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An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

theaiunderwriter.substack.com

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Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#81

Post by jetrink »

willvarfar wrote: post #46

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 b…

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.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#82

Post by layer8 »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #60
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #45

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 "rando…

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.

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.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#83

Post by RajT88 »

Velorivox wrote: post #70
littlecranky67 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#85

Post by why_at »

alkonaut wrote: post #57

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…

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.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#86

Post by genericone »

traverseda wrote: post #71

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?

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#87

Post by [deleted] »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #60
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #45

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 "rando…

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.

[deleted]

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#88

Post by SLHamlet »

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...

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#89

Post by the_af »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #60
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #45

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 "rando…

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 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.

Re: An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

#90

Post by coderenegade »

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.

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