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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

#501

Post by FeepingCreature »

kazinator wrote: post #475
djoldman wrote: post #332

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.

We should never have accepted the term "intellectual property" at all, if this is the mindset it leads to.

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

#502

Post by loki-ai »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #458
loki-ai wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and how do you reconcile any work in software development? If someone isn’t willing to work for free, should they just not work in the field at all? Do you think software culture would really be richer?

My income is tied to the labor time I exert in creating/supporting services. I don't sit back and collect royalties on the code itself. Software is one of the first fields where the fundamental worthlessness of content revealed itself, hence FOSS. When you watch a musical performance, you are also paying for labor. Even when you buy a physical art object, all the costs involved decompose back to labor. When you have…

you’re allowed to tie your income to creating systems precisely because you’re not allowed to copy them from previous companies or other sources

selling software isn’t much different from a musician collecting royalties, especially now when everything’s shifted to a subscription model. it lets us keep pretending we’re adding value, even though most of them often stays the same for years

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

#503

Post by FeepingCreature »

RataNova wrote: post #487
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…

Yeah, I've been feeling the same. When a model spits out something that looks exactly like a frame from a movie just because I typed a generic prompt, it stops feeling like “generative” AI and more like "copy-paste but with vibes."

To my knowledge this happens when that single frame is overrepresented in its training data. For instance, variations of the same movie poster or screenshot may appear hundreds of times. Then the AI concludes that this is just a unique human cultural artifact, like the Mona Lisa (which I would expect many human artists could also reproduce from memory).

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

#504

Post by darkwater »

fluidcruft wrote: post #452
MgB2 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prompt didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones though. It left a lot of freedom for the model to make the "archeologist" e.g. female, Asian, put them in a different time period, have them wear a different kind of hat etc. It didn't though, it just spat out what is basically a 1:1 copy of some Indiana Jones promo shoot. No where did the prompt ask for it to look like Harrison Ford.

But... the prompt neither forbade Indiana Jones nor did it describe something that excluded Indiana Jones. If we were playing Charades, just about anyone would have guessed you were describing Indiana Jones. If you gave a street artist the same prompt, you'd probably get something similar unless you specified something like "... but something different than Indiana Jones".

The nice thing about humans is that not every single human being read almost every content present on the Internet. So yeah, a certain group of people would draw or think of Indiana Jones with that prompt, but not everyone. Maybe we will have different models with different trainings/settings that permits this kind of freedom, although I doubt it will be the commercial ones.

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

#505

Post by wtcactus »

I don't see this as being better or worse than all the reboots, remakes, and pointless sequels for movies that make the bulk (in financing) of Hollywood's present production: these also make the same "assumptions" of how some idea should look like. In fact, I think they make it even worst.

Give me "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, as if he was defeated by the righteous fight against patriarchy by a strong, independent woman, that is better at everything than he is": Sure, here is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for you.

In fact, when generative video evolve enough, it will usher an era of creativity where people that previously were kept out of the little self pleasing circle of Hollywood, will be able to come up with their own idea for a script and make a decent movie out of it.

Not that I believe AI will be able to display properly the range of emotions of a truly great actor, but, for 99% of movies, it will be just fine. A lot of good movies rely mostly on the script anyway.

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

#506

Post by Retric »

alphan0n wrote: post #350
rdtsc wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s not how copyright law works. Commissioned work is owned by the commissioner unless otherwise agreed upon by contract. So long as the work is not distributed, exhibited, performed, etc, as in the example of keeping the artwork on their refrigerator in their home, then no infringement has taken place.

Ownership of artwork is independent of copyright infringement. Derivative works qualify for their own independent copyright, you just can’t sell them until after the original copyright expires.

Just because I own my car doesn’t mean I can break the speed limit, these are orthogonal concepts legally.

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

#507

Post by FeepingCreature »

9dev wrote: post #470
fluidcruft wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... the prompt neither forbade Indiana Jones nor did it describe something that excluded Indiana Jones. If we were playing Charades, just about anyone would have guessed you were describing Indiana Jones. If you gave a street artist the same prompt, you'd probably get something similar unless you specified something like "... but something different than Indiana Jones".

And… that is called overfitting. If you show the model values for y, but they are 2 in 99% of all cases, it’s likely going to yield 2 when asked about the value of y, even if the prompt didn’t specify or forbid 2 specifically.

I would argue this is just fitting.

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

#508

Post by jl6 »

djoldman wrote: post #332

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…

> There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years.

I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset.

If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years.

The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that goes public domain after 20.

Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I don’t know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But 120->20? Maybe not.

A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist.

In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn’t have the LOTR movies.

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

#509

Post by FeepingCreature »

munificent wrote: post #286
r3trohack3r wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re setting court precedent that will apply equally to OpenAI as it does to the llama.cpp and stable diffusion models running on your own graphics card.

SGTM. Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever. Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character. But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to act…

That world was worse. It wasn't much worse, because we haven't seen most of the benefit of GenAI yet, but yes I would say that it was worse.

It wasn't "so bad", but any history of improvement can be cut into slices that aren't "so bad" to reverse.

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

#510

Post by planb »

noduerme wrote: post #500
planb wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Formulated this way, I see your point. I see the LLM as a tool, just like photoshop. From a legal standpoint, I even think you're right. But from a moral standpoint, my feeling is that it should even be okay for an artist to sell painted pictures of Harrison Ford. But not to sell the same image as posters on ebay. And now my argument falls apart. Thanks for leading my thoughts in this direction...

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