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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

#911

Post by mrkstu »

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.

Yep, my parents commissioned an oil back in the 70s that was a near duplicate of another artist's painting- they couldn't have afforded the original artist, so he has not lost anything and the painter did the painting as a hired work, so legally I doubt any law was broken.

Hangs on my wall now- I know I can never sell until the copyright on the original runs out (which it most likely won't in my lifetime) it but it is a very well done painting and a family legacy piece I am glad exists.

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

#913

Post by flashman »

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…

Redbubble was sued by the Pokemon Company two months prior to the launch of Pokemon Go, so you picked the exact wrong company and moment to try this with

https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/pokemon-hel...

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

#914

Post by flashman »

nearbuy wrote: post #455
flessner wrote: post #384

Everyone is talking about theft - I get it, but there's a more subtler point being made here. Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new. Everything is simply a blend of prior work. I am not saying that this doesn't have economic value, but it means these AI models are closer to lossy compression algorithms than they are to AGI. The following quote by Sam Altman from about 5 years ago is intere…

> Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new. How could you possibly know this? Is this falsifiable? Is there anything we could ask it to draw where you wouldn't just claim it must be copying some image in its training data?

Let's reverse that. "Current generation AI models can think of things that are truly new."

How could you possibly know that? Could you prove that an image wasn't copying from images in its training data?

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

#915

Post by jauntywundrkind »

sothatsit wrote: post #783
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, I am not. Read my comment again. You can literally just ask AI for whatever you want. It has such an incredible breadth of what it can produce that calling it uncreative because the default thing that it produces is the most common image you'd expect is both lazy, and motivated thinking.

I said that already well before you did.

> 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.

what a terror you've been.

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

#916

Post by ninalanyon »

benwad wrote: post #538
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…

The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies released in 2001, made $887 million in its original theatrical run (on a $93 million budget). It would absolutely still have been made if copyright was only 20 years. And now it would be in the public domain!

And the book it is based on would have been written had there been no copyright at all.

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

#917

Post by munificent »

satvikpendem wrote: post #882
munificent wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway. No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines. As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig w…

> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines. There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along.…

> There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one?

You're entitled to your own value system, but in mine, humans are worth infinitely more than computers.

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

#918

Post by dcow »

munificent wrote: post #917
satvikpendem wrote: post #882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines. There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along.…

> There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? You're entitled to your own value system, but in mine, humans are worth infinitely more than computers.

Same in mine. But mine isn’t predicated on the irreplaceability of human labor to derive value from human life. If we automated literally everything and we could all just live off UBI and drink wine and look at the stars all day, humans would still be intrinsically valuable. Or, the ability of a machine to generate art good enough to serve as a fun D&D avatar does not devalue a human doing the same. You may be attaching a… market value… to humans by proxy of their capital output. Very capitalist of you. If you look at things that way, the value of a human life has been trending toward zero and will continue. So I prefer not to hold a belief system that only values humans by the value of their labor. Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.

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

#919

Post by foxglacier »

prerok wrote: post #35
foxglacier wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it can exclude the copyright outputs and provide something else instead of blocking the inputs. I'm sure there's AI that can check if a picture is close enough to something in their database of copyrighted characters built up from some kind of DMCA-like process of copyright holders submitting examples of their work to be blocked.

Indeed, but where does it stop? Looks like Potter? No go. Hmm, looks like an illustration of Pug? No go. Looks like Simon the sorcerer. No go. Hmm, looks like a wizard from Infocom's Sorcers get all the girls. No go. The problem is that it regurgitates what already exists and if you really want to abide by all the permissions then there is nothing left.

Not at all. It doesn't only regurgitate what already exists and create a new wizard character that's not an existing one. It might have some elements of existing ones but that doesn't make it necessarily a copyright violation.

Here's Gemini's "make a picture of a young wizard which isn't a copy of any existing one.". I don't know enough about wizards to know how unique it is but maybe you can tell. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/gg-dl/AA8i_VKUEpqw3AOOB_t4...

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

#920

Post by concats »

api wrote: post #346
dcow wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An artist is a small manufacturing facility that produces a physical (canvas, print, mp3, etc) product, no? What is different about the production of Micky Mouse cartoons? Why is it normal for industries to compete in manufacturing of physical product, but as soon as you can apply copyright, now you exclusively have rights to control anything that produces a similar result?

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?

A couple of years ago, I would have agreed that this would be a big and complicated issue. But do we all really think this is a problem in 2025? By now we actually have proof that it isn't impossible.

First of all, there is already, today, a plethora of FOSS projects where the developers get regular salaries without relying on royalties. Good experienced people work, make a career, yet the end product is free. We have hard proof that it won't "become a non-viable [...] career". The field might shrink, or at least change, but it won't die entirely. There is still value to be gained, so someone somewhere will pay to have it created.

Furthermore, now a days there are also websites such as Patreon, Kickstarter, and the like that have clearly demonstrated that the same can also be applied to creative endeavors such as art, music, or writing. You just pay people as they work, monthly salaries, rather than afterwards based on royalties. Yes, it comes with other issues, and for many years it was hard to say if those would be crippling. But by now we can actually see, with real world examples, that it's a feasible way to fund creative projects, and the people working on them, even if the digital products were released for free after completion. It turns out that millions of people are willing to pay for these things, to speed up the development presumably, even though they would have gotten the same product for free later, it's no longer a hypothetical.

I also think that the future will show us even more ways to finance creative intellectual work without making things into 'intellectual property' that you have to guard fiercely with copyright as if it was in short supply.

Yes, it would probably become very hard to earn really big money, millions or billions, in the industry if everyone was working for salaries rather than royalties. The distribution would presumably be less top heavy, and more similar to other industries where "going viral" isn't really a thing. But is that such a bad thing? And it's not even a guarantee that this would change, after an artist goes viral their next project would presumably have a lot more fans and investors willing to ensure they continue working, since they loved the first album/film/etc so much.

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