An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by chrisweekly » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:10 PM UTC

mcmcmc wrote: post #64

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…

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……

(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.

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

#92

Post by froh » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

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.

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

#93

Post by airstrike » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#94

Post by ToValueFunfetti » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #37

burnished wrote: post #25

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 conc…

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 be…

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.

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

#95

Post by the_af » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

piyh wrote: post #72

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.

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.

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

#96

Post by mvieira38 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

coderenegade wrote: post #90

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…

It's an IP theft machine. Humans wouldn't be allowed to publish these pictures for profit, but OpenAI is allowed to "generate" them?

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

#97

Post by the_af » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

RajT88 wrote: post #83

Velorivox wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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

#98

Post by kridsdale3 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #89

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.

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" bu…

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.

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

#99

Post by salamanderman » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

stevage wrote: post #40

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.

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

#100

Post by alabastervlog » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 9:15 PM UTC

> 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.