An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
(theaiunderwriter.substack.com)1436 points by participant3 2 days ago
1436 points by participant3 2 days ago
The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.
These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate Party's credit, undoing corporate personhood would be a good first step, so that we can focus on enforcing protections for the works of humans. Still, attributing those works to CEOs instead of corporations wouldn't result in much change.
>The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.
Wait, I'm still trying to figure out the difference between your imaginary world and the world we live in now?
I think the main difference is if everything were freely available they may attempt to monetize the life out of it, but they will fail if they can't actually provide something people actually want. There's no more "You want a thing so you're going to buy our thing because we are the exclusive providers of it. That means we don't even have to make it very good"
If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently have.
Thor would have red hair in the imaginary world, rather than being a Blonde man which was made to be a somewhat distinguished comic book character.
The Disney or otherwise copyrighted versions allow for unique spins on these old characters to be re-copyrighted. This Thor from Disney/Marvel is distinguished from Thor from God of War.
> “Before starting the series, we stuffed ourselves to the gills with Norse mythology, as well as almost every other type of mythology – we love it all! But you’ve got to remember that these are legendary tales – myths – and no two versions are ever exactly the same. We changed a lot of things – for example, in most of the myths Thor has red hair, Odin has one eye, etc. But we preferred doing our own version.”
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-earl...
Huh, did not know that. As an Icelandic person I knew about Þór the Norse god much earlier than Thor the marvel character. I never really pictured his hair color, nor knew he had a specific hair color in the mythology. I actually always pictured him with a beard though. What mostly mattered though was his characteristics. His ill temper and drinking habits, and the fact that he was not a nice person, nor a hero, but rather a guy who starts shit that gets everyone else in trouble, he also wins every fight except one (he looses one against Elli [the personification of old age]). The little I’ve seen of him in the Marvel movies, he keeps almost none of these characteristics.
EDIT: My favorite story of him is the depiction of the fall of Ásgarður, where Loki and some Jötun are about to use the gods vanity against them and con them out of stuff they cannot actually pay for a wall around Ásgarður. Þór, being the way he is, cannot be around a Jötun without fighting and killing him. So rather than paying up (which the gods cannot do) Þór is sent to see this Jötun, knowing very well that he will be murdered. This betrayal is marked as the beginning of the end in Völuspá (verse 26).
How do restaurants work, then? You can’t copyright a recipe. Instructions can’t generally be copyrighted, otherwise someone would own the fastest route from A to B and charge every person who used it. The whole idea of intellectual property gets really weird when you try to pinpoint what exactly is being owned.
I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default. Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations. People need the freedom to wield culture without restriction, not protection from someone having the same idea as them and manifesting it.
It’s more reasonable to say that the idea of intellectual property is challenging for nonlawyers because of the difficulty in understanding ownership not as one thing, but as a bundle of various elements of control, exclusion, obligation, or entitlement, even some of which spring into existence out of nowhere.
In other words, the challenge is not to understand “what exactly is being owned,” and instead, to understand “what exactly being owned is.”
> I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default.
Why wouldn't big corps win by default? They have the brand name, own the resources to make more polished version of any IP, and have better distribution channels than anyone else.
Can you tell me how this scenario won't play out?
1. Big corporation has people looking for new and trending IP.
2. Instead of buying the rights to it, they get their army of people to produce more polished versions of it.
3. Because they have branding and a better distribution channel, the money goes 100% to them.
> Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations.
People working in the field sell their copyright like Gravity Falls' Alex Hirsch: https://x.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1906915851720077617
> How do restaurants work, then?
Primarily because recipe creation is not one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants?
Closed source - when was the last time your restaurant told you what was in, and how to make, your favourite dish?
What's in Coca Cola?
What are the 11 herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken?
How do I make the sauce in a Big Mac?
> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people.
Disney would be among the largest beneficiaries if the right to train AI models on content was viewed as an exclusive right of the copyright holder; they absolutely do not benefit from AI training being considered fair use.
Maybe now, post-AI.
But if you'd asked this question in 2015 or earlier, everyone would have said Disney -> pro-patent, average people & indie devs -> anti-patent. Microsoft was famously pro-patent, as were a number of nuisance companies that earned the label "patent troll."
Honestly, this idea of "patents to protect the people" would've come across as a corporate lawyer trick pre-2015.
> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people
No, support open source AI and this will not happen.
This is the exact opposite of the truth.
Look at YouTube. Look at SoundCloud. Look at all the fan fiction sites out there, internet mangas and manwhas and webtoons, all the podcasts, all the influencers on X and Instagram and TikTok and even OnlyFans, etc etc. Look at all the uniquely tiny distribution channels that small companies and even individuals are able to build in connection with their fans and customers.
There is endless demand for the endless variety of creativity and content that's created by normal people who aren't Disney, and endless ways to get it into people's hands. It is literally impossible for any one company to hoover all of it up and somehow keep it from the people.
In fact, the ONLY thing that makes it possible for them to come close to doing that is copyright.
And the only reason we have such a huge variety of creativity online is because people either (a) blatantly violate copyright law, or (b) work around gaps in copyright law that allow them to be creative without being sued.
The idea that we need copyrights to protect us from big companies is exactly wrong. It's the opposite. Big companies need copyright to protect their profits from the endless creativity and remixing of the people.
The original claim is false,
> intellectual property [...] used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.
There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of things you can create. More things than there exist stars in our galaxy.
The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist, solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the hard part that takes the investment of time and money.
In the old world before Gen AI, this was the hard thing that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast, and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own.
The new problem is distributing that content.
> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.
Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing, you're 100% right.
If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI, or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then the corporations won't be able to profit off of it.
If social networks were replaced with common carriers and protocols.
If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or expensive compute.
If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve.
Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the giants will win. And network effects will favor the few versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck with big tech distribution.
Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even more so, to the distributors of that content.
This is the same argument we made in the 90s about what the web was going to do. What ended up happening was the growth of aggregators and silos like Facebook that baited everyone with ease of use into putting everything into their walled garden and then monetized it. The creators, namely the posters of the content, got nothing.
The same is happening already with AI creations. Doing it yourself is work and takes some technical skill, so most people use hosted AI services. Guess who makes all the money?
You will be able to create and share your own spin on Star Wars. You won’t see anything for that except maybe cred or some upvotes. The company that hosts it and provides the gateway and controls the algorithms that show it to people will get everything.
> The problem with ideas is that they have to be good.
No they don't, look at music popular in social networks.
> and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance.
Even before the generative AI, I think we live in the era where there are more creators than ever in history: everybody today can publish their music or art without any large investments (except for instruments: they are expensive as always). I would prefer we have cheaper pianos, samples and microphones instead of worthless music-copying models.
If we are going to have a general discussion about copyright reform at a national level, I'm all for it. If we are going to let billion dollar corporations break the law to make even more money and invent legal fictions after the fact to protect them, I'm completely against it.
Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately owned data center is not the same as freedom of information for flesh and blood human beings.
You’re setting court precedent that will apply equally to OpenAI as it does to the llama.cpp and stable diffusion models running on your own graphics card.
I don’t know about that, we seem to be so deeply into double standards for this stuff that we’ve forgotten they are double standards. If I aggressively scrape content from anywhere and everywhere ignoring robots.txt and any other terms and conditions, then I’ll probably be punished. Corporate crawlers that are feeding the beast just do this on a massive scale and laugh off all of the complaints, including those from smaller corporations who hire lawyers..
SGTM.
Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever.
Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character.
But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.
Was that world so bad?
Can stable diffusion be created without using copyrighted content? Maybe we should have some exemption for non-commercial research but definitely not for commercial exploitation or generating copyrighted images using open-source models.
> invent legal fictions after the fact
You're reading into the situation...
For the US getting legislators to do anything is impossible: even the powerful fail.
When a legal system is totally roadblocked, what other choice is there? The reason all startups ask forgiveness is that permission is not available.
(edit). Shit. I guess that could be a political statement. Sorry
A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content. Every whip-wielding archaeologist is now Harrison Ford. Every suave British spy is now Daniel Craig. With the power of AI, creativity is dead and buried.
This is what was often missed in the previous round of AI discourse that criticized these companies for forcing diversity into their systems after the fact. Every suave spy being Daniel Craig is just the apolitical version of every nurse being a woman or every criminal being Black. Converging everything to the internet's most popular result represents an inaccurate and a dumped down version of the world. You don't have to value diversity as a concept at all to recognize this as a systemic flaw of AI, it is as easy as recognizing that Daniel Craig isn't the only James Bond let alone the only "suave English spy".
It’s only a flaw insofar as it’s used in ways in which the property of the tool is problematic. Stereotypes are use for good and bad all the time, let’s not pretend that we have to attack every problem with a funky shaped hammer because we can’t admit that it’s okay to have specialized tools in the tool belt.
Why does the AI have to inject the creativity? It's supposed to guess what you want and generate it. The prompts in the article make it clear the author wants Harrison Ford.
If you ask it for a female adventure-loving archaeologist with a bullwhip, you think you'll get Harrison Ford?
What if you ask for a black man? Etc etc.
You're talking about how unoriginal it is when the human has asked it in the least creative way. And it gives what you want (when the content filters don't spot it)
don't you think it is empowering and aspiring for artists? they can try several drafts of their work instantaneously, checking out various compositions etc before even starting the manual art process.
they could even input/train it on their own work. I don't think someone can use AI to copy your art better than the original artist.
Plus art is about provenance. If we could find a scrap piece of paper with some scribbles from Picasso, it would be art.
This does seem to work for writing. Feed your own writing back in and try variations / quickly sketch out alternate plots, that sort of thing.
Then go back and refine.
Treat it the same as programming. Don't tell the AI to just make something and hope it magically does it as a one-shot. Iterate, combine with other techniques, make something that is truly your own.
> A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content.
That's the whole problem with AI. It's not creative. There's no "I" in AI. There's just what we feed it and it's a whole lot of "garbage in, garbage out". The more the world is flooded with derivative AI slop the less there will be of anything else to train AI on and eventually we're left with increasingly homogenized and uncreative content drowning out what little originality is still being made without AI.
> That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it
A world without copyright is just as problematic as a world with copyright. With copyright, you run into the problem of excessive control. This wasn't too much of a problem in the past. If you bought a book, record, or video recording, you owned that particular copy. You could run into disagreeable situations because you didn't own the rights, but it was difficult to prevent anyone from from viewing a work once it had been published. (Of course, modern copyright laws and digitial distribution has changed that.)
On the flip side, without copyright, it would be far easier for others to exploit (or even take credit) for the work of another person without compensation or recourse. Just look at those AI "generated" images, or any website that blatently rips off the content created by another person. There is no compensation. Heck, there isn't even credit. Worse yet, the parties misrepresenting the content are doing their best to monetize it. Even authors who are more than willing to give their work away have every right to feel exploited under those circumstances. And all of that is happening with copyright laws, where there is the opportunity for recourse if you have the means and the will.
You don’t need credit to talk about pop culture. I don’t need to credit the Indian Jones copyright holder when I paint a stunning likeness of Ford in a kaki outfit with a whip, even if the holder might try to sue me over it. Copyright and credit aren’t the same.
There are also trademark protections. I heard Ford actually trademarked his likeness to ensure he got a piece of the merchandise action.
To reply to the parenthetical, copyright has nothing to do with credit. Taking credit for someone else's work is banned in some places in some contexts (they call this a moral rights regime) but not the same thing as what is being talked about when people say copyright (which is about copying and performing)
The idea that someone can't use ideas without someone else making money from it is a really, really, radically weird idea and is very new in the history of human society.
> If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.
This reminds me of Tom Scott’s “Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers” [1]
I think what you observe is more like a natural blowback to the prevailing idea that this is somehow beyond critique because it will fundamentally change culture and civilization forever.
There's a bit of irony here too. The intellectual discourse around intellectural property, a diverse and lively one from an academic standpoint, the whole free and open source software movements, software patents, the piracy movement and so on have analyzed the history, underlying ideas and values in detail for the past thirty years. Most people know roughly what is at stake, where they stand, and can defend their position in an honest way.
Then comes new technology, everyone and their mother gets excited about it, and steamrolls all those lofty ideas into "oh look at all the shiny things it can produce!". Be careful what you wish for.
Let's be clear. You can be for free software, against copyright, etc., and STILL be in favor of these firms being punished for violating copyright as they have. Because frankly, we -- normal people -- have always known that we would be punished if we did anything close to this: so many people have been thrown in jail, even killed themselves, because they distributed some film or hosted some books. But now, when a big corporation does it, and in doing so seeks to replace and impoverish thousands, millions of hard-working, law-abiding people, now is when we should expect the government to finally say -- oh, that copyright thing was silly all along? No. Perhaps if the deal was that the whole system would go away entirely -- that we, too, could do what these firms have done. But that's not what's being proposed. That will not happen. They want the laws to be for them, not for us, and I will always be opposed to attempts at actualizing that injustice.
IMO the natural effect of this will be to massively devalue any individual cultural artifact, and that this will also achieve the benefit of defanging the big copyright holders. Is it the right way to go about it? No. Is it an insult to anyone who ever got nabbed for piracy? Sure. But tbh as a pirate voter I'll still very much take it.
But why do you want to make a collection of pixels that resembles existing characters and not create your own?
Essentially: “information wants to be free”.
I agree.
But this must include the dissolution of patents. Otherwise corporations and the owners of the infrastructure will simply control everything, including the easily replicable works of individuals.
In practice it's often longer. Drug companies queue up minor tweaks to their formulas and can threaten to sue anyone even close to the new way, even carbon copies of the now expired patent. Few can afford to win a lawsuit.
We need more courts and judges to speed the process, to make justice more accessible, and universal SLAPP protections to weed out frivolous abuse.
I am against dissolution of patents if the technology took lot of research. In this case the patent protects from others copying the result of research.
However, obvious patents like "a computer system with a display displaying a product and a button to order it" should not be allowed. Also, software patents should not exist (copyright is enough).
What if all that research led to some incredible world changing for the better idea/concept/product in an open society that would benefit everyone, in the closed society only those allowed to use the patent benefit
It's not baffling in the least.
No matter the extent you believe in the freedom of information, few believe anyone should then be free to profit from someone else's work without attribution.
You seem to think it would be okay for disney to market and charge for my own personal original characters and art, claiming them as their own original idea. Why is that?
The copyright last 70 years after the death of the author, so 170 years would be rare (indeed 190 years would be possible). This was an implementation of a 1993 EU directive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive
That itself was based on the 1886 Berne Convention. "The original goal of the Berne Convention was to protect works for two generations after the death of the author". 50 years, originally. But why? Apparently Victor Hugo (he of Les Miserables) is to blame. But why was he bothered?
Edit: it seems the extension beyond the death of the author was not what Hugo wanted. "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people." So I'm still trying to figure out who came up with it, and why.
May I ask why you want to use someone's work instead of creating your own?
I think we have all grown up with pervasive strong IP rights, and most people have come to internalize it as a matter of fairness or an almost natural right, rather than a practical tool designed to incentivize creation.
And then even if you get past that, the world is filled with lots of IP we love, and it is easy to imagine weakened IP rights taking that away, but quite difficult to imagine what weakened IP rights might buy us.
I do have some hope still that this generative AI stuff will give a glimpse into the value of weaker IP rights and maybe inspire more people to think critically about it. But I think it is an uphill battle. Or maybe it will take younger people growing up on generative AI to notice.
How do you suggest you protect your "thing"?
* If I make a thing that is different and I get a patent - cool. * If I create a design that is unusual and I get copyright on it - is that cool?
Both concepts - patent and copyright - are somewhat controversial, for multiple reasons.
If you invented a thingie, would you not want some initial patent related protection to allow you to crack on with some sort of clout against cough CN? If you created a film/creative thang, would you not want some protection against your characters being ... subverted.
Patents and copywrite are what we have - do you have any better ideas?
What's the damage to the society done by Disney holding the rights to Mickey Mouse? Like, if we're being honest?
Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.
It’s worse in music: the folk music that came before recorded music had a long history of everyone borrowing and putting their own spin on someone else’s tune and, today, this is viewed as some kind of assault on the originator of the tune.
If companies can’t gatekeep our artistic culture for money, we’ll be better able to enjoy it.
We're about to witness a fundamental shift in the human experience. Some time in the near future there will not be a single act of creation you can do that isn't trivial compared to the result of typing "make cool thing please now" into the computer. And your position is to add to the problem because with your policy anything I create should get chucked into the LLM grinder by any and everybody. How do I get my human body to commit to doing hard things with that prospect at hand? This is the end of happiness.
I don't know, that sounds like the basic argument for copyright: "I created a cool thing, therefore I should be able to milk it for the rest of my life". Without this perk, creatives are less motivated. Would that be bad? I guess an extreme version would be a world where you can only publish anonymously and with no tangible reward.
I hate to paint with such a broad brush, but I’d venture that “creatives” are not primarily motivated by profit. It is almost a truism that money corrupts the creative endeavour.
There are various ways to turn creativity into money, even without publishing any kind of artwork. Basically all skilled jobs and entrepreneurial enterprises require creativity. And if you do have an artwork, you can still seek profit through acclaim, even without copyright: interviews, public appearances. Artists once had patrons - but that tends to put aristocrats in control of art.
So money will motivate a lot of the creativity that goes on.
Meanwhile, if you dabble in some kind of art or craft while working in a factory to make ends meet, that kind of limits you to dabbling, because you'll have no time to do it properly. Money also buys equipment and helpers, sometimes useful.
On the other hand, yes, it ruins the art. There's a 10cc song about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_Art%27s_Sake_(song)
Though, this reminds me of an interesting aside: the origin of the phrase "art for art's sake" was not about money, but about aesthetics. It meant something like "stop pushing opinions, just show me a painting".
I don't really care.
Either enforce the current copyright regime and sue the AI companies to dust.
Or abolish copyright and let us all go hog wild.
But this halfway house where you can ignore the law as long as you've got enough money is disgusting.
Or treat AI training as within the coverage of the current fair use regime (which is certainly defensible within the current copyright regime), while prosecuting the use of AI models to create infringing copies and derivative works that do not themselves have permission or a reasonable claim to be within the scope of fair use as a violation (and prosecuted hosted AI firms for contributory infringement where their actions with regard to such created infringements fit the existing law on that.)
^ I feel like I almost never see this take, and I don't understand why because frankly, it strikes me at patently obvious! Of course the tool isn't responsible, and the person who uses it is.
I see AI training on public material like I would upcoming artists being inspired by the artists before them. Obviously the scale is very different. I don't mind your scenario because an AI firm, if they couldn't stay on top of what their model was creating, could voluntarily reduce the material used to train it.
You imply that AI model is creating new works and not merely rearranging pieces from other works you never saw and therefore might consider novel. AI model is not a model of a creative human currently: a human doesn't need to listen to million songs to create his own.
This may not be a particularly popular opinion, but current copyright laws in the US are pretty clearly in favor of training an AI as a transformative act, and covered by fair use. (I did confirm this belief in conversation with an IP attorney earlier this week, by the way, though I myself am not a lawyer.)
The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.
Emitting works that violate copyright is certainly possible, but you could argue that the additional entropy required to pass into the model (the text prompt, or the random seed in a diffusion model) is necessary for the infringement. Regardless, the current law would suggest that the infringing action happens at inference time, not training.
I'm not making a claim that the copyright should work that way, merely that it does today.
> Regardless, the current law would suggest that the infringing action happens at inference time, not training.
Zuckerberg downloading a large library of pirated articles does not violate any laws? I think you can get a life sentence for merely posting links to the library.
> The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.
I agree with this, but it's worth noting this does not conflict with and kind of reinforces the GP's comment about hypocrisy and "[ignoring] the law as long as you've got enough money".
The terms of use angle is better than copyright, but most likely we'll never see any precedent created that allows this argument to succeed on a large scale. If it were allowed then every ToS would simply begin to say Humans Only, Robots not Welcome or if you're a newspaper then "reading this you agree that you're a human or a search engine but will never use content for generative AI". If github could enforce site terms and conditions like that, then they could prevent everyone else from scraping regardless of individual repository software licenses, etc.
While the courts are setting up precedent for this kind of thing, they will be pressured to maintain a situation where terms and conditions are useful for corporations to punish people. Meanwhile, corporations won't be able to punish corporations for the most part, regardless of the difference in size. But larger corporations can ignore whatever rules they want, to the possible detriment of smaller ones. All of which is more or less status quo
Training alone, perhaps. But the way the AIs are actually used (regardless of prompt engineering) is a direct example of what is forbidden by the case that introduced the "transformative" language.
> if [someone] thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.
Of course, we live in a post-precedent world, so who knows?
The hypocrisy is obviously disgusting.
It also shows how, at the end of the day, none of the justifications for this intellectual property crap are about creativity, preserving the rights of creators, or any lofty notion that intellectual property actually makes the world a better place, but rather, it is a naked power+money thing. Warner Bros and Sony can stop you from publishing a jpeg because they have lawyers who write the rulebook. Sam Altman can publish a jpeg because the Prince of Saud believes that he is going build for corporate America a Golem that can read excel spreadsheets.
> It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus.
No, the idea is that rules needed to be changed in a way that can are valid for everyone, not just for mega corporations who are trying to exploit other's works and gatekeep the it behind "AI".
Consider that one day you may wish to author a creative work and derive financial benefit from that labor. There is legitimate use for limited time ownership of reproducible cultural artifacts. Extending that to 95 years is the problem.
I wish to one day derive financial benefit from hitting myself with a hammer for 8 hours a day. Should we construct a legal apparatus to guarantee that I am able to do so?
Edit: the point I want to illustrate is that we do not get to choose what others value, or to dictate what is scarce and no one is entitled to make a living in a specific way even if they really want to
> used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful
This is where the argument falls apart. Not because the copyright isn't used by the rich and powerful, but because it misses the fact that copyright also grants very powerful rights to otherwise powerless individuals, thus allowing for many small businesses and individuals to earn a living based on the rights granted by our current copyright system.
>information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus
I think that's the reason why I've (and probably many others?) have cooled down on general open source coding.
Open source started when well-paid programmers used their stable positions and ample extra time to give back to the community. What happened then is that corporations then siphoned up all that labor and gave nothing back, just like the AI bros siphoned up all data and gave nothing back. The 'contract' of mutual exchange, of bettering each other, was always a fantasy. Instead the companies took away that ample extra time and those stable positions.
Here we are in 2025 and sometimes I can't afford rent but the company C-tier is buying itself their hundredth yacht. Why should I contribute to your system?
> to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.
How is copyright stifling innovation?
You could not rip something off more blatantly than Gravity, which had the lawsuit dismissed entirely.
Taurus vs Stairway to Heaven, the list goes on and on and on.
You can often get away with nearly murder ripping off other people's stuff.
Copyright makes the legality of arXiv and SciHub questionable at best. It locks publicly funded research behind paywalls. It makes being able to search the law (including case law) of the US incredibly expensive. It puts a burden on platforms to be beholden to DMCA takedowns, lest the content owner go to their hosting or DNS provider, has happened to itch.io. It adds licensing fees onto public musical performances (ASCAP).
Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube have had their videos demonetized and their channels even removed because of the Content ID copyright detection scheme and their three strikes rule. In some cases to a ridiculous extent - some companies will claim ownership of music that isn't theirs and either get the video taken down or take a share of the revenue.
I watched a video where someone wrote a song and registered it via CDBaby, which YouTube sources for Content ID. Then someone claimed ownership of the song, so YouTube assigned the third party 50% of the ad revenue of the video.
Let's separate the implementation of copyright and the concept of copyright. I don't think you would find anyone who would say the US's implementation of copyright is flawless, but the OP seems to be talking about the concept itself.
> Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube have had their videos demonetized and their channels even removed because of the Content ID copyright detection scheme and their three strikes rule. In some cases to a ridiculous extent - some companies will claim ownership of music that isn't theirs and either get the video taken down or take a share of the revenue.
Let's take YouTube videos as an example. If the concept of copyright doesn't exist, there is nothing stopping a YouTuber with millions more subscribers from seeing a trending video you made and uploading it themselves. Since they're the one with the most subs, they will get the most views.
The winner of the rewards will always go to the brand that people know most rather than the video makers.
> Copyright makes the legality of arXiv
Why? I thought that authors post the articles to arxiv themselves.
> It locks publicly funded research behind paywalls.
It is not copyright, it is scientists who do not want to publish their work (that they got paid for) in open access journals. And it seems the reason is that we have the system where your career advances better if you publish in paid journals.
Because it's self indulgent wankery. If I, as writer and an artist, have just the most absolutely brilliant thoughts, and write them down into a book or draw the most beautiful artwork, I can earn money off that well into my afterlife with copyright. Meanwhile the carpenter who is no less bright, can only sell the chair he's built once. In order to make money off of it, he must labor to produce a second or even a third chair. Why does one person have to work harder than the other because of the medium they chose?
Meanwhile in China, just because you invented a thing, you don't get to sit back and rest on your laurels. sipping champagne in hot tubs, because your competitor isn't staying put. He's grinding and innovating off your innovation so you'd also better keep innovating.
The only people making chairs by hand today are exceptionally well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or designers/studios.
It's not at all unusual for popular/iconic furniture designs to be copyrighted.
Reality is people who invent truly original, useful, desirable things are the most important human beings on the planet.
Nothing that makes civilisation what it is has happened without original inventiveness and creativity. It's the single most important resource there is.
These people should be encouraged and rewarded, whether it's in academia, industry, as freelance inventors/creators, or in some other way.
It's debatable if the current copyright system is the best way to do that, because often it isn't, for all kinds of reasons.
But the principle remains. Destroy rewards for original invention and creativity and you destroy all progress.
One reason so many people are amenable to the copyright argument is at least partly because of these counterarguments that posit that every writer must be an elitist or fabulously wealthy vs. instead of someone who spent X years toiling away at their craft or skill while working menial/multiple jobs.
yeah we should abolish copyright and make it so that creators get paid for every eyeball that's looking at your content. first, we establish a total panopticon. and then you get paid when people engage with your content, like, the system records that a person watches your movie, doesn't matter how they got a copy of your movie, but this person watches your movie, and that watch gets sent into the system and you get paid out from it. no more copyright, just horribly invasive tracking of everything everywhere. Call it copythrough.
That would never work, but like writing sci-fi.
This has nothing to do with stifling innovation.
I am yet to meet a writer who doesn't even attempt to write for fear that whatever they write will be found to be in violation of copyright (unless they are the type of writer that is always finding excuses not to write).
Several people have made successful careers out of fan fiction...
I don't think it is that easy. Take musicians for example. There are several thousands most popular and rich, some that can only gather a small club and a long tail of people who can only play music on their day off. And now with development of generative models their financial situation is going to get only worse.
The income from the book is scaling by its number of customers, versus roughly one person at a time who can enjoy the chair. It incentivizes finding ways to entertain more people with your effort.
If I paint a picture on a physical canvas, I can charge people to come into my house and take a look. If I bring the canvas to a park, I'm not entitled to say "s-stop looking at my painting guys!"
If you're worried about your work being infinitely reproduced, you probably shouldn't work in an infinitely-reproducible medium. Digitized content is inherently worthless, and I mean that in a non-derisive way. The sooner we realize this, the richer culture will be.
Really all content is worthless. Historically, we've always paid for the transmission medium (tape, CD) and confused it for the cost of art itself.
Accusatory clause aside, but I agree, this is how a lot of "starving artists" get out of being starving.
>People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.
No they aren't, intellectual property is a legal fiction and ideas belong to all of humanity. Humanity did fine without intellectual property for thousands of years, it's a relatively recent creation.
> I'm guessing you've never created something of value before
That's an interesting speculation. You realize that it could also be turned against you, right? Never a good idea!
So, let's focus on the arguments rather than making assumptions about each other's backgrounds.
> People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.
People are absolutely entitled to the fruits of their labour. The crucial question is whether the current system of 'IP' control – designed for scarcity – is the best way to ensure that, especially when many creators find it hinders more than it helps. That's why many people explore and use other models.
Getting the megacorporations to sit up and take notice of this is about the only way the average independent artist has any hope of stopping this crap from destroying half our jobs. What'm I gonna do, sue OpenAI? Sam Altman makes more money sitting on the toilet taking a dump than I do in an entire year.
I have no love for the Mouse but if I can get them and the image slop-mongers to fight then that's absoutely fine. It would be nice to have a functioning, vibrant public domain but it is also nice to not have some rich asshole insisting that all copyright laws must be ignored because if they properly licensed even a fraction of what they've consumed then it would be entirely too expensive to train their glorified autocomplete databases on the entire fucking internet for the purpose of generating even more garbage "content" designed to keep your attention when you're mindlessly scrolling their attention farms, regardless of how it makes you feel, and if I can choose one or the other then I am totally behind the Mouse.
The problem with this kind of plagiarism isn't that it violates someone's specific copyright.
But the discussion around plagiarism calls attention to the deeper issue: "generative" AI does not have emergent thinking or reasoning capabilities. It is just very good at obfuscating the sources of its information.
And that can cause much bigger problems than just IP infringement. You could make a strategic decision based on information that was deliberately published by an adversary.
I can't speak for everyone obviously, but my anti-AI sentiment in this regard is not that IP law is flawless and beyond reproach, far from it. I'm merely saying that as long as we're all required to put up with it, that OpenAI and company should also have to put up with it. It's incredibly disingenuous the way these companies have taken advantage of publicly available material on an industrial scale, used said material to train their models "for research" and as soon as they had something that vaguely did what they wanted, began selling access to them.
If they are indeed the output of "research" that couldn't exist without the requisite publicly available material, then they should be accessible by the public (and arguably, the products of said outputs should also be inherently public domain too).
If they are instead created products to be sold themselves, then what is utilized to create them should be licensed for that purpose.
Additionally, if they can be used to generate IP violating material, then IMHO, makes perfect sense for the rights holders of those IPs to sue their asses like they would anyone else who did that and sold the results.
Again, for emphasis: I'm not endorsing any of the effects of IP law. I am simply saying that we should all, from the poorest user to the richest corporation, be playing by the same rules, and it feels like AI companies entire existence is hinging on their ability to have their IP cake and eat it too: they want to be able to restrict and monetize access to their generative models that they've created, while also having free reign to generate clearly, bluntly plagiarizing material, by way of utilizing vast amounts of in-good-faith freely given material. It's gross, and it sucks.
Very well put. I’m open to a future in which nothing is copyrighted & everything is in the public domain, but the byproduct of that public domain material should _also_ be owned by the public.
Otherwise, we’re making the judgement that the originators of the IP should not be compensated for their labor, while the AI labs should be. Of course, training & running the models take compute resources, but the ultimate aim of these companies is to profit above & beyond those costs, just as artists hope to be compensated above & beyond the training & resources required to make the art in the first place.
as an artist, I totally agree with this approach. the whole idea of trying to pay artists for their contributions in training data is just impractical.
if the data’s pulled from the public domain, the model built from this human knowledge should be shared with all creators too, meaning everyone should get access to it
Beware of pushing for rules that you don't personally believe in. You just might succeed a little too well, and have to live with the consequences.
It smells like a psyop, to be honest. Doesn't take much to get the ball rolling. Just more temporarily embarrassed millionaires sticking up for billionaires and corporations, buying their propaganda hook line and sinker, and propagating it themselves for free. Copyright is a joke, DMCA is a disgusting, selectively applied tool of the elite.
I don't understand how protecting Disney characters prevents development of art or science. Why do you need them at all? There is lot of liberally licensed art and I think today there are more artists than ever in history.
Also making a billion dollar business by using hard work of talented people for free and without permission is not cool. The movie they downloaded from Pirate Bay for free took probably man-years of work to make.
Also I wonder how can we be sure that the images produced by machine are original and are not a mix of images from unknown artists at DeviantArt. Maybe it is time to make a neural image origin search engine?
For the last paragraph, it already exists: Stable Attribution.
It doesn't work. If you put your handmade drawing inside, it'll also tell you what images were mixed to make it, even though it was entirely human-made.
The issue here is that you think the problem is
> intellectual property
rather than
> used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation
You're using those "2008 ideas now to defend the rich and powerful exploiting and stifling creativity; the problem hasn't changed, you've just swapped sides.
OpenAI isn't the underdog here.
Here's what Ars got out of GPT-4 a year ago: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york...
I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that this represents a "hideous theft machine", but I think even if we discard that, this is still bad.
It's very clear that generative has abandoned the idea of creative; image production that just replicates the training data only serves to further flatten our idea of what the world should look like.
Right, the focus is on IP theft, and that’s part of it, but let’s set that aside.
How useful is an image generator that, when asked to generate an image of an archaeologist in a hat, gives you Harrison Ford every time?
Clearly that’s not what we want from tools like this, even just as tools.
First, that only works for potential biases you already know about and can anticipate, or can spot in the output. If the result is an egregious ripoff or an artist you’ve never heard of, or is the likeness of a model or actor you’re not aware of, how would you know?
Second, it doesn’t create the kind of originality we want. It just limits the kind of unoriginality we are getting.
This makes AI image generation very boring. I don't want to generate pictures I can find on google, I want to make new pictures.
I found apple's tool frustrating. I have a buzzed haircut, but no matter what I did, apple was unable to give me that hairstyle. It wants so bad for my avatar to have some longer hair to flourish, and refuses to do anything else.
I remember when google news was fined be the EU for just linking and using some preview + trailer text to actual news websites. The news are owned by a few monopolies and they don't like giving up control.
I received so many Copyright and DMCA takedowns for early youtube videos posted in the early 2010's for no reason except some background music blaring a hit. It had millions of views and NO ADs. Now the ad-infested copies with whatever tricks they use can still be found, while my videos predating all had to be deleted. Google. You like their product? Don't like it too much, it may cease to exist, or maybe just for you for arbitrary reasons and simultaneously remove your access to hundreds of websites via their monopoly on Single-Sign-On.
Then there are those takedown notices for honest negative reviews on Google Maps by notorious companies having accumulated enough money via scams that they now can afford to hire lawyers. These lawyers use their tools and power to manipulate the factual scoring into a "cleansed one".
OpenAI seriously has not received any court orders from all the movie studios in the world? How is that even possible?
I previously posted in a comment that I have video evidence with a friend being eye witness how OpenAI is stealing data. How? Possibly by abusing access granted by Microsoft.
Who is still defending OpenAI and why? There are so many highly educated and incredibly smart people here, this is one of the most glaring and obvious hardcore data/copyright violations, yet OpenAI roams free. It's also the de-facto most ClosedAI out there.
OpenAI is: - Accessing private IP & data of millions of organisations - Silencing and killing whitleblowers like Boing - Using $500B tax-payer money to produce closed source AI - Founder has lost it and straight up wants to raise trillion(s)
For each of these claim there is easily material that can be linked to prove it, but some like ChatGPT and confuse the usefulness of it with the miss-aligned and bad corporate behaviour of this multi-billion dollar corporation.
the guardrails are probably going to end up being way too close together when the dust settles — imagine if something as simple as "young wizard" would be enough to trip the warnings. someone could be looking to do an image from Feist's early novels, or of their own work, & that will be verboten. it may turn out that we're facing the strongest copyright holders being able to limit everyone's legitimate use of these tools.
Unless it can exclude the copyright outputs and provide something else instead of blocking the inputs. I'm sure there's AI that can check if a picture is close enough to something in their database of copyrighted characters built up from some kind of DMCA-like process of copyright holders submitting examples of their work to be blocked.
Indeed, but where does it stop? Looks like Potter? No go. Hmm, looks like an illustration of Pug? No go. Looks like Simon the sorcerer. No go. Hmm, looks like a wizard from Infocom's Sorcers get all the girls. No go.
The problem is that it regurgitates what already exists and if you really want to abide by all the permissions then there is nothing left.
The AI companies could always license all that copyrighted training materials. You can't claim there's no solution while ignoring the solution everyone' been using for ages just because these corporations told you so.
I would expect "young wizard" to generate something similar to Harry Potter more than Pug, tbh
> Yes- LLMs and internet search are two different things, but LLMs train on the entirety of the internet, so you would think there would be some obvious overlap.
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.
From the comments on the page
> It's a jeopardy machine. You give it the clue, and it gives you the obvious answer.
Incredibly lucid analogy.
You're allowed to draw IP and share your drawings. You're allowed to screenshot and photoshop IP. You're allowed to sell tools that help others draw and photoshop IP*. You're not allowed to sell these drawings and photoshops.
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.
> You're allowed to draw IP and share your drawings.
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 pay for ChatGPT and ask for copyrighted images, is that selling the generated IP?
The image the AI generates is not copyrighted (except maybe by OpenAI I guess) unless it ends up being an exact duplicate of an existing image. Copyright applies to a specific work. The character may be trademarked like Mickey Mouse, but that is a different IP protection.
I would argue yes, since the output is what you are probably after, when buying access to ChatGPT.
You are responsible for the output, just like any other tool.
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.
What if the ceo of xerox went on social media and promoted copy machines by showing how you could use them for infringement?
The analogies fail because the copyrighted material were not used for creating the copy machine, Illustration, or (maybe?) the keyboard suggestion engine. If LLMs were produced ethically, then the whole discussion is moot. But if the only way to produce copyrighted material requires being trained on copyrighted material, then...
>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.
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.
Corporations would love for everybody to believe they own and control every single instance of any audio or visual output they create but that's just not true. 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 is important but does/should not extend to every time I want to print out a picture of a boy wizard for my kid. We live in a culture, not an IP regime.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what's copyrightable.
> 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.
> No one can legally stop you from writing your own story about a boy wizard who goes to school
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.
I'm fascinated by the fact that the images are almost right, but never totally.
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.
According to some of the replies in this discussion, even "artist trying to paint from memory" is guilty of infringement, as long as the subject matter can be linked in any way to someone's "IP". Im not legally trained to evaluate these claims, but some of them seem outlandish!
> According to some of the replies in this discussion, even "artist trying to paint from memory" is guilty of infringement
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.)
Painting and selling a painting or otherwise substituting that painting for an original work that deprives the original creator is theft, plain and simple. Not selling it, there's room for discussion and more considered legal review.
It is not only copyright that is problematic. It generates Franco when asked about the best Spanish leader in the 20th century.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67efebf4-3b14-8011-8c11-8f806c7ff6...
To be fair, Franco is the only Spanish leader most people (or at least most non-Spaniards) can even name
On the one hand, that seems problematic. But on the other, it seems cherry-picked: For the U.S., it generates a picture of JFK. For Russia/USSR, it gives Stalin. For India, it gives Ghandi. For South Africa it gives Nelson Mandela. For Germany, it provides an appropriately hand-wringing text response and eventually suggests Konrad Adenauer.
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...
Literally nothing you've said in this post matters.
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.
This is a tangent but I think that this neat illustration of how LLMs regurgitate their training material makes me voice a little prediction I've been nursing recently:
LLMs are better at generating the boilerplate of todays programming languages than they will be with tomorrows programming languages.
This is because not only will tomorrows programming languages be newer and lacking in corpus to train the models in but, by the time a corpus is built, that corpus will consist largely of LLM hallucinations that got checked into github!?
The internet that that has been trawled to train the LLMs is already largely SEO spam etc, but the internet of the future will be much more so. The loop will feed into itself and become ever worse quality.
That sounds like a reasonable prediction to me if the LLM makers do nothing in response. However, I'll bet coding is the easiest area for which to generate synthetic training data. You could have an LLM generate 100k solutions to 10k programming problems in the target language and throw away the results that don't pass automated tests. Have humans grade the results that do pass the tests and use the best answers for future training. Repeat until you have a corpus of high quality code.
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?
well, because then open AI needs to pay out even more money than they're already losing...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. So when I tried the “Indiana Jones” prompt I got an image back that looked a lot like Indiana Jones but with a face much more similar to Nathan Drake. Whereas the predator prompt generated an image of the predator but, unlike the article, wearing his mask.
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.
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...
Today I finally caved in and tried the ghibli style transfer in chatgpt. I gave it a photo of my daughter and said the thing (prompt shared about). It said it couldn't due to copyright issues. Fine. I removed ghibli from the prompt and replaced it with a well-known japanese studio where Hayao Miyazaki works. Still nothing, copyright reasons my fellow human. I thought they finally turned it off due to the pressure, but then something caught my eye. My daughter, on the image, had a t-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it! I used the original prompt with ghibli in it and added to "paint a unicorn on the t-shirt instead to avoid copyright issues". It worked.
tl;dr; Try the disney boss and see what happens!
Here's a question.
What if I want to prompt:
"An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, make sure it is NOT Indiana Jones."
One way or another, you (and the model) do need to know who Indiana Jones is.
After that, the moral and legal choices of whether to generate the image, and what to do with it, are all yours.
And we might not agree on what that is, but you do get the choice
If the AI company sells it to you, no matter your prompting, they are stealing. If you also sell that work, then so are you.
You are writing a conclusion without providing reasons or feelings.
Are you able to link to or write out your reasoning (however concisely?).
Is your view here legal, ethical, and/or vibes based? Each can can be interesting!
They are not stealing! Indiana Jones is already out there in pop culture.
We shouldn't complain about AI holding a mirror up to our world and noting "you guys love Indiana Jones a lot. Here's a picture inspired by his appearance, based on your generic prompt that I'm guessing is a nod to the franchise."
The AI is a step ahead of your unsubtle attempts to "catch it stealing".
The image of Indiana Jones is not "ready for market" when it emerges from your prompt. Just like Googling "Indy with whip", the images that emerge are not a commercial opportunity for you.
When you make multi-billion dollar movies with iconic characters, expect AI to know what they look like and send them your way if your prompt is painfully obvious in its intent.
And interesting comparison between Web search vs Gen AI.
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.
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?
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)
I am not sure that I understand the problem here. Why does it matter how the image was generated?
This image generation is a tool like any other tool. If the image generator generates an image of Mickey Mouse or if I draw Mickey Mouse by hand in photoshop, I can't use it commercially either way.
So what exactly is new or different here?
Skeletor might want to live in Castle Grayskull, but he actually lives in Snake Mountain.
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.
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.
>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.
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!"
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.
This post should be required reading on HN. Have you expanded it to a blog article?
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Archeologists don't actually wear fedora hats.
And the stereotypical meme "archeologist hat" is the pith helmet.
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.
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?
With some work, works with politicians as well: https://chatgpt.com/share/67eefb1c-ceac-8012-ad90-3b64356744...
I could see a "Devil's Plan" style game show where, for one of the challenges the contestants have to come up with AI prompts that produce results, that then get fed into another AI prompt to determine whether they satisfy the conditions or not. E.g.
[ Challenge Image: An aquarium full of baby octopodes, containing a red high-heeled slipper in the center and a silver whistle hanging from a fern on the right-hand side ]
Then the contests have to come up (under pressure, of course) with a prompt that produces their own rendition of that image, and the game will decide if their image contains enough of the elements of the original to score a point.
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).
This sounds similar to how piracy actually increases sales in the long run, even though IP holders hate it.
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...
> 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.
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.
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-...
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).
This is a few years old, but interesting to see Miyzaki's reaction to AI generated video.
“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...
I'm curious, is it the AI that should be blamed or the prompter who asks to generate something based on copyright?
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.
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.
Hmm author seems not to have noticed that Quatermain's love interest was played by Sharon Stone
I personally think Studio Ghibli, and by extension their artists and former artists, have created a beautiful art style. The fact that we call it Ghibli, when really, its the artists there (and former artists) is misleading.
The people leave, go to different studios, and make different art. This is not their only style, and Ghibli is not known to make many movies these days.
The only thing this is hurting, if anything, is Studio Ghibli, not the artists. Artists capable of drawing in this style can draw in any style.
I don’t know. Studios have distinct styles. Think Disney, Pixar, Aardman, Hanna-Barbera. Most of those obviously come from early influential artists (like with Ghibli), but they have become recognizable for the studio itself. It’s not just the style of the individual artists.
Its kind of weird how everyone is complaining about copyright infringemet in memes now.
Memes are pretty inherently derrivative. They were always someone elses work. The picard face palm meme was obviously taken from star trek. All your base is obviously from that video game. Repurposing someone else's work with new meaning is basically what a meme is. Why do we suddenly care now?
I believe it's because AI hatred is quite trendy now. It's true though, memes were always copyright infringement; it's just that no one bothered to sue for it.
Creepy Craig is hilarious. can't be Daniel Craig because the physiology is too different. And whoever this is they're Daniel Craig's dark younger brother.
https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...
and I'm all in on this conclusion:
> It’s stealing, but also, admittedly, really cool.
This isn't surprising in any way is it? And it just goes to show that no model will ever be a box from which you can trust the output isn't tainted by copyrights, or that you don't inadvertently use someones' likeness. It's not a copyright laundering machine. Nor will it be used as one. "But I used an AI model" isn't some magic way to avoid legal trouble. You are in as much legal trouble using these images as you are using the "originals".
Yeah I don't really understand what the thesis of this article is. Copyright infringement would apply to any of those images just the same as if you made them yourself.
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.
> close-up image of a cat's face staring down at the viewer
> 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.
Doesn’t ChatGPT have a deal to train off reddit content? Despite never watching any of these movies, I have seen all of the original images in memes on Reddit. Is it still theft if they paid to obtain the training data? Should Reddit be sued for hosting copyrighted images in meme subreddits?
I don't understand why problems like this aren't solved by vector similarity search. Indiana Jones lives in a particular part of vector space.
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.
Thinking of it in terms of vector similarity does seem appropriate, and then definition of similarity suddenly comes into debate: If you don't get Harrison Ford, but a different well-known actor along with everything else Indiana-Jones, what is that? Do you flatten the vector similarity matrix to a single infringement-scale?
> Not worth it to compute the embedding for Indy
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...
I tried the "generate a photo image of a female adventurer protagonist who raids tombs" on ChatGPT
And got an eerily similar picture as in the article: https://imgur.com/Dv7hkoC
Sometimes it just randomly prompts about the content guidelines and the next day it will do it perfectly right away. Maybe you just had a wrong moment in time, or maybe it depends on the random server you're assigned.
I have a dream that one day bloggers will learn the difference between copyrighting and copywriting.
Art inspired by images that are out of copyright.
All modern art currently created by humans is already trained on copyrighted images. What seems to be missing is the innate human ability to copy someone else's homework but change it up a bit (c.f. "the hero's journey" that is so much of modern storytelling).
It's fairly easy to make the association with just text. If you injest all the content in the world, excluding copyrighted material, I would still expect a picture of harrison ford!
I think Harrison Ford's chin scar should be seen as a witness mark to copyright infringement. It simply should not have rendered this based on that prompt.
Sorry, but these images are exactly what comes to my mind immediately when reading the prompts. You can argue about intellectual property theft (though I find it funny that the same people that would boycott Disney for suing a fanfiction author are now on the side of copyright holders), but it's not wrong or unintuitive.
Maybe a thinking model would - just like my brain might after the initial reaction - add a "but the user formulated this in a way that makes it obvious that they do not explicitly mean Indiana Jones, so lets make it an asian woman" prompt, but we all know how this worked out for Google's image generator that generated black nazis.
> Google's image generator that generated black nazis.
Didn't see this one, but I've certainly played around with Dall-E (via MS image creator) and had things like "You wanted a picture of a happy shark, but we decided this one needs to be an asian woman frolicking in the sea" or "You wanted a picture of Beavis doing something so in one of the images we made him a pretty racist middle-eastern caricature"
> (though I find it funny that the same people that would boycott Disney for suing a fanfiction author are now on the side of copyright holders)
Is that a contradiction?
Certainly some of the hate comes from the fact that they take from small producers just as much as from large. I have an author friend who is annoyed at present to find out that facebook slurped up his books as part of their training set without so much as a by-your-leave or (as far as he could tell) even purchasing a copy.
As such, the people on the sharp end are often the underdog, with no way to fight back.
When it comes to the properties mentioned in the article, I think it's very different from fanfiction or fan-art - that's a labour of (nerdy) love, rather than wholesale, automated rip-off for profit.
> I don’t know…the actual inspirations for Indiana Jones, like Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard's novels, "King Solomon's Mines", and the real life Roy Chapman Andrews, who led expeditions to Mongolia and China in the 1920s and wore a fedora.
The actual inspiration for Indy was protagonist Harry Steele from the movie The Secret of the Incas (1954). Filmed on location in Cusco and Machu Picchu, before they became popular tourist destinations, the movie also had scenes and elements that made it into Raiders of the Lost Ark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_the_Incas
The movie's available on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TS7Fabyolw
A lot more info: http://www.theraider.net/information/influences/secret_of_in...
(And listen out for the astonishing voice of Yma Sumac!)
Definitely a missed opportunity that the article didn't discuss that obviously-derivative borrowing has been happening a lot longer than ML image generation has been around. And that borrowing is OK! Indiana Jones' appearance is very obviously based directly on Charlton Heston's character in Secret of the Incas, but the Spielberg/Lucas films are objectively better in every way than that source material.
What I see happening soon is a deeper transition from playful whimsy to real applications with contractual obligations.
Right now it's an unencumbered exploration with only a few requirements. The general public isn't too upset even if it blatantly feeds on copyrighted data [1] or attacks wikipedia with its AI crawlers [2].
The end state once legislation has had a chance to catch is breath looks more like Apple being forced to implement USB type C.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/04/ai-bo...
This phenomenon is why I personally get so angry at the license washing that these models are capable of for code: I put out a lot of code as open source... but it is GPL on purpose, as I want your code to be just as free as mine in exchange for getting to use mine. But, now, you're all "I want to build that for myself!" and so you ask an AI and just describe what my project does into the tool... and who is to say it isn't generating something "too close" to my code? Do you even check? If you yourself as a human had first looked at my code, you'd have to be VERY careful to not be accidentally infringing my code... and yet people pretend this AI is somehow not capable of IP theft?!
Preach!
How is it that my FF preference (something like 'Always show scrollbars') is regularly just ignored.
I want my scrollbars! And I wat `em fat and in my UI's color scheme!
And why the HELL would a web designer think this is a good idea. Maybe their beret and hipster pants are too tight?
Thanks for being here for my rant. I owe you one :-)
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".
Do you do ChatGPT illustration request-type headlines now?
>AI is supposed to be able to [...] make extremely labor intensive things much easier
... as showcased by the cited examples?
More so, this derivative work would otherwise be unreachable for regular folk with no artistic talent (maybe for lack of time to develop it), but who may aspire to do such creative work nevertheless. Why is that a bad thing? Sure, simple posts on social media don't have much work or creativity put into them, but are enjoyable nevertheless, and the technology _can_ be used in creative ways - e.g. Stable Diffusion has been used to turn original stories drawn with stick figures into stylized children's books.
The author argues against this usage for "stealing" the original work, but how does posting a stylized story on social media "steal" anything? The author doesn't present any "pirated" copies of movies being sold in place of the originals, nor negative impact on sales figures. In the case of the trending Studio Ghibli, I wouldn't be surprise to see a positive impact!
As for the "soulless 2025 fax version of the thing", I think it takes a very negative mindset to see it this way. What I've seen shared on social media has been nothing but fun examples, people playing around with what for them is a new use of technology, using it on pictures of fond memories, etc.
I'm inclined to agree with the argument made by Boldrin and Levine:
>”Intellectual property” has come to mean not only the right to own and sell ideas, but also the right to regulate their use. This creates a socially inefficient monopoly, and what is commonly called intellectual property might be better called “intellectual monopoly.”
>When you buy a potato you can eat it, throw it away, plant it or make it into a sculpture. Current law allows producers of a CDs and books to take this freedom away from you. When you buy a potato you can use the “idea” of a potato embodied in it to make better potatoes or to invent french fries. Current law allows producers of computer software or medical drugs to take this freedom away from you. It is against this distorted extension of intellectual property rights that we argue.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4980956_The_Case_Ag...
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.
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?
It's only "intellectual theft" because we consider peoples thoughts their own property. On many levels, that doesn't really make sense to me.
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.
Think about it. Copyright and trademark are only a thing because of the constraint of the speed of light (or as some people believe, the constraint of the simulation running the universe). In an infinite universe, everything that has ever been invented or created by a human has already happened thousands of times in another place and another time.
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.
Why is everyone pretending it's the LLM that is creating the image and not the diffusion model?
Style can’t be copyrighted. It can’t be patented either.
When Wes Anderson makes films that use techniques from the French New Wave that he didn’t invent is that wrong? When there is a DaVinci color profile that resembles what they did in Spider-Man, is that wrong?
The unique techniques of French New Wave filmmaking became cliche. Then Oliver Stone and Tarantino came along and evolved it into their unique styles. That the Studio Ghibli style is being imitated en mass is just natural evolution. Should that guy be the only one that can do that style? If that’s the case, then literally every creative work should be considered forgeries.
The AI aspect of this is a red herring. If I make a Ghibli style film “by hand” is that any different than AI? Of course not, I didn’t invent the style.
Another perspective, darkroom burning and dodging is a very old technique yet photoshop makes it trivial — should that tool be criticized because someone else did it the old and slow way first?
If you're handing out red cards for repetition, aren't you guilty of the same infringement? You repeated the exact same prompt, which is itself an obvious bait for AI to draw the pop-culture lookalike.
I'm surprised by the comments here. When your prompt is so mind-numbingly simple, an obvious "dare" for AI to be a naughty little copyright infringer, can you blame it for dishing up the "big mac" you asked for while sitting in a fancy restaurant?
Don't want Indiana Jones? Don't ask for Indiana Jones!
I was really hoping that the conversation around AI art would at least be partially centered on the perhaps now dated "2008 pirate party" idea that intellectual property, the royalty system, the draconian copyright laws that we have today are deeply silly, rooted in a fiction, and used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.
Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus. That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it, and they know better than you do about the culture and communication that you are and are not allowed to experience.
It's just baffling. If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.