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

#151

Post by TremendousJudge » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #94

teddyh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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

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

#152

Post by pier25 » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #138

pier25 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you aren't allowed to monetize an image of Indiana Jones even if you made it yourself.

That depends. There are situations where you are. Satire in particular would be a common one, but there can be others. Rules around copyright (esp. Fair use) can be very context dependent.

Those are the exceptions that confirm the rule, as they say.

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

#153

Post by divCraftsman » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

mvieira38 wrote: post #96

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?

[dead]

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

#154

Post by masfuerte » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

mlsu wrote: post #137

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, i…

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.

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

#155

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

ryandrake wrote: post #149

crazygringo wrote: post #139

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…

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.)

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

#156

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

squeaky-clean wrote: post #150

gertlex wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ s…

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 a…

Yeah... so much for that hope on my end! Thanks for testing.

(hard to formulate why I was too lazy to test myself :) )

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

#157

Post by ToucanLoucan » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

MgB2 wrote: post #30

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 co…

> 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.

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

#158

Post by kokanee » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

mlsu wrote: post #137

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, i…

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.

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

#159

Post by fragmede » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #148

mlsu wrote: post #137

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, i…

> 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.

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.

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

#160

Post by meatmanek » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #61

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…

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.