Comment by areoform

Comment by areoform a day ago

Theft from whom and how?

Are you telling me that our culture should be deprived of the idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset?

Indiana Jones is 44 years old. When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done since humans first started sitting down next to a fire and telling stories?

edit: this reminds of this iconic scene from Dr. Strangelove, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ9B7owHxMQ

    Mandrake: Colonel... that Coca-Cola machine. I want you to shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.
   
   Guano: That's private property.
   
   Mandrake: Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame, outlook, way of life, and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of the United States? Can you imagine? Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twit!

   Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what's gonna happen to you?
   
   Mandrake: What?
   
   Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.

I guess we all have to answer to the Walt Disney company.

calmbell a day ago

"idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset" is very different from the almost exact image of Indiana Jones.

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GolfPopper 14 hours ago

And a reason people are getting ticked at the AI companies is the hypocrisy. They're near-universally arguing that it's okay for them to treat copyright in a way that it is illegal for us to, apparently on the basis of, "we've got a billions in investment capital, and applying the law equally will make it hard for us to get a return on that investment".

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chongli a day ago

Exactly. The idea of Indiana Jones, the adventurer archaeologist more at home throwing a punch than reading a book, is neither owned by nor unique to Lucasfilm (Disney). There is a ton of media out there featuring this trope character [1]. Yes, the trope is overwhelmingly associated with the image of Harrison Ford in a fedora within the public consciousness, but copyright does not apply to abstract ideas such as tropes.
Some great video games to feature adventurer archaeologists:
* NetHack (One of the best roles in the game)
* Tomb Raider series (Lara Croft is a bona fide archaeologist)
* Uncharted series (Nathan Drake is more of a treasure hunter but he becomes an archaeologist when he retires from adventuring)
* Professor Layton series
* La-Mulana series (very obviously inspired by Indiana Jones, but not derivative)
* Spelunky (inspired by La-Mulana)
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventurerArchae...

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- cess11 20 hours ago
  
  As a connoisseur of bad as well as old movies I'd like to add The Librarian movies to this list, and The Mummy, where the first from 1932 stars the inimitable Boris Karloff as the lovesick undead.
  
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_ph_ a day ago

Not forever. But 75 years after the death of the creator by current international agreement. I definitely think that the exact terms of copyright should be revisited - a lot of usages should be allowed like 50 years of publishing a piece of work. But that needs to be agreed upon and converted into law. Till then, one should expect everyone, especially large corporations, to stick to the law.

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saulpw a day ago

When Mickey Mouse was created (1928), copyright was 28 years that could be reupped once for an additional 28 years. So according to those terms, Mickey Mouse would have ascended to the public domain in 1984.
IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively. Make copyright law to be what is best for society and creators as a whole, not for lobbyists representing already copyrighted material.

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- debugnik 20 hours ago
  
  > IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively.
  Careful, if we were to shorten copyright, not doing so retroactively would give an economic advantage to franchises already published over those that would get published later. As if the current big studios needed any further advantages over newcomers.
  
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  saulpw 2 hours ago
  
  It seems like it would make it more palatable to the existing franchises if their precious existing copyrights were not shortened. ("We paid billions of dollars under the assumption that we'd be able to milk this IP for 35 more years!") But anyway copyrights aren't going to get shorter in the near future.
  
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fullstop 14 hours ago

I mean, at least shouldn't we wait until Harrison Ford has passed?

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jauntywundrkind a day ago

Its kind of funny that everyone is harping this way or that way about IP.

This is a kind of strange comment for me to read. Because imby tone it sounds like a rebuttal? But by content, it agrees with a core thing I said about myself:

> and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations

What's just such a nightmare to me is that the tech is so normative. So horribly normative. This article shows that AI again and again reproduced only the known, only the already imagined. Its not that it's IP theft that rubs me so so wrong, it's that it's entirely bankrupt & uncreative, so very stuck. All this power! And yet!

You speak at what disgusts me yourself!

> When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done

The machine could be imagining all kinds of Indianas. Of all different remixed recreated expanded forms. But this pictures are 100% anything but that. They're Indiana frozen in Carbonite. They are the driest saddest prison of the past. And call into question the validity of AI entirely, show something greviously missing.

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sothatsit a day ago

> All this power! And yet!
You are completely ignoring the fact that you can provide so much more information to the LLMs to get what you want. If you truly want novel images, ChatGPT can absolutely provide them, but you have to provide a better starting point than "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip".
If you just provide a teensy bit more information, the results dramatically change. Try out "An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". Or give it an input image to work with.
From just adding a couple words, ChatGPT produces an entirely new character. It's so easy to get it to produce novel images. It is so easy in fact, that it makes a lot of posts like this one feel like strawmen, intentionally providing so little information to the LLMs that the generic character is the only obvious output that you would expect.
Now, would it be better if it didn't default to these common movie tropes? Sure. But the fact that it can follow these tropes doesn't mean that it cannot also be used to produce entirely new images filled with your imagination as well. You just have to actually ask it for that.

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- jauntywundrkind 16 hours ago
  
  You're again failing to read my top post. Badly.
  
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  sothatsit 9 hours ago
  
  No, I am not. Read my comment again. You can literally just ask AI for whatever you want. It has such an incredible breadth of what it can produce that calling it uncreative because the default thing that it produces is the most common image you'd expect is both lazy, and motivated thinking.
  
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  sothatsit 5 hours ago
  
  Okay, I just read your top comment, and I agree with you on that. But it still doesn't take much to nudge these models off of the "default guy". So to write an entire melodramatic comment about how these models crush creativity is incredibly reductive. These models provide so much room for people to inject their own creativity into its outputs.
  So yes, the models are not creative on their own. But equally, these models are definitely capable of helping people to express their own creativity, and so calling them "uncreative", and especially "bankrupt", rings hollow. It speaks like you are expecting the models to be artists, when in fact they are just tools to be used however people see fit.
  And so, the "default guy" or "default style" that ChatGPT outputs will become recognisable and boring. But anyone who wants to inject their own style into their prompts, either using text or input images, can do so. And in doing so, they skip over all of your concerns.
  
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dcow a day ago

It strikes me that perhaps the prompts are not expansive or expressive enough. If you look at some of the prompts our new wave of prompt artists use to generate images in communities like midjourney, a single sentence doesn't cut it.
If AI is just compression, then decompressing a generic pop-culture-seeking prompt will yield a generic uninspired image.

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- sejje 8 hours ago
  
  Exactly. The AI understands that reference. It gives you what you asked for, it doesn't try to divine that it's a weird test for IP violations. If it made up a different image, that would be exactly the thing we're mad about with "hallucinations" when we want serious, accurate responses.
  
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lupusreal 15 hours ago

I have given detailed descriptions of my own novel ideas to these image generators and they have faithfully implemented my ideas. I don't need the bot to be creative, I can do that myself. The bot is a paint brush. Give it to somebody who isn't creative and you won't get anything creative out of it. That isn't the tool's fault, it's merely an inadequacy of the user.

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