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

theaiunderwriter.substack.com

671–680 of 927 posts

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

#671
post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I train a model to say y=2, and then I ask the model to guess the value of y and it says 2, and you call that overfitting? Overfitting is if you didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones and then it still gave Indiana Jones.

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 concentrations of training data because of human culture/popularity of characters/objects means that if I go and give a random person the same description of a character that the AI got and ask "who am I talking about, what do they look like?" there's a very high likelihood that they'll answer "Indiana Jones".

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

#672

Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine. One thing I would say, it's interesting to consider what would make this not so obviously bad. Like, we could ask AI to assess the physical attributes of the characters it generated. Then ask it to permute some of those attributes. Generate some random tweaks: ok but brawy, short, and a different descent. Do similarly on some clothing colors. Change the game. Hit the "rando…

Yup it's called overfitting. But I don't suppose you'd appreciate a neutral model either.

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

#673

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…

> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can. And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince…

>the average person speaks and thinks in these terms,

(Trademarks aside) Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to create a profitable game for them.

If they all go bankrupt today I won't lose any sleep over it.

People also try to make a living selling bananas and apples. Should we create an elaborate scheme for them to make sure they survive? Their product is actually important to have. Why can't they own the exclusive right to sell bananas similarly? If anyone can just sell apples it would hurt their profit.

It is long ago but that is how things use to work. We do still have taxi medallions in some places and all kinds of legalized monopolies like it.

Perhaps there is some sector where it makes sense but I can't think of it.

If you want to make a movie you can just do a crowd funder like Robbert space industry.

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

#674
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…

The likeness of Indiana Jones is not protected in any way - as far as I know - that would stop a human artist creating, rendering and selling a work of art representing their creative vision of Indiana Jones. And even more so in a private context. Even if the likeness is protected (“archaeologist, adventurer, whip, hat”) then this protection would only be in certain jurisdictions and that protection is more akin to a…

The likeness of Indiana Jones, as a character, is owned by Disney

If they show that image to a jury they’ll have no issues convincing them the LLM is infringing.

Moreover if the LLM creators are charging for it, per token or whatever, they are profiting from it.

Yes are there jurisdictions were this won’t work and but I think in US Disney lawyers could make viable argument.

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

#675
I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that this represents a "hideous theft machine", but I think even if we discard that, this is still bad.

It's very clear that generative has abandoned the idea of creative; image production that just replicates the training data only serves to further flatten our idea of what the world should look like.

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

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably more: "I'll save my energy for interacting with AI for something more useful to me"

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

#677
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm ok with the model knowing what Indiana Jones or the Predator looks like with well remembered details, ClosedAI doesn't seem to be OK with it, because they are explicitly censoring characters of more popular IPs. Presumably as a fig leaf against accusations of theft.

If you define feeding of copyrighted material into a non-human learning machine as theft, then sure. Anything that mitigates legal consequences will be a fig leaf. The question is "should we define it as such?"

The fact that they have guardrails to try and prevent it means OpenAI themselves thinks it is at least shady or outright illegal in someway. Otherwise why bother?

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

#679

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…

> my whole shop was taken offline I think the problem there was being dependent on someone who is a complete pushover, doesn't bother to check for false positives and can kill your business with a single thought.

Yes that was the whole point of my post.

For further info it was Redbubble.

>Redbubble is a significant player in the online print-on-demand marketplace. In fiscal year 2023, it reported having 5 million customers who purchased 4.8 million different designs from 650,000 artists. The platform attracts substantial web traffic, with approximately 30.42 million visits in February 2025.

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

#680
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine. I hate how it is common to advance a position to just state a conclusion as if it were a fact. You keep repeating the same thing over and over until it seems like a concensus has been reached instead of an actual argument reasoned from first principle. This is no theft here. Any copyright would be flimsier than software patents. I love Studio Ghibli (including $500/seat f…

>it's the heart and the detail that make them what they are. You cannot clone that You absolutely can and these theft machines are proving that, literally cloning those details with very high precision and fidelity.

I didn't mean visual fidelity, I meant the way that plot and theme and art interleave. I first watched My Neighbour Totoro on VHS with no visual fidelity and it was still magic.

You can easily steal the style of a political cartoon or especially XKCD but you cannot steal or generate genuine fresh insight or poignant relevant metaphor for the current moment.

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