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

theaiunderwriter.substack.com

541–550 of 927 posts

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

#541
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise a really amazing point! One that should get more attention in these discussions on HN! I'm a painter in my spare time. I think it is okay to sit down and paint a picture of Harrison Ford (on velvet, maybe), and sell it on Etsy or something if you want to. Before you accuse me of hypocrisy, let me stipulate: Either way, it would not be ok for someone to buy that painting and use it in an ad campaign that ins…

Thank you too, this discussion really helped me in getting a more nuanced view on this whole topic. I still think OpenAI should be allowed to generate these kind of images, but just from of a selfish "I want to use this to generate labels for my (uncommercial) home brew beers"-perspective. I surely better understand the counterpoints now.

I think it's an amazing tool as a starting point or a way to get ideas. Our small ad agency's policy has always been to research the hell out of something... like, if you're asked to do a logo for someone running for state Senate, go read the history of the state senate since 1846, and look up all the things everyone used, and start brainstorming art ideas that have multiple layers of meaning that work with your candidate's message. But AI makes it super easy to get a nice looking starting point and then use your ideas to iterate on top of that.

I'm a bit of a home moonshiner, too, so love that you're coming up with labels and using these tools to help out! If I could offer one piece of advice, whether for writing prompts or making your own final art, it would be: History is so rich with visual ideas you can riff from. The history of beer and wine bottles itself is unbelievable. If aliens came here a thousand years after we're gone, and all that was left were liquor labels, they could understand most of our culture. The LLMs always go to the most obvious thing, unless you tell them specifically otherwise. Use the tool but also get funky and mix up the ideas you love the most, adding your own flavor. Just like being a brewer or a chef. That's the essence of being an artist, and making something that at the end of the day is unique and new. Love it. Send me a beer please.

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

#542
post #540

Not sure if anyone is interested in this story, but I remember at the height of the PokemonGo craze I noticed there were no shirts for the different factions in the game, cant rememebr what they were called but something like Teamread or something. I setup an online shop to just to sell a red shirt with the word on it. The next day my whole shop was taken offline for potential copyright infringement. What I found sur…

How was your shop taken down? Usually there are lawyers letters involved first?

Print in demands definitely have terms of service allowing them to take whatever down. You’re playing by their rules, and your $2 revenue / tshirt and very few overall sales is not worth the potentially millions in legal fees to fight for you.

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

#544
post #535

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 are missing a bunch of edge cases, and the law is all about edge cases. An artist who works professionally has family members, family members who are dependent on them. If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two sep…

GP's not missing those edge cases; GP recognizes those edge cases are themselves a product of IP laws.

Those laws are effectively attempting to make information behave as physical objects, by giving them simulated "mass" through a rent-seeking structure. The case you describe is where this simulated physical substrate stops behaving like physical substrate, and choice was made to paper over that with extra rules, so that family can inherit and profit from IP of a dead creator, much like they would inherit physical products of a dead craftsman and profit from selling them.

It's a valid question whether or not this is taking things too far, just for the sake of making information conform to rules of markets for physical goods.

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

#545

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…

>I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws.

Really? Because there are a lot of very stupid laws out there that should absolutely be broken, regularly, flagrantly, by as many people as possible for the sake of making enforcement completely null and pointless. Why write in neutered corporate-speak while commenting on a casual comment thread while also (correctly) pointing out the absurdity of certain laws.

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

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :) )

Because it's depressing how much money was burned for this sort of result? That makes me pretty lazy.

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

#547

Like actual creative person Ted Chiang (who moonlights at Microsoft) put it, you might be able to get an LLM to churn out a genuinely original story, but only after creating an extremely long and detailed prompt for it to work with. But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself! https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/09/ted-chiang-ai-new-yorker-c...

> But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself!

Nah, that's just restating the infamous 'how to draw an owl' advice:

https://casnocha.com/2010/11/how-to-draw-an-owl.html#comment...

The thing is, that "long-ass prompt" is step 1, and LLM then draws "the rest of the fucking owl" for you. That's quite a big difference to doing it all yourself.

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

#548
post #535

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 are missing a bunch of edge cases, and the law is all about edge cases. An artist who works professionally has family members, family members who are dependent on them. If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two sep…

You seem to talk about fairness. Copyright law isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to benefit society. On one side you have the interest of the public to make use of already created work. On the other side is the financial incentive to create such work in the first place.

So the question to ask is whether the artist would have created the work and published it, even knowing that it isn't an insurance to their family in case of their early death.

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

#549
post #535

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 are missing a bunch of edge cases, and the law is all about edge cases. An artist who works professionally has family members, family members who are dependent on them. If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two sep…

If copyright law is reduced to say, 20 years from the date of creation (PLENTY of time for the author to make money), then it's irrelevant if he dies young or lives until 100.

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

#550
post #535

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 are missing a bunch of edge cases, and the law is all about edge cases. An artist who works professionally has family members, family members who are dependent on them. If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two sep…

Il not sure IP should be used as a life insurance, there’s already many public and private ideas tools for that.

Also it seems you assume inheritance is a good think. Most people do think the same on a personal level, however when we observes the effect on a society the outcome is concentration of wealth on a minority and barriers for wealth hand change === barriers for "American dream".

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