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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

#631

Post by KHRZ »

camillomiller wrote: post #486
RataNova wrote: post #480

The real tension isn't just about copyright, it's about what creativity means when models are trained to synthesize the most statistically probable output from past art.

Correct. I will say the following as a STEM person that was lucky enough to have an art bachelor as well. One side of the world, the STEM nerds that have never understood nor experienced the inherently inefficient process of making art for lack of talent and predisposition, have won the game of capitalism many times over thanks to the incredible 40-years momentum of tech progress. Now they're trying to convince every…

There was another concept trying to operate on a logical view of the world, called copyright. It tried to establish a few simple rules, with the goal to promote art and science. However copyright was long ago perverted by capitalism to instead promote corporate profits.

Generative AI exposes how broken copyright law is, and how much reform is needed for it to serve either it's original or perverted purpose.

I would not blame generative AI as much as I would blame the lack of imagination, forethought and indeed arrogance among lawmakers, copyright lobbyists and even artists to come up with better definitions of what should have been protected.

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

#632

Post by paulluuk »

M95D wrote: post #565
KronisLV wrote: post #551

I think the cat is out of the bag when it comes to generative AI, the same way how various LLMs for programming have been trained even on codebases that they had no business using, yet nobody hasn’t and won’t stop them. It’s the same as what’s going to happen with deepfakes and such, as the technology inevitably gets better. > Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously…

It's a very clear difference between a cheap animation and Ghibli. Anyone can see it. In the first case, there's only one static image for an entire scene, scrolled and zoomed, and if they feel generous, there would be an overlay with another static image that slides over the first at a constant speed and direction. It feels dead. In the second case, each frame is different. There's chaotic motions such as wind and t…

There is a huge middle ground between "static image with another sliding static image" and "1 year of drawing per 4 second Ghibli masterpiece". From your comment is almost looks like you're suggesting that you have to choose either one or the other, but that is of course not true.

I bet that a good animator could make a really impressive 4-second scene if they were given a month, instead of a year. Possibly even if they were given a day.

So if we assume that there is not a binary "cheap animation vs masterpiece" but rather a sort of spectrum between the two, then the question is: at what point do enough people stop seeing the difference, that it makes economic sense to stay at that level, if the goal is to create as much high-quality content as possible?

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

#633

Post by GPerson »

whycome wrote: post #68
GPerson wrote: post #54

I just think it’s stealing, and honestly not that cool once you’ve seen it once or twice, and given the ramifications for humanity.

The majority of human creation is like this. All language. Process. Even the US anthem was “stolen”

Since you make no argument to justify your unfounded claim, I’ll simply respond by informing you that these (obviously) are not remotely similar. To claim they are indicates some kind of deep disrespect for your fellow human beings. You could not tell the difference between taking a screen shot of the Mona Lisa and spending a lifetime to perfect the art of painting and then putting years of effort into painting it.

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

#634

Post by jl6 »

barrkel wrote: post #557
jl6 wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The success that we can now measure through hindsight wasn’t assured at the time of greenlighting the film. They took a huge gamble: https://variety.com/2021/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-peter-j... It would have been an even bigger gamble if they weren’t able to bank on any long term revenue (I’m certain Netflix continues to pay for the rights to stream the trilogy after 2021).

This argument works against you. The probability of a long tail of revenue is even less likely than a major hit, so it necessarily has less weight in any decision to swing for the fences. Producers don't invest in movies for hypothetical revenues in 20 years time. If it doesn't pay off soon after release, it's written off as a loss. Revenues in 100 years time are completely irrelevant.

Actually I think long tail revenue is quite well correlated with a property being a hit. Netflix paid $500m for the rights to Seinfeld 20 years after the show ended. Star Wars is still huge, nearly 50 years after the release of the original. Disney in general has ruthlessly mined its back catalog; they just printed another $700m from a Lion King prequel, whose value lay largely in the good will still hanging over from the original, which they still own, and which is still absolutely a valuable asset despite being 30 years old. Back catalogs are huge deals. Amazon paid $8bn for MGM to boost its Prime Video content library. Streaming has opened up long tail revenue opportunities beyond the box office that never existed before.

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

#635

Post by briandear »

Style can’t be copyrighted. It can’t be patented either.

When Wes Anderson makes films that use techniques from the French New Wave that he didn’t invent is that wrong? When there is a DaVinci color profile that resembles what they did in Spider-Man, is that wrong?

The unique techniques of French New Wave filmmaking became cliche. Then Oliver Stone and Tarantino came along and evolved it into their unique styles. That the Studio Ghibli style is being imitated en mass is just natural evolution. Should that guy be the only one that can do that style? If that’s the case, then literally every creative work should be considered forgeries.

The AI aspect of this is a red herring. If I make a Ghibli style film “by hand” is that any different than AI? Of course not, I didn’t invent the style.

Another perspective, darkroom burning and dodging is a very old technique yet photoshop makes it trivial — should that tool be criticized because someone else did it the old and slow way first?

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

#636

Post by techpression »

johanvts wrote: post #570
jl6 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 slig…

For movies in particular the tail is very thin. Only very few 50 year old movies are ever watched. Was any commercial movie ever financed without a view to making a profit in the box office/initial release?

According to Matt Damon (in one of many interviews) a lot of movies were produced with the second revenue stream (vhs/dvd) being part of the calculations, that is why we now get a lot less variety and alternative movies made, that second revenue stream doesn’t exist any more (I assume streaming pays very little in comparison).

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

#637

Post by jl6 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #572
jl6 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 slig…

> 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. Not so, because of net present value. The return from investing in normal stocks is ~10%/year, which is to say ~670% over 20 years, because of compounding interest. Another way of saying this is that $1 i…

> And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.

For the crown jewel IP that the studios are most interested in protecting, the opposite of this assumption is true. Star Wars, for example, is making more money than ever. Streaming revenues will probably invalidate that assumption for an even wider pool of back catalog properties.

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

#638

Post by api »

autoexec wrote: post #414
api wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say I write a book or record an album and there is no copyright. How do I get paid? Musicians I suppose can tour, which is grueling but it’s something. Authors, programmers, actors, game studios, anything that’s not performed live would immediately become non-viable as a career or a business. Large corporations would make money of course, by offering all you can eat streaming feeds of everything for a monthly f…

>. Let’s say I write a book or record an album and there is no copyright. How do I get paid? I've purchased books that were in the public domain and without copyright. I've paid for albums I could already legally listen to for free. I've paid for games and movies that were free to play and watch. I'm far from the only person who has or would. The people who pirate the most are also the ones who spend the most money o…

You’re talking about individual piracy. I’m talking about huge scale corporate piracy, which is already happening (laundered through AI algorithms and other ways) and would happen a lot more if copyright vanished.

Part of what muddies the water here too is that copyright lasts too long. Companies like Disney lobbied for this successfully. It should have a time horizon of maybe 25 years, 50 at most.

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

#639

Post by brookst »

noduerme wrote: post #525
planb wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sam…

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…

I like your formulation but I find point 1 unconvincing. Does it still hold if you paint from a reference image beside the easel? Or projected into the canvas? Or if it’s not a “real” painter but a low-wage laborer? Two of them side by side? A hundred of them?

Where I’m going is I don’t think it makes sense for the moral / legal acceptability of a in image to depend on the mechanical means which created it. I think we have to judge based on the image itself. If the human-generated version and AI-generated version both show the same level of interpretation when viewed, I don’t think point 1 supports treating them differently.

And, as you say, point 2 is mostly congruent, but I have to point out that LLMs are not merely compressed versions of the training material, but instead generalized learnings based on the training data.

ML “neurons” may function differently than our own, and transformer architecture is likely different from the way we think, but the learning of generalized patterns plus details sufficient to reconstitute specific instances seems pretty similar.

Think about painting Indiana Jones; I’ll bet you could paint the handle of the whip in great detail. But it’s likely that’s because you remember a specific image of his whip handle; it’s because you know what whip handles look like in general. ML models work similarly (at some level of abstraction).

I’m left unconvinced that there is anything substantially different about human and AI generated art, and also that we can only judge IP position of either based on the work itself.

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