/2025||

So, no speculation as to why Spiderman and Harry Potter were forbidden but Terminator and James Bond were allowed?

nkingsy 4/3/2025||

I think the unstated assumption is that there's a block list somewhere being fed into a guardian model's context

salamanderman 4/3/2025|||

If I were doing this, I would have the system generate the image, and then I would have it run a secondary estimate saying "probability that this is a picture of [list of characters that Disney has given us reference input for]". If the picture has a "looks like Spiderman" score greater than X, then block it. EDIT - To answer the question, I'm guessing Disney provided a reference set of copyrighted images and characters, and somehow forgot Indiana Jones.

stevage 4/3/2025||

There seemed to be so many that weren't blocked, which is curious.

psychoslave 4/3/2025||

They casted avada arachna on it, and basta.

jalapenos 4/6/2025||

IP is kind of one of those things, like the drug war, where anyone with common sense and no vested interest can say "yeah, that's obviously incredibly fucking stupid".

But nevertheless it continues because the vested interests gain their power from it, and use that power to maintain it.

The only legitimate "IP" is keeping it secret. Plenty of other industries already live by this. SaaS solved software piracy, hedge funds can't or don't bother regarding their algorithms.

It's great that AI is one more brick stacked on the chest of the fundamentally stupid and twisted concept of "IP".

gs17 4/4/2025||

> but why do I have to credit an image of an image in the style of copywritten material?

I'm not sure why style was the hangup here, isn't it clearly that it's AI generated? I'm sure two weeks ago a human making the same picture would be obviously worth crediting.

troppl 4/4/2025||

Something I haven't yet seen mentioned, but that is going through my mind. To me, it doesn't even seem like OpenAI got any better at producing GenAI images. Instead, it seems to me like they now simply removed a whole bunch of guardrails. Guardrails that, for example, made AI images shitty on purpose, so to be "safe" and allow people to kind of recognize. Making all of this "safe" was still very en vogue a few months back, but now there was simply a big policy/societal change and they are going with the trends.

This then allows their pictures to look more realistic, but that also now shows very clearly how much they have (presumably always) trained on copyrighted pictures.

mzs 4/4/2025||

This get really meta very fast, December last year: https://japantoday.com/category/entertainment/studio-ghibli-...

Did Karin or her children ever see a ¥ from this adaptation on robbers ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronja,_the_Robber%27s_Daughter...

ur-whale 4/4/2025|

The whole article is predicated on the idea that IP laws are a good idea in the first place.

otabdeveloper4 4/4/2025|

Abolishing them for billion-dollar-valuation corporations while keeping them for regular people is definitely a bad idea, though.

The argument here isn't "let's abolish copyright", the argument is "let's give OpenAI a free copyright infringement pass because they're innovative and cutting-edge or something".

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