That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation and they'll never create.
Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.
There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.
For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Redbubble was sued by the Pokemon Company two months prior to the launch of Pokemon Go, so you picked the exact wrong company and moment to try this with
Idk, the models generating what are basically 1:1 copies of the training data from pretty generic descriptions feels like a severe case of overfitting to me. What use is a generational model that just regurgitates the input?
I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with something that at least feels new.
In the end, other than for copyright-washing, why wouldn't I just use the original movie still/photo in the first place?
People like what they already know. When they prompt something and get a realistic looking Indiana Jones, they're probably happy about it.
To me, this article is further proof that LLMs are a form of lossy storage. People attribute special quality to the loss (the image isn't wrong, it's just got different "features" that got inserted) but at this point there's not a lot distinguishing a seed+prompt file+model from a lossy archive of media, be it text or images, and in the future likely video as well.
The craziest thing is that AI seems to have gathered some kind of special status that earlier forms of digital reproduction didn't have (even though those 64kbps MP3s from napster were far from perfect reproductions), probably because now it's done by large corporations rather than individuals.
If we're accepting AI-washing of copyright, we might as well accept pirated movies, as those are re-encoded from original high-resolution originals as well.
Tried Flux.dev with the same prompts [0] and it seems actually to be a GPT problem. Could be that in GPT the text encoder understands the prompt better and just generates the implied IP, or could be that a diffusion model is just inherently less prone to overfitting than a multimodal transformer model.
If it overfits on the whole internet then it’s like a search engine that returns really relevant results with some lossy side effect.
Recent benchmark on unseen 2025 Math Olympiad shows none of the models can problem solve . They all accidentally or on purpose had prior solutions in the training set.
One thing I would say, it's interesting to consider what would make this not so obviously bad.
Like, we could ask AI to assess the physical attributes of the characters it generated. Then ask it to permute some of those attributes. Generate some random tweaks: ok but brawy, short, and a different descent. Do similarly on some clothing colors. Change the game. Hit the "random character" button on the physical attributes a couple times.
There was an equally shatteringly-awful less-IP-theft (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).... An equally shattering recent incident for me. Having trouble finding it, don't remember the right keywords, but an article about how AI has a "default guy" type that it uses everywhere, a super generic personage, that it would use repeatedly. It was so distasteful.
The nature of 'AI as compression', as giving you the most median answer is horrific. Maybe maybe maybe we can escape some of this trap by iterating to different permutations, by injecting deliberate exploration of the state spaces. But I still fear AI, worry horribly when anyone relies on it for decision making, as it is anti-intelligent, uncreative in extreme, requiring human ingenuity to budge off its rock of oppressive hypernormality that it regurgitates.
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?
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.
But I can hire an artist and ask him to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones, he creates a perfect copy and I hang it on my fridge. Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or other) laws? It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not the copyrighted IP.
I mean... If I go to Google right now and do an image search for "archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip," the first picture is a not-even-changed image of Indiana Jones. Which I will then copy and paste into whatever project I'm working on without clicking through to the source page (usually because the source page is an ad-ridden mess).
Perhaps the Internet itself is the hideous theft machine, and AI is just the most efficient permutation of user interface onto it.
(Incidentally, if you do that search, you will also, hilariously, turn up images of an older gentleman dressed in a brown coat and hat who is clearly meant to be "The Indiana Jones you got on Wish" from a photo-licensing site. The entire exercise of trying to extract wealth via exclusive access to memetic constructs is a fraught one).
I hate how it is common to advance a position to just state a conclusion as if it were a fact. You keep repeating the same thing over and over until it seems like a concensus has been reached instead of an actual argument reasoned from first principle.
This is no theft here. Any copyright would be flimsier than software patents. I love Studio Ghibli (including $500/seat festival tickets) but it's the heart and the detail that make them what they are. You cannot clone that. Just some surface similarity. If that's all you like about the movies... you really missed the point.
Imagine if in early cinema someone had tried to claim mustachioed villian, ditsy blonde, or dumb jock? These are just tropes and styles. Quality work goes much much much deeper, and that cannot be synthesised. I can AI generate a million engagement rings, but I cannot pick the perfect one that fits you and your partners love story.
PS- the best work they did was "When Marnie was There". Just fitted together perfectly.
Interesting proposal. Maybe if race or sex or height or eye color etc isn't given, and the LLM determines there's no reason not to randomize in this case (avoid black founding fathers), the backend could tweak its own prompt by programatically inserting a few random traits to the prompt.
If you describe an Indiana Jones character, but no sex, 50/50 via internal call to rand() that it outputs a woman.
Ah, I thought I knew this account from somewhere. It seems surprisingly easy to figure out what account is commenting just based on the words used, as I've commented that only a few active people on this site seem to use such strong words as shown here.
So if it’s a theft machine, how is the answer to try teaching it to hide the fact that it’s stealing by changing its outputs? That’s like a student plagiarizing an essay and then swapping some words with a thesaurus pretending that changes anything.
Wouldn’t the more appropriate solution in the case of theft be to remunerate the victims and prevent recidivism?
Instead of making it “not so obviously bad” why not just… make it good? Require AI services to either prove that 100% of their training corpus is either copyright free or properly licensed, or require them to compensate copyright holders for any infringing outputs.
Looks to me like OpenAI drew their guardrails somewhere along a financial line. Generate a Micky Mouse or a Pikachu? Disney and Pokemon will sue the sh*t out of you. Ghibli? Probably not powerful enough to risk a multimillion years long court battle.
I think the cat is out of the bag when it comes to generative AI, the same way how various LLMs for programming have been trained even on codebases that they had no business using, yet nobody hasn’t and won’t stop them. It’s the same as what’s going to happen with deepfakes and such, as the technology inevitably gets better.
> Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.
It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.
A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.
AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.
Oooh those guardrails make me angry. I get why they are there (dont poke the bear) but it doesn't make me overlook the self serving hypocrisy involved.
Though I am also generally opposed to the notion of intellectual property whatsoever on the basis that it doesn't seem to serve its intended purpose and what good could be salvaged from its various systems can already be well represented with other existing legal concepts, i.e deceptive behaviors being prosecuted as forms of fraud.
Everyone is talking about theft - I get it, but there's a more subtler point being made here.
Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new. Everything is simply a blend of prior work. I am not saying that this doesn't have economic value, but it means these AI models are closer to lossy compression algorithms than they are to AGI.
The following quote by Sam Altman from about 5 years ago is interesting.
"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we build this sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return."
That's a statement I wouldn't even dream about making today.
I don't see why this is an issue? The prompts imply obvious and well-known characters, and don't make it clear that they want an original answer. Most humans would probably give you similar answers if you didn't add an additional qualifier like "not Indiana Jones". The only difference is that a human can't exactly reproduce the likeness of a famous character without significant time and effort.
The real issue here is that there's a whole host of implied context in human languages. On the one hand, we expect the machine to not spit out copyrighted or trademarked material, but on the other hand, there's a whole lot of cultural context and implied context that gets baked into these things during training.
So many arguing that "copyright shouldn't be a thing" etc., ad nauseam, which is a fine philosophical debate. But it's also the law. And that means ChatGPT et. al. also have to follow the law.
I really, really hope the multimedia-megacorps get together and class-action ChatGPT and every other closed, for-profit LLM corporation into oblivion.
There should not be a two-tier legal system. If it's illegal for me, it's illegal for Sam Altman.
> Maybe Studio Ghibli making it through the seemingly deterministic GPT guardrails was an OpenAI slip up, a mistake,
The author is so generous... but Sam Altman literally has a Ghibli-fied Social profile and in response to all this said OpenAI chooses its demos very carefully. His primary concern is that Ghibli-fying prompts are over-consuming their GPU resources, degrading the service by preventing other ChatGPT tasks.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[+] [-] djoldman|11 months ago|reply
That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation and they'll never create.
Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.
There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.
For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.
[+] [-] ionwake|11 months ago|reply
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|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] weinzierl|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yojo|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ghostly_s|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrguyorama|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] conradkay|11 months ago|reply
https://www.suedbynintendo.com/
[+] [-] dfxm12|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moffkalast|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lukan|11 months ago|reply
Usually there are lawyers letters involved first?
[+] [-] flashman|11 months ago|reply
https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/pokemon-hel...
[+] [-] MgB2|11 months ago|reply
I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with something that at least feels new.
In the end, other than for copyright-washing, why wouldn't I just use the original movie still/photo in the first place?
[+] [-] jeroenhd|11 months ago|reply
To me, this article is further proof that LLMs are a form of lossy storage. People attribute special quality to the loss (the image isn't wrong, it's just got different "features" that got inserted) but at this point there's not a lot distinguishing a seed+prompt file+model from a lossy archive of media, be it text or images, and in the future likely video as well.
The craziest thing is that AI seems to have gathered some kind of special status that earlier forms of digital reproduction didn't have (even though those 64kbps MP3s from napster were far from perfect reproductions), probably because now it's done by large corporations rather than individuals.
If we're accepting AI-washing of copyright, we might as well accept pirated movies, as those are re-encoded from original high-resolution originals as well.
[+] [-] yk|11 months ago|reply
[0] https://imgur.com/a/wqrBGRF Image captions are the impled IP, I copied the prompts from the blog post.
[+] [-] vjerancrnjak|11 months ago|reply
Recent benchmark on unseen 2025 Math Olympiad shows none of the models can problem solve . They all accidentally or on purpose had prior solutions in the training set.
[+] [-] jauntywundrkind|11 months ago|reply
One thing I would say, it's interesting to consider what would make this not so obviously bad.
Like, we could ask AI to assess the physical attributes of the characters it generated. Then ask it to permute some of those attributes. Generate some random tweaks: ok but brawy, short, and a different descent. Do similarly on some clothing colors. Change the game. Hit the "random character" button on the physical attributes a couple times.
There was an equally shatteringly-awful less-IP-theft (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).... An equally shattering recent incident for me. Having trouble finding it, don't remember the right keywords, but an article about how AI has a "default guy" type that it uses everywhere, a super generic personage, that it would use repeatedly. It was so distasteful.
The nature of 'AI as compression', as giving you the most median answer is horrific. Maybe maybe maybe we can escape some of this trap by iterating to different permutations, by injecting deliberate exploration of the state spaces. But I still fear AI, worry horribly when anyone relies on it for decision making, as it is anti-intelligent, uncreative in extreme, requiring human ingenuity to budge off its rock of oppressive hypernormality that it regurgitates.
[+] [-] areoform|11 months ago|reply
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
I guess we all have to answer to the Walt Disney company.[+] [-] littlecranky67|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|11 months ago|reply
I mean... If I go to Google right now and do an image search for "archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip," the first picture is a not-even-changed image of Indiana Jones. Which I will then copy and paste into whatever project I'm working on without clicking through to the source page (usually because the source page is an ad-ridden mess).
Perhaps the Internet itself is the hideous theft machine, and AI is just the most efficient permutation of user interface onto it.
(Incidentally, if you do that search, you will also, hilariously, turn up images of an older gentleman dressed in a brown coat and hat who is clearly meant to be "The Indiana Jones you got on Wish" from a photo-licensing site. The entire exercise of trying to extract wealth via exclusive access to memetic constructs is a fraught one).
[+] [-] Pet_Ant|11 months ago|reply
I hate how it is common to advance a position to just state a conclusion as if it were a fact. You keep repeating the same thing over and over until it seems like a concensus has been reached instead of an actual argument reasoned from first principle.
This is no theft here. Any copyright would be flimsier than software patents. I love Studio Ghibli (including $500/seat festival tickets) but it's the heart and the detail that make them what they are. You cannot clone that. Just some surface similarity. If that's all you like about the movies... you really missed the point.
Imagine if in early cinema someone had tried to claim mustachioed villian, ditsy blonde, or dumb jock? These are just tropes and styles. Quality work goes much much much deeper, and that cannot be synthesised. I can AI generate a million engagement rings, but I cannot pick the perfect one that fits you and your partners love story.
PS- the best work they did was "When Marnie was There". Just fitted together perfectly.
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zulban|11 months ago|reply
If you describe an Indiana Jones character, but no sex, 50/50 via internal call to rand() that it outputs a woman.
[+] [-] satvikpendem|11 months ago|reply
Ah, I thought I knew this account from somewhere. It seems surprisingly easy to figure out what account is commenting just based on the words used, as I've commented that only a few active people on this site seem to use such strong words as shown here.
[+] [-] mcmcmc|11 months ago|reply
Wouldn’t the more appropriate solution in the case of theft be to remunerate the victims and prevent recidivism?
Instead of making it “not so obviously bad” why not just… make it good? Require AI services to either prove that 100% of their training corpus is either copyright free or properly licensed, or require them to compensate copyright holders for any infringing outputs.
[+] [-] RataNova|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fennecfoxy|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] enopod_|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gcmrtc|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nticompass|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] KronisLV|11 months ago|reply
> Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.
It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.
A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.
AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.
[+] [-] burnished|11 months ago|reply
Though I am also generally opposed to the notion of intellectual property whatsoever on the basis that it doesn't seem to serve its intended purpose and what good could be salvaged from its various systems can already be well represented with other existing legal concepts, i.e deceptive behaviors being prosecuted as forms of fraud.
[+] [-] flessner|11 months ago|reply
Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new. Everything is simply a blend of prior work. I am not saying that this doesn't have economic value, but it means these AI models are closer to lossy compression algorithms than they are to AGI.
The following quote by Sam Altman from about 5 years ago is interesting.
"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we build this sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return."
That's a statement I wouldn't even dream about making today.
[+] [-] coderenegade|11 months ago|reply
The real issue here is that there's a whole host of implied context in human languages. On the one hand, we expect the machine to not spit out copyrighted or trademarked material, but on the other hand, there's a whole lot of cultural context and implied context that gets baked into these things during training.
[+] [-] simianparrot|11 months ago|reply
I really, really hope the multimedia-megacorps get together and class-action ChatGPT and every other closed, for-profit LLM corporation into oblivion.
There should not be a two-tier legal system. If it's illegal for me, it's illegal for Sam Altman.
Get to it.
[+] [-] neomantra|11 months ago|reply
The author is so generous... but Sam Altman literally has a Ghibli-fied Social profile and in response to all this said OpenAI chooses its demos very carefully. His primary concern is that Ghibli-fying prompts are over-consuming their GPU resources, degrading the service by preventing other ChatGPT tasks.
[+] [-] mlsu|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zparky|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fractallyte|11 months ago|reply
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!)
[+] [-] ALLTaken|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wkirby|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] flenserboy|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] samspot|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alabastervlog|11 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MattGrommes|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] apersona|11 months ago|reply
> 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.