Comment by ionwake

Comment by ionwake 18 hours ago

31 replies

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Not sure if anyone is interested in this story, but I remember at the height of the PokemonGo craze I noticed there were no shirts for the different factions in the game, cant rememebr what they were called but something like Teamread or something. I setup an online shop to just to sell a red shirt with the word on it. The next day my whole shop was taken offline for potential copyright infringement.

What I found surprising is I didnt even have one sale. Somehow someone had notified Nintendo AND my shop had been taken down, to sell merch that didn't even exist for the market and if I remember correctly - also it didnt even have any imagery on it or anything trademarkable - even if it was clearly meant for pokmeonGo fans.

Im not bitter I just found it interesting how quick and ruthless they were. Like bros I didn't even get a chance to make a sale. ( yes and also I dont think I infringed anything).

District5524 17 hours ago

I asked Sora to turn a random image of my friend and myself into Italian plumbers. Nothing more, just the two words "Italian plumbers". The created picture was not shown to me because it was in violation of OpenAI's content policy. I asked then just to turn the guys on the picture into plumbers, but I asked this in the Italian language. Without me asking for it, Sora put me in an overall and gave me a baseball cap, and my friend another baseball cap. If I asked Sora to put mustache on us, one of us received a red shirt as well, without being asked to. Starting with the same pic, if I asked to put one letter on the baseball caps each - guess, the letters chosen were M and L. These extra guardrails are not really useful with such a strong, built-in bias towards copyright infringement of these image creation tools. Should it mean that with time, Dutch pictures will have to include tulips, Italian plumbers will have to have a uniform with baseball caps with L and M, etc. just not to confuse AI tools?

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  • Cthulhu_ 13 hours ago

    You (and the article, etc) show what a lot of the "work" in AI is going into at the moment - creating guardrails against creating something that might get them in trouble, and / or customizing weights and prompts under water to generate stuff that isn't the obvious. I'm reminded of when Google's image generator came up and this customization bit them in the ass when they generated a black pope or asian vikings. AI tools don't do what you wish they did, they do what you tell them and what they are taught, and if 99% of their learning set associates Mario with prompts for Italian plumbers, that's what you'll get.

    A possible (probably already exists) business is setting up truly balanced learning sets, that is, thousands of unique images that match the idea of an italian plumber, with maybe 1% of Mario. But that won't be nearly as big a learning set as the whole internet is, nor will it be cheap to build it compared to just scraping the internet.

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    • muzani 40 minutes ago

      I would love to know how YouTube does this for music. There's some holes obviously, like some cover artists will play the iconic riffs of a song and then stop somewhere. There's people who do reels or "commentary" of a movie scene and then put some horrible high pitched music to mask it from copyright.

      There's probably even some rules around this to only detect just enough to take legal action. Like GP stumbled on a trademark landmine, but obviously just selling red shirts with a bird on it can't be a trademark violation; it needs to be a specific kind of red too.

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    • rurp 5 hours ago

      >> they do what you tell them and what they are taught, and if 99% of their learning set associates Mario with prompts for Italian plumbers, that's what you'll get.

      I thought that a lot of the issues were the opposite of this, where Google put their thumb on the scale to go against what the prompt asked. Like when someone would ask for a historically accurate picture of a US senator from the 1800s and repeatedly get women and non-white men. The training set for that prompt has to be overwhelmingly white men so I don't think it was just a matter of following the training data.

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    • feoren 10 hours ago

      I remember all the hullaballoo about Asian Vikings and the like. It was so preposterous that Vikings would ever be Asian that it must be ultra-woke DEI mind-worms being forced onto AI! But of course, as far as the AI's concerned, it is even more preposterous that an Italian plumber would not be wearing red or green overalls with a mustache and a lettered baseball cap. I don't see any way you can get the AI to recognize that Vikings "should" be white people and not also think that Italian plumbers "should" look like that. Are they allowed to recombine their training data or must they strictly adhere to only what they've seen?

      Of course the irony is that if the people who get offended whenever they see images of non-white people asked for a picture of "Vikings being attacked by Godzilla" , they'd get worked up if any of the Vikings in the picture were Asian (how unrealistic!). It's a made-up universe! The image contains a damn (Asian) Kaiju in it, and everyone is supposed to be pissed because the Vikings are unrealistic!?

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      • GuB-42 9 hours ago

        That's what you get when you expect AIs to be like humans and be able to reason. We would be pissed if a human artist did that, so we are pissed when AIs do it.

        A human, even one whose only experience of an Italian plumber is Mario will be able to draw an Italian plumber who is not Mario. That's because he knows that Mario is just a video game character and doesn't even do much plumbing. He knows however how an actual non-Italian plumber looks like, and that a guy doing plumbing work in Italy is more likely to look like a regular Italian guy equipped like a non-Italian plumber than to a video game character.

        And if asked to draw a Viking, he knows that Vikings are people originating from Scandinavia, so they can't be Asian by definition, even in an Asian context. A human artist can adjust things to the unrealistic setting, but unless presented with a really good reason, will not change the core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking.

        But it requires reasoning. Which current image generating AIs don't have.

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      • jerf 8 hours ago

        The AIs were not "naturally" generating images of Asian Vikings. It was established to my satisfaction, even if the companies never admitted it (I don't recall it happening but I may have missed it), that it was actually the prompt being rather hamhandedly edited on the way to the image generator, for the clear purpose of "correcting" the opinions and attitudes of those issuing the prompts through social engineering.

        Unsurprisingly, people don't like being so nakedly herded in their opinions. When the "nudges" become "shoves" people object.

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        • feoren 8 hours ago

          My point is that there is no prompt engineering that could keep Vikings white without also keeping Italian plumbers looking like Mario. Unless you singled out Mario, but there are too many examples to do that with. The AI does not put Mario in a different category than a Viking. You have to try to get the AI to avoid using exact literal imagery, to make sure it's mixing things up a bit, varying facial features and clothing styles when it shows people ... you know, being "diverse". How are we supposed to get an Italian plumber in anything other than red overalls without getting a Viking wearing a sari?

          The Gemini prompt was something like "make sure any images of people show a diverse range of humans", or something. Yes, it was totally ham-handed, but that's not what people were pissed about. It's also ham-handed that we can't generate a nipple, or a swear word, or violence. Why does "make sure images do not contain excessive violence" not piss people off? The Vikings were fucking brutal. It would be very historically accurate to show them raping women and cutting people's limbs off. Are we all supposed to be pissed that AI does not generate that image? It's just as ham-handed as "make sure humans are diverse". No, it was not the ham-handedness that enraged people. It was not the historical inaccuracy. It was the word "diverse".

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      • feoren 8 hours ago

        I'm assuming the downvoters are the ones who get offended at the sight of an Asian Viking, so let me ask you this:

        In a work of fiction -- which you're automatically asking for when you ask an AI to generate an image -- in a work of fiction, would you be offended if you saw a white Ninja? A white Samurai? A white Middle-Eastern Jew born in Roman times? Would there have been internet outrage over pictures of white Samurai? We all know the answer: no, of course not. So why is an Asian Viking offensive when a white Samurai is not? Why are we supposed to get angry about an Asian Viking, but a white Jesus is just A-OK? What could the difference possibly be? Anyone?

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  • barbazoo 9 hours ago

    I feel like the golden and fun age of GenAI is already over.

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  • echelon 11 hours ago

    OpenAI will eventually have competition for GPT 4o image generation.

    They'll eventually have open source competition too. And then none of this will matter.

    OmniGen is a good start, just woefully undertrained.

    The VAR paper is open, from ByteDance, and supposedly the architecture this is based on.

    Black Forest Labs isn't going to sit on their laurels. Their entire product offering just became worthless and lost traction. They're going to have to answer this.

    I'd put $50 on ByteDance releases an open source version of this in three months.

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  • jxramos 9 hours ago

    lol, this interaction may possibly become known as "grooming the AI"

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  • adr1an 8 hours ago

    Another example of prime reasoning capabilities /s

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weinzierl 16 hours ago

Many years ago I tried to order a t-shirt with the postscript tiger on the front from Spreadshirt.

It was removed on Copyright claims before I could order one item myself. After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let me buy one item for personal use.

My point is: Doesn't have to be Sony, doesn't have to be a snitch - overzealous anticipatory obedience by the shop might have been enough.

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  • Xmd5a 15 hours ago

    >After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let me buy one item for personal use.

    I used Spreadshirt to print a panel from the Tintin comic on a T-shirt, and I had no problem ordering it (it shows Captain Haddock moving through the jungle, swatting away the mosquitoes harassing him, giving himself a big slap on the face, and saying, 'Take that, you filthy beasts!').

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    • beardyw 15 hours ago

      I bought Tintin T-shirts 40 years ago in Thailand (the "branded" choices were amazing). They were actually really good, still got them!

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yojo 11 hours ago

Twenty years ago, I worked for Google AdWords as a customer service rep. This was still relatively early days, and all ads still had some level of manual human review.

The big advertisers had all furnished us a list of their trademarks and acceptable domains. Any advertiser trying to use one that wasn’t on the allow-list had their ad removed at review time.

I suspect this could be what happened to you. If the platform you were using has any kind of review process for new shops, you may have run afoul of pre-registered keywords.

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ghostly_s 7 hours ago

Well the teams in Pokemon Go aren't quite as generic as Teamred: they are Team Instinct, Team Mystic, and Team Valor. Presumably Nintendo has trademarks on those phrases, and I’m sure all the big print on demand houses have an API for rights-holders to preemptively submit their trademarks for takedowns.

Nintendo is also famously protective of their IP: to give another anecdote, I just bought one of the emulator handhelds on Aliexpress that are all the rage these days, and while they don't advertise it they usually come preloaded with a buttload or ROMs. Mine did, including a number of Nintendo properties — but nary an Italian plumber to be found. The Nintendo fear runs deep.

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dfxm12 11 hours ago

Somehow someone had notified Nintendo

Is this correct? I would guess Nintendo has some automation/subscription to a service that handles this. I doubt it was some third party snitching.

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  • muzani an hour ago

    People snitch real fast when jealous. Sometimes it's as simple as someone wanting to do the same thing and finding out someone else did it.

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mrguyorama 5 hours ago

Allen Pan, a youtuber "maker" who runs in the circle of people who run OpenSauce, was a contestant on a Discovery channel show that was trying to force the success of Mythbusters by "finding the next mythbusters!". He lost, but it was formative to him because those people were basically all inspired by the original show.

A couple years ago, he noticed that the merchandise trademark for "Mythbusters" had lapsed, so he bought it. He, now the legal owner of the trademark Mythbusters for apparel, made shirts that used that trademark.

Discovery sent him a cease and desist and threatened to sue. THEY had let the trademark lapse. THEY had lost the right to the trademark, by law. THEY were in the wrong, and a lawyer agreed.

But good fucking luck funding that legal battle. So he relinquished the trademark.

Buy a walrus plushy cause it's funny: https://allen-pan-shop.fourthwall.com/en-usd/

Note the now "Myth Busted" shirts instead.

Hilariously, a friend of Allen Pan's, from the same "Finding the next mythbuster" show; Kyle Hill, is friends enough with Adam Savage to talk to him occasionally, and supposedly the actual Mythbusters themselves were not empathetic to Allen's trademark claim.

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lukan 18 hours ago

How was your shop taken down?

Usually there are lawyers letters involved first?

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  • apgwoz 18 hours ago

    Print in demands definitely have terms of service allowing them to take whatever down. You’re playing by their rules, and your $2 revenue / tshirt and very few overall sales is not worth the potentially millions in legal fees to fight for you.

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  • Cthulhu_ 13 hours ago

    Sure, from the suing party who sent a DMCA takedown request to your webhost, who forward it to you and give you 24 hours before they take it down. Nobody wants to actually go to court over this stuff because of how expensive it is.

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moffkalast 13 hours ago

> my whole shop was taken offline

I think the problem there was being dependent on someone who is a complete pushover, doesn't bother to check for false positives and can kill your business with a single thought.

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  • ionwake 11 hours ago

    Yes that was the whole point of my post.

    For further info it was Redbubble.

    >Redbubble is a significant player in the online print-on-demand marketplace. In fiscal year 2023, it reported having 5 million customers who purchased 4.8 million different designs from 650,000 artists. The platform attracts substantial web traffic, with approximately 30.42 million visits in February 2025.

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