No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation • Hacker News Board

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#231

Post by satvikpendem » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:10 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #230

satvikpendem wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting philosophy, what is this predicated on? Do you mean that people should not have to work for a living, ie labor versus play?

Is that not self evident? When people engage in labor for the task itself (as opposed to a heavily abstracted version of not wanting to starve) we generally refer to that as a hobby. So stating that people shouldn't need to worry about starving (metaphorically or otherwise) would be roughly equivalent.

It is not always evident especially when it comes to a site all about capital accumulation like HN, more due to its association with a venture capital firm.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#232

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

__loam wrote: post #171

kridsdale3 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very impressive. This is going to result in an explosion of content creation by pro studios, just as CG with cel-shading renderers did. I greatly prefer the hand-drawn + AI tweened look to the current low-budget CG 3D models look.

Most of the professionals in this industry actively despise this technology.

I doubt they will have a choice given the price difference.

This is arguably a good thing because if production cost drops it should mean either higher quality or more content.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#233

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #209

immibis wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of capitalism is a system in which all sorts of things that are not property are artificially made into property and given artificial property rights which can be traded.

That is the definition of capitalism people use when they want to apply the term capitalism to something that sucks. Allowing people to own physical items as business inventory or production equipment and compete with each other for the customer's dollar is entirely possible without the existence of copyright or patents. You would then be relying on some combination of open source, charitable contributions and patron…

> You would then be relying on ...

More likely trade secrets, NDAs, non-competes, and increasingly invasive DRM. In addition to the direct financial incentive, part of the logic behind IP law is to foster a more open market because that should be to the benefit of society at large in multiple ways.

Patents, for example, ensure that at least some minimal description of the process gets published for others to take inspiration from.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#234

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

munksbeer wrote: post #213

SirMaster wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems. Those people and effort aren't at all tied to the people who are making and using the art. In the past every individual person would have to individually study art and some style and practice for years of their life to be able to replicate it really well. And for each piece of…

I do wonder what the outcome would be for a model trained only on truly non copyright work, and derivatives from there. I'm no AI expert, but from what I understand they use some models to generate data with which to train further models. I'd be interested in the output, whether it would eventually just match what we have now anyway, so the copyright question may end up moot. I wonder how the argument would shift at…

I expect it would require significantly more human labor to train (ie no longer fully unsupervised). I imagine that this constraint would lead to significant additional research to improve the efficiency of the training process, and that novel approaches would be developed.

In other words I think it would suck up a lot of money over a few years and then we would arrive back pretty much where we are now.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#235

Post by ChadNauseam » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #145

ChadNauseam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually crossing a line? I'm sure some consumers have thought that rocket league was associated with FIFA, or that studio Ghibli movies were made by Disney. But these aren't widespread issues because we have a robust system of trademarks that draws a clear line: you can't use trademarked names or iconography in a way that causes confusion. But if some people heading Olivia Rodrigo's "good 4 you" think they'r…

vanilla ice vs queen case doesn't support your claim.

vanilla ice completely copied queen's baseline, not just the queen style. (not to mention that it never went to court)

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#236

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #46

Taek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's consensus around that idea. Lots of people (myself included) feel that copyright is already vastly overreaching, and that AI represents forward progress for the proliferation of art in society (its crap today, but digital cameras were crap in 2007 and look where they are now). Its also not clear for example that Studio Ghibli lost by having their art style plastered all over the internet. I went…

>Its also not clear for example that Studio Ghibli lost by having their art style plastered all over the internet. Maybe Studio Ghibli is much more than merely a style. Maybe people aren't looking at their production just for the style. Most people dislike wearing fake clothes and the dislike wearing fake watches or fake jewelry. Because it isn't just about the style.

>Most people dislike wearing fake clothes and the dislike wearing fake watches or fake jewelry

I'd disagree. Most people don't like buying something 'real' then finding out it's fake. Far more people don't mind an actual fake if it's either high quality or is very low priced.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#237

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

SirMaster wrote: post #146

Workaccount2 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah, but copyright infringement isn't a function of how quickly you can view and create works. Copyright is meant to secure distribution of works you create. It's not a tool to stop people from creating art because it looks like your art. That has been a thing for centuries, we even categorize art by it's style. Imagine anime was had to adhere to a copyright interpretation of "it's my style!".

Current copyright yes. But do you not for a second think that the current way the laws and rules are set are because of how hard and time consuming it was to replicate work? Just because "that's how it's always been" doesn't mean it's acceptable to keep it that way when the means to perform the action have so drastically changed.

I don't think the rules ever existed for the benefit of the individual, but rather the collective. If skilled artists couldn't sustain themselves from their work they wouldn't exist. Historically there was no alternative.

When a machine can do something there is not generally a (collectively beneficial) reason to protect the individual that competes with it. Backhoes weren't regulated in order to protect ditch diggers.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#238

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:44 PM UTC

SirMaster wrote: post #148

eadmund wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems. I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images. Emphasis on the new — copying is still cop…

You don't see a difference between a person spending years learning techniques to create art by hand, and spending months or years studying and practicing some famous artists style, and then spending days manually crafting drawing a single piece of artwork in the style and quality of the originals. The difference between that, and a person just entering a prompt to create some drawing in some style. The model looked…

Therefore we should give up all heavy equipment and all ditches should be dug with a spoon.

Sometimes technology changes and what was nearly impossible in the past becomes trivial.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#239

Post by pclmulqdq » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

nialv7 wrote: post #205

nowittyusername wrote: post #141

There is circumstantial evidence out there that 4o image manipulation isn't done within the 4o image generator in one shot but is a workflow done by an agentic system. Meaning this, user inputs prompt "create an image with no elephants in the room" > prompt goes to an llm which preprocesses the human prompt > outputs a a prompt that it knows works withing this image generator well > create an image of a room > and th…

None of your observations say anything about how these images are generated one way or another. The only thing we currently have to go off of is OpenAI's own words, which claims the images are generated by a single multimodal model autoregressively, and I don't think they are lying.

Generated autoregressively and generated in one shot are not the same. There is a possibility that there is a feedback loop here. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a small one, but not nearly the complex agentic workflow that OP may be thinking of.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#240

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

another-dave wrote: post #123

gcanyon wrote: post #34

It's interesting to hear people side with the artists when in previous discussions on this forum I've gotten significant approval/agreement arguing that copyright is far too long. As I've argued in the past, I think copyright should last maybe five years: in this modern era, monetizing your work doesn't (usually) have to take more than a short time. I'd happily concede to some sort of renewal process to extend that p…

I'd agree with limiting copyrights but would do it based on money earned rather than time, so something like when you make $X million, the work becomes public domain. As a specific example — _A Game of Thrones_ was released in 1996. It picked up awards early on but only became a NYT best seller in 2011, just before the TV show aired. It would feel harsh for an author to loose all their copyright because their work wa…

>o something like when you make $X million, the work becomes public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

No, no metrics that can be gamed.