Posted by participant3 4/3/2025
Tons of historical documents have shown that inventions, mathematical proofs, and celestial observations were made by humans separated by continents and time. What that shows is that it is certainly possible for two persons to have the same exact or similar thought without ever having been influenced by the other.
I want to add, to give credit where credit is due, that this thought was conveyed to me in first grade by another 1st grader sitting with me at the lunch table. That was a day and conversation that I will never forget. 1972.
I don't think it's possible to create an "alien which has acid for blood and a small sharp mouth within a bigger mouth" without anybody seeing a connection to Alien, even if it doesn't look anything like the original.
So there’s clearly some amount of random chance in there, but the trope is still very clear in the generated image, so it seems like you’re going to get an archetype.
“An insult to life itself”: Hayao Miyazaki critiques an animation made by artificial intelligence
https://qz.com/859454/the-director-of-spirited-away-says-ani...
Two close to one of the licensed properties you care to censor the generation of? Push that vector around. Honestly detecting whether a given sentence is a thinly veiled reference to indiana jones seems to be exactly the kind of thing AI vector search is going to be good at.
If IP holders submit embeddings for their IP, how can image generators "warp" the latent space around a set of embeddings so that future inferences slide around and avoid them--not perfectly, or literally, but as a function of distance, say, following a power curve?
Maybe by "Finding non-linear RBF paths in GAN latent space"[0] to create smooth detours around protected regions.
0. https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/ICCV2021/papers/Tzelep...
If infringement is happening, it arguably doesn't happen when an infringing work product is generated (or regurgitated, or whatever you want to call it.) Much less when the model is trained. It's when the output is used commercially -- by a human -- that the liability should rightfully attach.
And it should attach to the human, not the tool.
I really don't think so. If I paid a human artist to make the prompt in the title, and I didn't explicitly say "Indiana Jones" I would think it should be fairly obvious to the human artist that I do _not_ want Indiana Jones. If they gave me back a picture of, clearly, Indiana Jones, I would ask them why they didn't create something original.
Indiana Jones is already a successful permutation of that approach. He's Zorro, Rick Blaine, and Christopher Leiningen mashed together with their serial numbers filed off.
It isn’t an independent human. It is a service paid for by customers. The moment it provides the image to a paying user, the image has thus been used commercially.
In fact, the user may not even necessarily have to be paying in order to infringe copyright.
And besides, even amateur artists are ashamed to produce copies unless they are demonstrating mastery of technique or expressing adoration. And if it happens spontaneously, they are then frustrated and try to defend themselves by claiming to never have even experienced the original material. (As happens with simplistic, but popular musical riffs.) But AI explicitly is trained on every material it can get its hands on and so cannot make such a defense.
If you do it for free, is it different?
If I ask a friend to draw me as Indiana Jones? Or pay an artist? In either case I just want that picture to put in my rec room, not to sell.
Private copying and transference, even once for a friend, is copyright infringement.
I don’t necessarily agree with this, but it is true nonetheless.
Not without money or equivalent trade involved.
I can draw Mickey Mouse all day on my notebook, and hand it to you; no legal issues.
If I charge you a pack of bubble gum - Disney's lawyers will kick my door down and serve me notice.
This isn’t generally true. The copyright holder need only claim that the value of their copyrighted work or the profits received by its distribution has been reduced or lost. I’m not sure they even need to make such a claim, as courts have already determined that commerciality isn’t a requirement for infringement. It’s a matter of unauthorized use, distribution or reproduction, not trade.
They of course will likely never know and might not bother to litigate given the private and uncommercial nature, but they still have the right to do so.
They would weigh the financial and reputational cost of litigating against children sharing images and decide not to. Of course if one had 10000 friends and provided this service to them in a visible manner, then they’d probably come knocking.
You are asking the equivalent question of, if I put a pirated copy of windows on my PC that I only use privately at home am I violating copyright, or if I sell copies of music for people to only listen to in their own home.
But this is even more damning, this is a commercial service that is reproducing the copyrighted work.
Edit: Just to clarify to people who reflexively downvote. I'm making a statement of what is it not a value judgement. And yes there is fair use, but that's an exemption from the rule that it is a copyright violation.
Let’s put it another way: if you decide you want to recreate Indiana Jones shot for shot, and you hire actors and a director etc. which individuals are actually responsible for the copyright collation? Do caterers count too? Or is it the person who actually is producing the movie?
One death is a murder; 100k deaths is a war or a pandemic. One piece of chewing gum on the ground will get you a caning in Singapore; when everyone does it, that's NYC.
Up until now, one had to have some level of graphical or artistic skills to do this, but not anymore. Again, I agree that it attaches to the human...but we now have many more humans to attach it to.
This is not true, by the way. You will be fined for littering; or, if you are a repeat offender, be sentenced to cleaning public areas while wearing an offensively bright-coloured uniform (so that everyone can see that you are being punished). Source: https://www.nea.gov.sg/media/news/news/index/nea-increases-v...
But no, you won't be caned for littering. Caning is reserved for more serious offences like vandalism, or much worse crimes like rape and murder.
FWIW I’ve been to Singapore and had a great time, but I was careful to follow the many rules and signs. I especially liked the sign on the bus forbidding the opening of a durian fruit.
I am paying OpenAI. So they are producing these copyrighted works and giving them to me for their own commercial benefit. Normally that's illegal. But somehow not when you're just doing it en masse.
Given enough time (... a surprisingly short amount) and enough people creating art (say, about as many as we have had for the last couple hundred years) and indefinitely-long-lived recording, plus very-long copyright terms, the inevitable result is that it's functionally impossible to create anything within the space of "things people like" that's not violating copyright, for any but the strictest definitions of what constitutes copying.
The short story treats of music, but it's easy to see how visual arts and fiction-writing and the rest get at least extremely crowded in short order under those circumstances.
If you insist on making it about the model, you will wreck something wonderful.
I can literally imagine hundreds of things that are true to this description but entirely distinct from "Predator."
> used commercially
Isn't that what these AI companies are doing? Charging you for access to this?
(Because proper stock agencies offer those kind of protections. If OpenAI doesn't, then don't use them as a replacement to a stock agency.)
Not really? Why would a human artist create a faithful reproduction of Indiana Jones when asked to paint an archeologist? And besides, if they did, it would be considered clear IP infringement if the result were used commercially.
> If infringement is happening, it arguably doesn't happen when an infringing work product is generated (or regurgitated, or whatever you want to call it.) Much less when the model is trained. It's when the output is used commercially -- by a human -- that the liability should rightfully attach.
I agree. Release groups, torrent sites and seedbox operators should not be wrongly accused of pirating movies. Piracy only occurs in the act of actually watching a movie without paying, and should not be prosecuted without definitive proof of such (¬‿¬)
Over the years we've spent a lot of time on this and similar sites questioning the sanity of a legal system that makes math illegal, and, well, that's all this is. Math.
To the extent the model reproduces images from Indiana Jones and the others, it is because these multibillion-dollar franchises are omnipresent cultural icons. The copyright holder has worked very hard to make that happen, and they have been more than adequately repaid for their contribution to our shared culture. It's insane to go after an AI model for simply being as aware of that imagery and as capable of reproducing it as a human artist would be.
If the model gives you infringing material as a prompt response, it's your responsibility not to use that material commercially, just as if you had tasked a human artist with the same vague requirement and received a plagiarized work product in return.
Isn’t that exactly what OP is saying?
For all of the examples, I knew what image to expect before seeing it. I think it's the user who is at fault for requesting a copyrighted image, not the LLM for generating it. The LLM is giving (nearly) exactly what the user expects.
> describe indiana jones
> looks inside
> gets indiana jones
Okay, so the network does exactly what I would expect? If anything you could argue the network is bad because it doesn't recognize your prompt and gives you something else (original? whatever that would mean) instead. But maybe that's just me.