An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip • Hacker News Board

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

#861

Post by saulpw » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 12:31 AM UTC

debugnik wrote: post #484

saulpw wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Mickey Mouse was created (1928), copyright was 28 years that could be reupped once for an additional 28 years. So according to those terms, Mickey Mouse would have ascended to the public domain in 1984. IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively. Make copyright law to be what is best for society and creators as a whole, not for lobbyists representing already copyrighted material.

> IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively. Careful, if we were to shorten copyright, not doing so retroactively would give an economic advantage to franchises already published over those that would get published later. As if the current big studios needed any further advantages over newcomers.

It seems like it would make it more palatable to the existing franchises if their precious existing copyrights were not shortened. ("We paid billions of dollars under the assumption that we'd be able to milk this IP for 35 more years!") But anyway copyrights aren't going to get shorter in the near future.

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

#862

Post by lll-o-lll » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 12:45 AM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #756

feoren wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember all the hullaballoo about Asian Vikings and the like. It was so preposterous that Vikings would ever be Asian that it must be ultra-woke DEI mind-worms being forced onto AI! But of course, as far as the AI's concerned, it is even more preposterous that an Italian plumber would not be wearing red or green overalls with a mustache and a lettered baseball cap. I don't see any way you can get the AI to recogni…

That's what you get when you expect AIs to be like humans and be able to reason. We would be pissed if a human artist did that, so we are pissed when AIs do it. A human, even one whose only experience of an Italian plumber is Mario will be able to draw an Italian plumber who is not Mario. That's because he knows that Mario is just a video game character and doesn't even do much plumbing. He knows however how an actua…

I just asked gpt to draw an asian viking, and it did. What’s the problem?

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

#863

Post by muzani » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 1:10 AM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #681

ionwake wrote: post #534

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…

Somehow someone had notified Nintendo Is this correct? I would guess Nintendo has some automation/subscription to a service that handles this. I doubt it was some third party snitching.

People snitch real fast when jealous. Sometimes it's as simple as someone wanting to do the same thing and finding out someone else did it.

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

#864

Post by muzani » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 1:16 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #652

District5524 wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked Sora to turn a random image of my friend and myself into Italian plumbers. Nothing more, just the two words "Italian plumbers". The created picture was not shown to me because it was in violation of OpenAI's content policy. I asked then just to turn the guys on the picture into plumbers, but I asked this in the Italian language. Without me asking for it, Sora put me in an overall and gave me a baseball cap, a…

You (and the article, etc) show what a lot of the "work" in AI is going into at the moment - creating guardrails against creating something that might get them in trouble, and / or customizing weights and prompts under water to generate stuff that isn't the obvious. I'm reminded of when Google's image generator came up and this customization bit them in the ass when they generated a black pope or asian vikings. AI to…

I would love to know how YouTube does this for music. There's some holes obviously, like some cover artists will play the iconic riffs of a song and then stop somewhere. There's people who do reels or "commentary" of a movie scene and then put some horrible high pitched music to mask it from copyright.

There's probably even some rules around this to only detect just enough to take legal action. Like GP stumbled on a trademark landmine, but obviously just selling red shirts with a bird on it can't be a trademark violation; it needs to be a specific kind of red too.

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

#865

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 1:17 AM UTC

fashion-at-cost wrote: post #648

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your analysis misses the incredibly important caveat that revenue rises with inflation – or sometimes even faster. 50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue. Today, it’s $25. That’s a 50x increase… a dollar in 50 years might be worth $0.02 today, but a movie ticket in 50 years is worth about a movie ticket today.

No, that's just the difference between real and nominal dollars. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar 30 years from now even after adjusting for inflation, because the dollar you have today could be invested, or the dollar you don't have today has to be borrowed until you have it, and investments and loans both have interest rates in excess of inflation.

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

#866

Post by capnrefsmmat » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 1:31 AM UTC

djoldman wrote: post #812

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, this is a uniquely American view of copyright: > The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. In Europe, particularly France, copyright arose for a very different reason: to protect an author's moral rights as the creator of the work. It was seen as immoral to allow someone's work -- their intellectual…

That's an interesting perspective, and yes wholly foreign to my very American economics influenced background. Are the origins the same when looking at other intellectual property like patents? How did they deal with quoting and/or critiquing other's ideas? Did they allow limited quotation? What about parody and satire?

I'm not sure about other intellectual property rights. I do know there's a similar dichotomy for privacy: Americans tend to view it in terms of property rights (ownership of your image, data, etc.) while Europeans view it as a matter of protecting personal dignity. That leads to different decisions: for instance, there's a famous French case of an artist making a nude sketch of a portrait subject, and being unable to sell the sketch because it violated the subject's privacy rights, despite being the owner of the intellectual property.

Peter Baldwin's Copyright Wars is a good overview of the European vs American attitudes to copyright in general.

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

#867

Post by simonh » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 1:41 AM UTC

skeaker wrote: post #784

simonh wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the focus is on IP theft, and that’s part of it, but let’s set that aside. How useful is an image generator that, when asked to generate an image of an archaeologist in a hat, gives you Harrison Ford every time? Clearly that’s not what we want from tools like this, even just as tools.

Not an expert with this stuff but could you not just put "Harrison Ford" in the negative prompt?

First, that only works for potential biases you already know about and can anticipate, or can spot in the output. If the result is an egregious ripoff or an artist you’ve never heard of, or is the likeness of a model or actor you’re not aware of, how would you know?

Second, it doesn’t create the kind of originality we want. It just limits the kind of unoriginality we are getting.

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

#868

Post by jMyles » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

apersona wrote: post #832

jMyles wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not getting "better." It always just copied. That's all it /can/ do That's true of all the best artists ever. > They're just there to whitewash away liability from blatantly stealing someone else's content. That's because that's not a thing. Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give states more control over creativity. Nobody who copies bytes which represent my music is a "thief". To be a thie…

> Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give states more control over creativity. 1. I hate the argument of "legal fiction" because the whole concept of law itself is a "fiction" invented that gives states more control. But I imagine you wouldn't want to live in a "lawless" society, would you? 2. Can you please explain how ownership of content gives states more control over creativity? There are so ma…

1. I don't think that is necessarily so. We can look at the universe we're given for some obvious fundamental physical and mathematical laws. As sure as gravity, bytes can be copied. It's just part of the universe we live in. Legislation in resistance to that requires these complex legal fictions. I don't think all legal fictions are bad; but those that tell a story that plainly contradicts fundamental laws of mathematics seem to always produce unjust outcomes.

2. Of course states can outright ban content, but the facade of protecting the poor artist gives enormous political cover. Saying, "You can't create that content because it is subversive and likely to convince people that the state is superfluous in the internet age" is just a much more honest (and politically impossible) approach - saying instead "you can't create that because it infringers on someone else's property" makes it sound like there's an attempt to serve justice.

3. Can you say more about this?

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

#869

Post by bartread » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 1:59 AM UTC

Interesting. So when I tried the “Indiana Jones” prompt I got an image back that looked a lot like Indiana Jones but with a face much more similar to Nathan Drake. Whereas the predator prompt generated an image of the predator but, unlike the article, wearing his mask.

So there’s clearly some amount of random chance in there, but the trope is still very clear in the generated image, so it seems like you’re going to get an archetype.

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

#870

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 2:18 AM UTC

ikanreed wrote: post #702

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works. The thing is though, there is also a human requesting that . The prompt was chosen specifically to get that result on purpose. The corporate systems are trying to prevent this, but if you use any of the local models, you don't even have to be coy. Ask it for "photo of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones" and what do you ex…

No, I think that's unfair. I, as a user, could very reasonably want a parody or knock-off of Indiana Jones. I could want the spelunky protagonist. It's hard to argue that certain prompts the author put into this could be read any other way. But why does Nintendo get a monopoly on plumbers with red hats? The way AI is coded and trained pushes it constantly towards a bland-predictable mean, but it doesn't HAVE to be th…

The way it's coded, if you don't specify something more specific, asking for "plumber in a red hat" implies that you're asking for Mario, because that's the most well-known instance of what you requested. If you want something else, you ask for something else. Specify the ways in which you want your plumber in a red hat to differ from the most well-known instance, and it will.

If you want the Spelunky protagonist you can literally type "spelunky protagonist" into the prompt and it will do it, or you can describe how you want your own parody to differ from the original. But if you just type "Indiana Jones" into the prompt and nothing else, you're getting Indiana Jones, because what else is it even supposed to do with that? And likewise if you use a prompt which is designed to conjure India Jones by description rather than by name.