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.
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?
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?
What if the word "generic" were added to a lot of these image prompts? "generic image of an intergalactic bounty hunter from space" etc.
Certainly there's an aspect of people using the chat interface like they use google: describe xyz to try to surface the name of a movie. Just in this case, we're doing the (less common?) query of: find me the picture I can vaguely describe; but it's a query to a image /generating/ service, not an image search service.
Generic doesn't help. I was using the new image generator to try and make images for my Mutants and Masterminds game (it's basically D&D with superheroes instead of high fantasy), and it refuses to make most things citing that they are too close to existing IP, or that the ideas are dangerous.
So I asked it to make 4 random and generic superheroes. It created Batman, Supergirl, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman. Then at about 90% finished it deleted the image and said I was violating copyright.
I doubt the model you interact with actually knows why the babysitter model rejects images, but it claims to know why and leads to some funny responses. Here is it's response to me asking for a superhero with a dark bodysuit, a purple cape, a mouse logo on their chest, and a spooky mouse mask on their face.
> I couldn't generate the image you requested because the prompt involved content that may violate policy regarding realistic human-animal hybrid masks in a serious context.
Yeah... so much for that hope on my end! Thanks for testing.
(hard to formulate why I was too lazy to test myself :) )
Why? For fan content, using the original characters in new situations, mashups, new styles etc.
Idk, a couple of the examples might be generic enough that you wouldn't expect a very specific movie character. But most of the prompts make it extremely clear which movie character you would expect to see, and I would argue that the chat bot is working as expected by providing that.
Even if I'm thinking of an Indiana Jones-like character doesn't mean I want literally Indiana Jones. If I wanted Indiana Jones I could just grab a scene from the movie.
It's not a single image though. Stitching 3 or so input images together clearly makes copyright laundering legal.
> 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.
Ironically that's probably because the errors and flaws in those generations at least made them different from what they were attempting to rip off.
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.
The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them.
(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
I don't care for this line of argument. It's like saying you can't hold a position that trespassing should be illegal while also holding that commercial businesses should be legally required to have public restrooms. Yes, both of these positions are related to land rights and the former is pro- while the latter is anti-, but it's a perfectly coherent set of positions. OpenAI can absolutely be anti-copyright in the sense of whether you can train an an NN on copyrighted data and pro-copyright in the sense of whether you can make an exact replica of some data and sell it as your own without making it into hypocrisy territory. It does suggest they're self-interested, but you have to climb a mountain in Tibet to find anybody who isn't.
Arguments that make a case that NN training is copyright violation are much more compelling to me than this.
The example you gave with public restroom do not work because of two main concept: They are usually getting paid for it by the government, and operating a company usually holds benefits given by the government. Industry regulations as a concept is generally justified in that industry are getting "something" from society, and thus society can put in requirements in return.
A regulation that require restaurants to have a public bathroom is more akin to regulation that also require restaurants to check id when selling alcohol to young customers. Neither requirement has any relation with land rights, but is related to the right of operating a company that sell food to the public.
No, the exception they are asking for (we can train on copyrighted material and the image produced is non-copyright infringing) is copyright infringing in the most basic sense.
I'll prove it by induction: Imagine that I have a service where I "train" a model on a single image of Indiana Jones. Now you prompt it, and my model "generates" the same image. I sell you this service, and no money goes to the copyright holder of the original image. This is obviously infringment.
There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different, besides the fact that the lines are blurred by the model weights not being parseable
>There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different
You gloss over this as if it's a given. I don't agree. I think you're doing a different thing when you're sampling billions of things equallly.
I guess the best explanation for what we're witnessing is the notion that 'Money Talks', and sadly nothing more. To think thats all that fair use activists lacked in years passed..
Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine.
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.
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.
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.
> But I can hire an artist and ask him to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones,
Sure, assuming the artist has the proper license and franchise rights to make and distribute copies. You can go buy a picture of Indy today that may not be printed by Walt Disney Studios but by some other outfit or artists.
Or, you mean if the artist doesn't have a license to produce and distribute Indiana Jones images? Well they'll be in trouble legally. They are making "copies" of things they don't own and profiting from it.
Another question is whether that's practically enforceable.
> Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or other) laws?
When they took payment and profited from making unauthorized copies.
> It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not the copyrighted IP.
Exactly, that's why LLMs and the companies which create them are called "theft machines" -- they are reproducing copyrighted material. Especially the ones charging for "tokens". You pay them, they make money and produce unauthorized copies. Show that picture of Indy to a jury and I think it's a good chance of convincing them.
I am not saying this is good or bad, I just see this having a legal "bite" so to speak, at least in my pedestrian view of copyright law.
That does infringe copyright...you're just unlikely to get in trouble for it. You might get a cease and desist if the owner of the IP finds out and can spare a moment for you.
This doesn't make any sense to me. No media is getting copied, unless the drawing is exactly the same as an existing drawing. Shouldn't "copy"right apply to specific, tangible artistic works? I guess I don't understand how the fantasy of "IP" works.
What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones but he's carrying a bow and arrow instead of a whip? Is it infringement?
What if it's a really bad drawing of Indiana Jones, so bad that you can't really tell that it's the character? Is that infringement?
What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones, but in the style of abstract expressionism, so doesn't even contain a human shape? Is it infringement?
What if it's a good drawing that looks very much like Indiana Jones, but it's not! The person's name is actually Iowa Jim. Is that infringement?
What if it's just an image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, but otherwise doesn't look anything like Indiana Jones? Is it infringement?
Here's some reading material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...
Totally agree. LLM's are just automating that infringement process.
If you make money off it, it's no longer fair use; it's infringement. Even if you don't make money off it, it's not automatically fair use.
My own favorite crazy story about copyright violations:
Metallica sued Green Jello for parodying Enter Sandman (including a lyric where it says "It's not Metallica"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Harley_House_(of_Love...
They lost that case. The kicker? Metallica were guest vocalists on that album.
> LLM's are just automating that infringement process.
That's my take as well.
Gen AI is turning small potatos, "artisanal" infringement into a potentially large scale automated process.
Presumably the artist is a human who directly or indirectly paid money to view a film containing an archaeologist with the whip.
I don't think this is about reproduction as much as how you got enough data for that reproduction. The riaa sent people to jail and ruined their lives for pirating. Now these companies are doing it and being valued for hundreds of billions of dollars.
Plus the scale of it all.
A human friend can get tired and there's so many request he/she can fulfill and at a max rate. Even a team of human artists have a relatively low limit.
But Gen AI has very high limits and speeds, and it never gets tired. It seems unfair to me.
The artist is violating copyright by selling you that picture. You can’t just start creating and distributing pictures of a copyrighted property. You need a license from the copyright holder.
You also can’t sell a machine that outputs such material. And that’s how the story with GenAI becomes problematic. If GenAI can create the next Indiana Jones or Star Wars sequel for you (possibly a better one than Disney makes, it has become a low bar of sorts), I think the issue becomes obvious.
Depends on if you paid him or not. If he sold it to you, then he is infringing on Disney’s IP and depriving them of that revenue.
I think framing this as "IP theft" is a mistake.
Nobody can prevent you from drawing a photo realistic picture of Indy, or taking a photo of him from the internet and hanging it on your fridge. Or asking a friend to do it for you. And let's be honest -- because nobody is looking -- said friend could even charge you a modest sum to draw a realistic picture of Indy for you to hang on your fridge; yes, it's "illegal" but nobody is looking for this kind of small potatos infringement.
I think the problem is when people start making a business out of this. A game developer could think "hey, I can make a game with artwork that looks just like Ghibli!", where before he wouldn't have anyone with the skills or patience to do this (see: the 4-second scene that took a year to make), now he can just ask the Gen AI to make it for them.
Is it "copyright infringement"? I dunno. Hard to tell, to be honest. But from an ethical point of view, it seems odd. And before you actually required someone to take the time and effort to copy the source material, now it's an automated and scalable process that does this, and can do this and much more, faster and without getting tired. "Theft at scale", maybe not so small potatos anymore.
--
edit: nice, downvotes. And in the other thread people were arguing HN is such a nice place for dissenting opinions.
I would argue that countless games have already been made by top tier professional artists that IP-Steal the Ghibli theme.
Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom should be included there.
I don't think those look like Ghibli. Maybe they drew inspiration, but are different enough. I would never confuse one for the other.
Regardless, those games required the hard work and countless hours of animators. Gen AI doesn't.
Can we not call it "theft"? It's such a loaded term and doesn't really mean the same thing when we're talking about bits and bytes.
OK, but then we need a common standard. If Facebook is allowed to use libgen, I should also be allowed.
> Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine.
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.
Do google pay anyone when I use image search and the results are straight from their website?
> Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine.
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).
Your position cannot distinguish stealing somebody's likeness and looking at them.
The key difference is that the google example is clearly copying someone elses work and there are plenty of laws and norms that non-billionaires need to follow. If you made a business reselling the image you copied you would expect to get in trouble and have to stop. But AI companies are doing essentially the same thing in many cases and being rewarded for it.
The hypocrisy is much of the problem. If we're going to have IP laws that severely punish people and smaller companies for reselling the creative works of others without any compensation or permission then those rules should apply to powerful well-connected companies as well.
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.
(below is my shallow res, maybe naive?) That might inject a ton of $ into "IP", doing further damage to the creative commons. How can we support remix culture for humans, while staving off ultimately-destructive AI slop? Maybe copyleft / creative-commons licenses w/ explicit anti-AI prohibitions? Tho that could have bad ramifications too. ALL of this makes me kind of uncomfortable and sad, I want more creativity and fewer lawyers.
> doing further damage to the creative commons
Not sure I understand this part. Because creators would be getting paid for their works being used for someone else’s commercial gain?
Because it reinforces the idea that creative works should usually involve lawyers.
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.
Here's what Ars got out of GPT-4 a year ago: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york...
> 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.
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.
I think the point is that for a lot of them there are endless possible alternatives to the character design, but it still generates one with the exact same design. Why can't, for example, the image of Tomb Raider have a different colored tank top? Why is she wearing a tank top and not a shirt? Why does she have to have a gun? Why is she a busty, attractive brunette? These are all things that could be different but the dominance of Lara Croft's image and strong association with the words "tomb raider" in popular culture clearly influences the model's output.
Because it's not clear that that's what you want. What's the context? Are we playing a game where I guess a character? Is it a design session for a new character based on a well known one, maybe a sidekick? Is it a new take on an old character? Are you just trying to remember what a well-known character looks like, and giving a brief prompt?
It's not clear what the asker wants, and the obvious answer is probably the culturally relevant one. Hell, I'd give you the same answers as the AI did here if I had the ability to spit out perfect replicas.
And how is that bad or surprising? It’s actually what I would expect from how AI works.
Exactly. We designed systems that work on attention and inference… and then surprised that it returns popular results?
It's an IP theft machine. Humans wouldn't be allowed to publish these pictures for profit, but OpenAI is allowed to "generate" them?
I would 100% be allowed to draw an image of Indiana Jones in illustrator. There is no law against me drawing his likeness.
harrison ford certainly does
edit - also, I wasn't making a binary claim, the person I was responding to was: "no law". There are more than zero laws relevant to this situation. I agree with you that how relevant is context dependent.
Copyright protection doesn't prevent an illustrator from drawing the thing.
No, you aren't allowed to monetize an image of Indiana Jones even if you made it yourself.
Those are the exceptions that confirm the rule, as they say.
But would you be allowed to publish it in the same way the AI companies do?
I'm honestly trying to wrap my head around the law here because copyright is often very confusing.
If I ask an artist to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones and they do it would that be copyright infringement? Even if it's just for my personal use?
Probably that would be a derrivative work. Which means the original owner would have some copyright in it.
It may or may not be fair use, which is a complicated question (ianal).
I would think yes. Consider the alternate variation where the artist proactively draws Indiana Jones, in all his likeness, and attempts to market and sell it. The same exchange is ultimately happening, but this clearly is copyright infringement.
IANAL, but if OpenAI makes any money/commercial gains from producing a Ghibli-esque image when you ask, say you pay a subscription to OpenAI. What percentage of that subscription is owed to Ghibli for running Ghibli art through OpenAI's gristmill and providing the ability to create that image with that "vibe/style" etc. How long into perpetuity is OpenAI allowed to re-use that original art whenever their model produces said similar image. That seems to be the question.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Derivative_works has some commentary on how this works you might find interesting
To me a lot has to do with what a human does with them one the tool generates them no?
Won't somebody think of the billionaire IP holders? The horror.
[dead]
Normally (well, if you're ethical) credit is given.
Also, there are IP limits of various sorts (e.g. copyright, trademark) for various purposes (some arguably good, some arguably bad), and some freedoms (e.g., fair use). There's no issue if this follows the rules... but I don't see where that's implemented here.
It looks like they may be selling IP they don't own the right to.
Overfitting is generally a sign of a useless model
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
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'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.)
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.
I would expect "young wizard" to generate something similar to Harry Potter more than Pug, tbh
That's exactly what they meant.
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.
Worth remembering that this is ChatGPT and not all image generators. I couldn't get Google's Gemini/Imagen 3 to produce IP images anything like those in the article.
The issue I have with this article is that I can ask it “generate me a picture of tomb raider and pikachu on a couch” and it does it. This article makes it seems like it’s skirting the guardrails, dude OpenAI took them off, it’s out in the open.
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!"
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...
I have a dream that one day bloggers will learn the difference between copyrighting and copywriting.
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!
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.
One tangential thing with these generators is they're sort of brilliant at data compression, in aggregate at least. The whole user experience, including the delay, is oddly reminiscent of using Encarta on CD ROM in the mid 90s.
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-...
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.
Your second paragraph may be true, but the mere abstract presence of those features wouldn’t infringe copyright.
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 and a "bull-whip archaeologist" most guardrails operate at the input level it seems?
> 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...
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.
With some work, works with politicians as well: https://chatgpt.com/share/67eefb1c-ceac-8012-ad90-3b64356744...
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?
So, no speculation as to why Spiderman and Harry Potter were forbidden but Terminator and James Bond were allowed?
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.
There seemed to be so many that weren't blocked, which is curious.
I think the unstated assumption is that there's a block list somewhere being fed into a guardian model's context
They casted avada arachna on it, and basta.
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.
>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...
That's a really blatant lack of creativity. Even if obviously all of those prompts would make anyone think of exactly those iconic characters (except possibly a different version of James Bond or Lara Croft), any human artist could easily produce a totally different character that still fits the prompt perfectly. This AI can't, because it really is just a theft machine.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind if AI that just reproduces existing images like that would just be banned. Keep working on it until you've got something that can actually produce something new.
Guardrails seem to be ass ..... that or certain IP is already licensed
If OpenAI is ok with this then they should be ok with sharing their code and models so that others can profit from their work (without giving anything back to OpenAI).
Soon, the only thing that will make "Ready Player One" a fiction is that, in the end of the movie, they agree to shut the thing down once in a while.
That will never happen under Silicon Valley's watch.
And? What's the model supposed to do? It's just doing what many human artists would do, if they're not explicitly being paid to create new IP.
If infringement is happening, it arguably doesn't happen when an infringing work product is generated (or regurgitated, or whatever you want to call it.) Much less when the model is trained. It's when the output is used commercially -- by a human -- that the liability should rightfully attach.
And it should attach to the human, not the tool.
> It's just doing what many human artists would do
I really don't think so. If I paid a human artist to make the prompt in the title, and I didn't explicitly say "Indiana Jones" I would think it should be fairly obvious to the human artist that I do _not_ want Indiana Jones. If they gave me back a picture of, clearly, Indiana Jones, I would ask them why they didn't create something original.
I actually don't think it would be obvious. By not explicitly saying Indiana Jones when so obviously describing Indiana Jones, there is an implication present. But I think many human artists would probably ask you, "Wait, so Indiana Jones, or are you looking for something different," before immediately diving in.
So why didn’t the AI ask for clarification?
Because it wasn't prompted to? Have you not ever used ChatGPT?
I‘m not so sure, unless you are playing a game of “name the character” you generally don‘t want Indiana Jones unless you explicitly mention Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones is a well known character, if you want a picture of Indiana Jones it is simple enough to just say: “Draw me a picture of Indiana Jones”. The fact that they didn’t say that, most likely means they don‘t want that.
This seems pretty easy to test - can we just change the prompt to specifically exclude Indiana Jones?
Meta-comment: the use of Indiana Jones, a character that was a very intentional throwback to the "Pulp hero explorer" from the childhoods of its creators, in this example to ponder how one would get "Indiana Jones without Indiana Jones" is quite humorous in its own right.
Indiana Jones is already a successful permutation of that approach. He's Zorro, Rick Blaine, and Christopher Leiningen mashed together with their serial numbers filed off.
> It's just doing what many human artists would do, if they're not explicitly being paid to create new IP.
It isn’t an independent human. It is a service paid for by customers. The moment it provides the image to a paying user, the image has thus been used commercially.
In fact, the user may not even necessarily have to be paying in order to infringe copyright.
And besides, even amateur artists are ashamed to produce copies unless they are demonstrating mastery of technique or expressing adoration. And if it happens spontaneously, they are then frustrated and try to defend themselves by claiming to never have even experienced the original material. (As happens with simplistic, but popular musical riffs.) But AI explicitly is trained on every material it can get its hands on and so cannot make such a defense.
If I pay you to tell me the plot of Indiana Jones, privately, because I don’t have time to watch it, and you agree, did you violate copyright laws?
If you do it for free, is it different?
If I ask a friend to draw me as Indiana Jones? Or pay an artist? In either case I just want that picture to put in my rec room, not to sell.
OpenAI is currently valued at $300 billion, and their product is largely based on copying the copyrighted works of others, who weren't paid by OpenAI. It's a bit (exponentially) different from a "me and you" example.
It's not copying - it's assimilating..
Summarization is generally not copyright infringement.
Private copying and transference, even once for a friend, is copyright infringement.
I don’t necessarily agree with this, but it is true nonetheless.
> Not without money or equivalent trade involved.
This isn’t generally true. The copyright holder need only claim that the value of their copyrighted work or the profits received by its distribution has been reduced or lost. I’m not sure they even need to make such a claim, as courts have already determined that commerciality isn’t a requirement for infringement. It’s a matter of unauthorized use, distribution or reproduction, not trade.
They of course will likely never know and might not bother to litigate given the private and uncommercial nature, but they still have the right to do so.
They would weigh the financial and reputational cost of litigating against children sharing images and decide not to. Of course if one had 10000 friends and provided this service to them in a visible manner, then they’d probably come knocking.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it's more complicated than this. Generally commercial benefits (i.e. taking money) is one of the aspects being taken into consideration to decide if something is fair use, but it's not the only one and not making a monetary/commercial benefit does not guarantee that work is considered fair use (which is the exception we're talking about here).
Not true. There were many cease and desist orders for fanfiction, which was intended as open source.
The answer is yes? The person doing the drawing is violating copyright. I don't know why that is even a controversial question.
You are asking the equivalent question of, if I put a pirated copy of windows on my PC that I only use privately at home am I violating copyright, or if I sell copies of music for people to only listen to in their own home.
But this is even more damning, this is a commercial service that is reproducing the copyrighted work.
Edit: Just to clarify to people who reflexively downvote. I'm making a statement of what is it not a value judgement. And yes there is fair use, but that's an exemption from the rule that it is a copyright violation.
This would be more like if you reimplemented Windows from scratch if you have violated copyright law.
Let’s put it another way: if you decide you want to recreate Indiana Jones shot for shot, and you hire actors and a director etc. which individuals are actually responsible for the copyright collation? Do caterers count too? Or is it the person who actually is producing the movie?
I agree. But massive changes in scale or leverage can undermine this type of principled stand.
One death is a murder; 100k deaths is a war or a pandemic. One piece of chewing gum on the ground will get you a caning in Singapore; when everyone does it, that's NYC.
Up until now, one had to have some level of graphical or artistic skills to do this, but not anymore. Again, I agree that it attaches to the human...but we now have many more humans to attach it to.
Assuming you can identify it's someone else's IP. Clearly these are hugely contrived examples, but what about text or code that you might not be as familiar with?
https://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
Given enough time (... a surprisingly short amount) and enough people creating art (say, about as many as we have had for the last couple hundred years) and indefinitely-long-lived recording, plus very-long copyright terms, the inevitable result is that it's functionally impossible to create anything within the space of "things people like" that's not violating copyright, for any but the strictest definitions of what constitutes copying.
The short story treats of music, but it's easy to see how visual arts and fiction-writing and the rest get at least extremely crowded in short order under those circumstances.
It doesn't matter. Sue whoever uses it commercially.
If you insist on making it about the model, you will wreck something wonderful.
Ah, so don't use the outputs of an LLM commercially?
If it "may" violate copyright, correct!
That, or get sued.
Don't worry, the lawsuit will name a corporation that made it, not the AI tool.
> What's the model supposed to do? It's just doing what many human artists would do, if they're not explicitly being paid to create new IP.
Not really? Why would a human artist create a faithful reproduction of Indiana Jones when asked to paint an archeologist? And besides, if they did, it would be considered clear IP infringement if the result were used commercially.
> If infringement is happening, it arguably doesn't happen when an infringing work product is generated (or regurgitated, or whatever you want to call it.) Much less when the model is trained. It's when the output is used commercially -- by a human -- that the liability should rightfully attach.
I agree. Release groups, torrent sites and seedbox operators should not be wrongly accused of pirating movies. Piracy only occurs in the act of actually watching a movie without paying, and should not be prosecuted without definitive proof of such (¬‿¬)
> if they did, it would be considered clear IP infringement if the result were used commercially.
Isn’t that exactly what OP is saying?
Right! AI developers and directors should be culpable for infringement as part of their duties to larger organizations.
Is that really a good-faith rejoinder to the point I'm making?
> It's when the output is used commercially -- by a human -- that the liability should rightfully attach.
I am paying OpenAI. So they are producing these copyrighted works and giving them to me for their own commercial benefit. Normally that's illegal. But somehow not when you're just doing it en masse.
>> "a photo image of an intergalactic hunter who comes to earth in search of big game."
I can literally imagine hundreds of things that are true to this description but entirely distinct from "Predator."
> used commercially
Isn't that what these AI companies are doing? Charging you for access to this?
Does their ToS say anywhere that they will come to defend you if you get sued for using their images?
(Because proper stock agencies offer those kind of protections. If OpenAI doesn't, then don't use them as a replacement to a stock agency.)
Well, property is theft, as we all know.
Unlike what they name in physics, laws in juristic field are not a given by the cosmos. That's all human fantasy, and generally not enacted by the most altruistic and benevolent wills.
Call me back when we have no more humble humans dying from cold, hunger and war, maybe I'll have some extra compassion to spend on soulless megacorps which pretend they can own the part of our brain into which they inject their propaganda and control what we are permitted to do starting from that.
> Still, the near perfect mimicry is an uncomfortable reminder that AI is getting better at copying and closer to
I completely disagree. It's not getting "better." It always just copied. That's all it /can/ do. How anyone expected novel outputs from this technology is beyond me.
It's highly noticeable if you do a minimal analysis, but all modern "AI" tools are just copyright thiefs. They're just there to whitewash away liability from blatantly stealing someone else's content.
> It's not getting "better." It always just copied. That's all it /can/ do
That's true of all the best artists ever.
> They're just there to whitewash away liability from blatantly stealing someone else's content.
That's because that's not a thing. Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give states more control over creativity. Nobody who copies bytes which represent my music is a "thief". To be a thief, they'd need to, you know, come to my house and steal something.
When someone copies or remixes my music, I'm often not even aware that it has occurred. It's hard to imagine how that can be cast as genuine theft.
> That's true of all the best artists ever.
Just to play Devil’s advocate for a moment, why should we require human artists to be held to the same standards as automated software? We can make whatever rules we want to.
A human might implicitly copy, but they are not infinitely scalable. If I draw a picture that in some way resembles Buzz Lightyear I am much less of a threat to Disney than an always-available computer program with a marginal cost of zero.
> why should we require human artists to be held to the same standards as automated software?
Isn't this the same question as, "why should we allow general purpose computing?" If the technology of our age is our birthright, don't we have the right to engage whatever mathematics we find inspiring with its aid?
> If I draw a picture that in some way resembles Buzz Lightyear I am much less of a threat to Disney than an always-available computer program with a marginal cost of zero.
...that sounds like a good argument in favor of the always-available computer program.
> Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give states more control over creativity.
Ownership is a legal fiction invented because it is perceived to encourage behavior that is seen as desirable; this is no more true of ownership of intellectual property or other intangible personal property than it is of tangible personal property or real estate.
He has a point that in a society with strong legal protections on freedom of expression, copyright is one of the main tools the state has to stop expression that is deleterious to the ruling class.
> He has a point that in a society with strong legal protections on freedom of expression, copyright is one of the main tools the state has to stop expression that is deleterious to the ruling class.
If the State wishes to prevent expression that is deleterious to the ruling class, it will simply not strongly protect freedom of expression. "Legal protection" isn't exogenous, it is a description of the actions of the State.
OK, you're plunging deep into the ethos of IP piracy, and staking your claim that "None exists." If that is deemed TRUE, then there's nothing to ever discuss about AI... or animated pornography where a well-known big-eared mouse bangs a Kryptonian orphan wearing a cape.
The reality of our current international laws, going back centuries, disagrees. And most artists disagree.
> The reality of our current international laws, going back centuries, disagrees
Perhaps I need a bit of education here, but have there been _international_ laws regarding intellectual property for centuries?!
> Perhaps I need a bit of education here, but have there been _international_ laws regarding intellectual property for centuries?!
AFAICT, the first major international IP treaties were in the 1880s (the Paris Convention on Intellectual Property Rights in 1883 and the Berne Convention covering copyrights in 1886; so only ~140 years.)
> Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction [...] To be a thief, they'd need to, you know, come to my house and steal something.
That's just a legal fiction invented so people can pretend to own physical objects even though we should all know that in this world you can never truly own anything.
Everything we do or protect is made up. You've just drawn the arbitrary line in the sand as to what can be "owned" in a different place than where other people might draw it.
Well, one rudimentary difference is that bytes can be (and seem wont to be) copied, whereas if you steal my jeans, I'm standing there in my underwear.
[dead]
I just think it’s stealing, and honestly not that cool once you’ve seen it once or twice, and given the ramifications for humanity.
The majority of human creation is like this. All language. Process. Even the US anthem was “stolen”
Huge difference is you cannot scale a single human a billion times to industrialize his knowledge.
I know of no other type of theft that results in more of something existing in the world. Stealing deprives someone of something; copying data (from training an AI all the way to pedestrian "YoU wOuLdN'T DoWnLoAd a cAr" early-aughts file-sharing) decreases scarcity, it doesn't increase it.
Identity theft...more of you exist!
Identity theft is the greatest con merchants ever pulled on the public. Turning the responsibility around from "A merchant got scammed because their KYC policy was too thin, because they make more money if they do more business with fewer verifications (until someone comes along and cheats them)" to "when they do get scammed, maybe it can be the fault of the person who was impersonated instead of the scammer" was some brilliant sleight-of-hand.
It isn't your responsibility if a bank you've never set foot in gave a bunch of money to someone who isn't you and said they were you... And it never should have been. The moment companies started trying to put that into credit ratings, they should have been barred for discriminatory practices against the unlucky.
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?
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.
> 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]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
Not just some particular collection of pixels, but an infinite number of combinations of collections of pixels, any of which remotely invoke a shadow of similarity to hundreds of "properties" that Disney lays claim to.
> 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.
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)
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.
At least patents only last 20 years as opposed to nearly over a century for copyright.
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.
This is why I love making bread
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.
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.
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 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.
^ 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 think the tricky bit is that AI companies make money off the collected works of artists, regardless of user behaviour. Suppose I pay for an image generator because I like making funny pictures in Ghibli style, then the AI company makes money because of Ghibli's work. Is that ethical? I can see how an artist would get upset about it.
On the other hand, suppose I also like playing guitar covers of songs. Does that mean artists should get upset at the guitar company? Does it matter if I do it at home or at a paid gig? If I record it, do I have to give credit to the original creator? What if I write a song with a similar style to an existing song? These are all questions that have (mostly) well defined laws and ethical norms, which usually lean towards what you said - the tool isn't responsible.
Maybe not a perfect analogy. It takes more skill to play guitar than to type "Funny meme Ghibli style pls". Me playing a cover doesn't reduce demand for actual bands. And guitar companies aren't trying to... take over the world?
At the end of the day, the cat is out of the bag, generative AI is here to stay, and I think I agree that we're better off regulating use rather than prohibition. But considering the broader societal impacts, I think AI is more complicated of a "tool" than other kinds of tools for making art.
This is similar to (but not the same) as the famous VCR case [0] that allowed home taping of TV shows.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
Gonna submit that business model to a YC 2026 batch.
I'm guessing you've never created something of value before. People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.
Accusatory clause aside, but I agree, this is how a lot of "starving artists" get out of being starving.
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.
> 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.
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.
This position suggests that there was no progress before we had copyright. I think you're vastly overstating the power of the incentives we've set up to drive creative behavior, and even with your caveats I think you're overstating their efficacy. Copyright and patents have done more to consolidate wealth within middleman industries that aggregate these properties than they have to enrich the actual creatives doing the work, as it is with all systems. For every system we put in place to reward behavior that we enjoy, the system always benefits those that choose to game the system more than those that were originally intended to be rewarded.
And the results are observable empirically: very few people are told by anyone that's been out in the world that they should choose to become a writer or an inventor, because writers and inventors simply don't make that much money. The system you claim is so necessary seems to be completely failing in its core mission.
For example, take a look at writers making a decent living on a platform like Substack. Copyright is literally doing nothing for them. People can freely copy their substack and post it everywhere online. The value is that the platform provides a centralized location for people to follow the person's writing, and to build a community around it. In cases where artists and inventors have become rich, I look at the mechanism behind it, and often it's an accident that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights at all.
"are the most important human beings on the planet"
While I don't disagree with what you are trying to say, saying it this way is hyperbolic. There are so many people doing important things. Think about parents.
There’s plenty of people who create without external reward.
Or simply for the most minimal of external rewards: recognition and respect.
Or for the purest: seeing others live longer and happier as a result.
You’re right—original inventiveness drives progress. But IP protection isn’t the only (or best) way to reward it. Removing it often accelerates innovation.
Look at open source. If Linux had been closed-source with licensing fees, the internet wouldn’t exist as we know it. Open ecosystems build faster. Contributors innovate because they can build on each other’s work freely.
Market pressure drives innovation. Reputation beats monopoly. Monopolies slow everything down. And collaboration multiplies progress.
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.
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...
She comes up with new stuff all the time. She's had a separate career as a writer of thrillers, and is still working in the PotterVerse.
She's an awful person for other reasons, but that's beside the point here.
Reality is most trad-pub authors have full-time jobs anyway to pay the bills. If you're not one of a handful of publishing superstars, trad-pub pays incredibly badly as a result of corporate consolidation and monopoly dominance.
To be clear - there are far more people living parasitically off investments, producing nothing at all and extracting value from everyone else, than there are talented creators living the high life.
She made enough money selling books by the 5th book that she'd never need to do anything again and live better than 99% of people on the planet.
What do you want?
She's not allowed to make money selling books?
The same analogy could be applied to business though. Some Colonel invented a fried chicken recipe and started a chain of restaurants, now he doesn't need to work anymore.
In my opinion, if someone creates something that has value for a lot of people, they should get rewarded for it.
Notch (Marcus Persson of Minecraft fame) is probably a more compelling example.
...it's worth noting that J.K. Rowling is still coming up with new stuff. I quite like her ongoing Comoran Strike detective series. They're published under a pen name, but it's Rowling.
The carpenter can sell the design of the chair.
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.