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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

#491
post #72

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.

You're right, it's not just about reproduction, it's about how the data was collected

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

#492

I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for t…

It is not about trademark laws. It is about where laws apply. If you torrent a movie right now, you'll be fined in many advanced countries. But a huge corporation led by a sociopath scrapes the entire internet and builds a product with other people's work ? Totally fine.

This. It seem the situation is controversial now because of the beloved Studio Ghibli IP, but I want to see the venn diagram of people outrage at this, and the people clamoring for overbearing Disney chatachter protection when the copyright expired and siding with paloworld in the Nintendo lawsuit.

It seem most of the discussion is emotionally loaded, and people lost the plot of both why copyright exists and what copyright protects and are twisting that to protect whatever media they like most.

But one cannot pick and choose where laws apply, and then the better question would be how we plug the gap that let a multibilion Corp get away with distribution at scale and what derivative work and personal use mean in a image generation as a service world, and artist should be very careful in what their wishes are here, because I bet there's a lot of commission work edging on style transfer and personal use.

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

#493

I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for t…

You're conflating trademark with copyright. Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works. So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court a…

> So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him?

No, you can't! But it shouldn't be the tool that prohibits this. You are not allowed to use existing images of Harrison Ford for your commercial and you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?

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

#494

I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for t…

New rule: you get to keep your belongings for 20 years and that's it. Then they are taken away. Every dollar you made twenty or more years ago, every asset you acquired, gone. That oughtta be enough to incentivize people to work and build their wealth. Anything more than that is unnecessary.

I think you mean "20 years after you die". That seems like a perfectly rational way to deal with people who want to be buried in their gold and jewels in a pyramid.

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

#495

Sometimes it just randomly prompts about the content guidelines and the next day it will do it perfectly right away. Maybe you just had a wrong moment in time, or maybe it depends on the random server you're assigned.

No, it first generates the image and then another completely different component checks the image for adherence to the guidelines. So it's not your prompt that violates the guidelines, but the resulting image (which is different every time for the same prompt)

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

#496

I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for t…

Trademarks are very different from copyrights. In general, they never expire as long as the fees are paid in the region, and products bearing the mark are still manufactured. Note, legal firms will usually advise people that one can't camp on Trademarks like other areas of IP law.

For example, Aspirin is known as an adult dose of acetylsalicylic acid by almost every consumer, and is Trademarked to prevent some clandestine chemist in their garage making a similarly branded harmful/ineffective substance that damages the Goodwill Bayer earned with customers over decades of business.

Despite popular entertainment folklore, sustainable businesses actually want consumer goodwill associated with their products and services.

While I agree in many WIPO countries copyright law has essentially degenerated into monetized censorship by removing the proof of fiscal damages criteria (like selling works you don't own.) However, Trademarks ensure your corporate mark or product name is not hijacked in local Markets for questionable purposes.

Every castle needs a moat, but I do kind of want to know more about the presidential "Tesler". lol =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZUB1eJb34

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

#497
post #488

Sorry, but these images are exactly what comes to my mind immediately when reading the prompts. You can argue about intellectual property theft (though I find it funny that the same people that would boycott Disney for suing a fanfiction author are now on the side of copyright holders), but it's not wrong or unintuitive. Maybe a thinking model would - just like my brain might after the initial reaction - add a "but t…

> Google's image generator that generated black nazis.

Didn't see this one, but I've certainly played around with Dall-E (via MS image creator) and had things like "You wanted a picture of a happy shark, but we decided this one needs to be an asian woman frolicking in the sea" or "You wanted a picture of Beavis doing something so in one of the images we made him a pretty racist middle-eastern caricature"

> (though I find it funny that the same people that would boycott Disney for suing a fanfiction author are now on the side of copyright holders)

Is that a contradiction?

Certainly some of the hate comes from the fact that they take from small producers just as much as from large. I have an author friend who is annoyed at present to find out that facebook slurped up his books as part of their training set without so much as a by-your-leave or (as far as he could tell) even purchasing a copy.

As such, the people on the sharp end are often the underdog, with no way to fight back.

When it comes to the properties mentioned in the article, I think it's very different from fanfiction or fan-art - that's a labour of (nerdy) love, rather than wholesale, automated rip-off for profit.

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

#498
post #127

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.

> 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 t…

> 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.

Ok, my sister can draw, and she gifts me an image of my favorite Marvel hero she painted to hang on my wall. Should that be illegal?

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

#499

I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for t…

You're conflating trademark with copyright. Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works. So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court a…

Human appearance does not have enough dimensions to make likeness a viable thing to protect; I don't see how you could do that without say banning Elvis impersonators.

That said:

> I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley.

If you're framing the sides like that, it's pretty clear which I'm on. :)

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

#500
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating trademark with copyright. Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works. So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court a…

> So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? No, you can't! But it shouldn't be the tool that prohibits this. You are not allowed to use existing images of Harrison Ford for your commercial and you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mou…

Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's justification for charging money to paint a picture of Harrison Ford to its users?

The justification so far seems to have been loosely based on the idea that derivative artworks are protected as free expression. That argument loses currency if these are not considered derivative but more like highly compressed images in a novel, obfuscated compression format. Layers and layers of neurons holding a copy of Harrison Ford's face is novel, but it's hard to see why it's any different legally than running a JPEG of it through some filters and encoding it in base64. You can't just decode it and use it without attribution.

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