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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 their creation and they'll never create.

Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.

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 wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.

For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.

> 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 that ideas are in fact property. That the first person to think something and write it down rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are "stealing."

This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.

>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.

> 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.

Do you want more games (movies, books...)? Then you want studios to make money in that type of game. Because and if they make money they have incentive to do so. Now if you are happy with the number and quality of free games a few hard core people who will do it even if they make nothing then you don't care. However games generally take a lot of effort to create and so by paying people to make them we can ensure people who want to actually have the time - as opposed want to but instead have to spend hours in a field farming for their food.

Now it is true that games often do look alike and many are not worth making and such. However if you want more you need to ensure they make money so it is worth investing.

We can debate how much they should make and how long copyright should be for. However you want them to make money so they make more.

Games:

> "On platforms like Steam, indie games constitute the vast majority of new titles. For instance, in 2021, approximately 98% of the 11,700 games released on Steam were from indie developers. This trend has continued, with indie games accounting for 99% of releases on gaming platforms between 2018 and 2023."

Written content:

> "Every year, traditional publishers release around half a million to a million new books in the U.S., but that number is dwarfed by the scale of independent writing online: WordPress users alone publish over 70 million blog posts per month, Amazon sees over 1.7 million self-published books annually, and platforms like Medium, Substack, and countless personal websites generate millions more articles and essays. While the average quality of traditional publishing remains high due to strict editorial standards, consumer behavior has shifted dramatically—people now spend far more time reading informal, self-published content online, from niche newsletters to Reddit posts, often favoring relevance, speed, and authenticity over polish. This shift has made the internet the dominant source of written content by volume and a major player in shaping public discourse."

Video content:

> "Today, the overwhelming majority of video content is produced not by Hollywood or television studios, but by individuals on the internet. YouTube alone sees over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute—more than 260 million hours per year—vastly outpacing the combined annual output of all major film studios and TV networks, which together produce only a fraction of that volume. Despite questions about quality, consumer habits have shifted dramatically: people now watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube content per day, and platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch are growing rapidly, especially among younger audiences. While Hollywood still commands attention with high-budget blockbusters and prestige series, user-generated content dominates the daily media diet in both time spent and engagement."

You know what dominates though: the big budget games/books/videos. Indie is sometimes really good, but a lot of it is horrible.

That's because the big budget creators are very good at business, which has four parts[1]: not just the product, but also the revenue model, the market, and distribution.

Big budget studios are AMAZING at distribution. They blow indie devs out of the water, who focus almost all their effort on just product.

Do big budget studios often make great games? Yes! But they often produce total garbage, too, just like indie devs. I think the biggest difference between them is distribution.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

How has IH been going post-split from Stripe? I have not visited in a while but I'm curious on your thoughts. Also, if you are in or hosting any NYC-related events, I would love to join.

It's been going well! Not profitable yet, but spending more time on it in 2025, so it will be soon I think.

I'll actually be in NYC visiting Channing this coming week, perhaps we'll do an impromptu event for IHers in the area

Sounds good, let us know for the event.

> Do you want more games (movies, books...)?

Not really. We already have multiple lifetimes of them to enjoy.

But if I do I'm happy to pay for the work in advance. No need to go full Spanish inquisition on my sock drawer.

It's been a US-led project for the benefit of American corporations.

If I was running the trade emergency room in any European state right now, I'd have "stop enforcing US copyright" up there next to "reciprocal tarrifs".

Unfortunately we have a bunch of copyright-friendly groups in EU, so this would only work in the "stop enforcing US copyright in retaliation" sense, but not likely in the "stop enforcing copyright because on the net, it's a scam" sense.

Worked for china

In the context of when they want to borrow others' stuff. But then Chinese companies are _more_ than happy to take advantage of Western laws to defend their own IP. It's hypocrisy.

It's business or it's incentives make more sense.

Hypocrisy is a foolishly judgemental word, and it is anthropomorphising a jurisdiction. Western civ has advantages we don't decry - should we just cherrypick the things we don't like?

The main issue is Western laws are created by Western jurisdictions and if we don't like how the laws are used then the laws should be "fixed" (although maybe a bit better than the current attempt at a fix!)

I would point out that using laws you are subject to too is not hypocrisy. Even if you do not want the same laws in your own country or if you lobby against those laws simultaneously.

Your comment inspires me to write an essay titled "What's wrong with hypocrisy?" because it seems like no-one really cares about it anymore. It's like the concept itself has lost meaning. Hypocrisy a big, abstract word that has the audacity to refer to other big abstract words like "character" and "virtue" and "fairness". Now many people accused of hypocrisy say "so what?". What's going on there? It has the feel of a situation where someone says your software has memory leaks, and you say "so?" not knowing what that even means. "Hypocrisy" and "memory leaks" share the notion of a characterization of a set of flaws that can and will show themselves in many disparate ways. Powerful signals to a specialist, and noise for a generalist. And not just noise, but a signal against the critic as an elitist snob that uses words and concepts no-one understands.

The worst part about this trend toward hypocrisy acceptance is that nobody cares when you point it out. This empowers the hypocrite to answer with "So what?" because they know they will face absolutely no consequences. In politics, business, and even personal life, most people have everything to gain and very little to lose*. And our current hyper-individualistic society has only exacerbated the issue. "Who cares if the people around me don't trust me? I'll just get what I need from some faceless computer system."

* You actually have a lot to lose, but it's not tangible or very directly measurable, and the effects compile over a long time, so the results are not easy to see.

Yes, a lack of disincentive to hypocrisy and, in fact, considerable disincentive to pointing it out, seems to be the case. Why? From a utilitarian perspective, at the societal level hypocrisy undermines the "cooperate" Nash equilibrium; at the individual level, it undermines "conscience". The question we might ask is how did we lose conscience? If psychological egoism is the default "philsophy" of humans (and I think that it is, just as "autocracy" is the default governing system), then the better question is how did we get it and maintain it in the first place? In an ideal world you get to do tests, where one group's values are tested against another group with different values to see which group is stronger. An example of this is with war - WWII was liberalism vs fascism, and the Cold War was liberalism vs communism. We won both. So what happened? Could it be that liberalism collapses on its own when it's not measured against an alternative?

I too had been thinking of such a similar blog post, of why hyprocrisy even matters. In most of human history, might had essentially made right (or rather, power did not care whether it were hypocritical or not). However, we did indeed cooperate before modern liberalism as well, so it's hard to say exactly what effect this modern-day obsession being non-hypocritical creates.

A lot of “hypocracy” is nothing of the sort. Selectively using the rules that are derived from a moral concern is not hypocracy, unless they argued for those rules on those moral grounds. Chinese companies aren't known for their fervant declarations of support for american values, and so it is entirely fair that they play according to the rules-as-written. Now, if they're espousing communist ideals for all people, _then_ there would be a valid claim of hypocracy, but the arguments I see are basically never this nuanced.

Which is not to say that there is no hypocracy these days, just that the word is so frequently misapplied that its use is little more than a signal of emotional valence.

We were close to your viewpoint being the popular one, but sadly many (most?) independent content creators are so overtaken by fear of AI that they've done a 180. The same people who learned by tracing references to sell fanart of a copyrighted franchise (not complaining, I spend thousands on such things) accuse AI of stealing when it glances at their own work. We're entering a new golden age of creative opportunity and they respond by switching sides to the philosophy of intellectual property championed by Disney and Oracle (except for those companies' ironic use of AI themselves..).

We would prefer a world where we can use the skills we have spent a lifetime honing without having to compete with some asshole taking everything we’ve shared and stuffing it into a machine that spits out soulless clones of our work without any acknowledgment of our existence.

This could a be verbatim quote from a seamstress talking about looms.

You know, the more AI can do the more I understand the Luddites.

Yes. The Luddites had some pretty good ideas about resisting the centralization of profits into the hands of the people who owned the machines who took over their jobs, really. So did the French Revolution.

Not really, the machines these days are owned by everyone, the type of labor is not the same as it was, as anyone can own a laptop as a means of production. As an aside, I have seen your comments quite a bit on AI art related threads over the past few years, especially while I see close to none on ones related to AI code related ones, and I always thought there was some hypocrisy there, which actually led me to the theory that it is not the tech that threatens people so, but the economic incentives behind them, as you state in this comment.

That is why I would advocate for people to support open source AI that at least does not drive profits to any one entity, but people have been so knee-jerk reactive to anything AI over the years that they do not understand that more regulation only means that big tech, with the means to buy licenses to content, would essentially be the arbiters to new popular culture, ironically screwing creators even more in the process; think Disney, but 10x more powerful.

I'm an artist, not a programmer. I'm not gonna be trying to use AI to code anything. I don't see any hypocrisy here.

I do however greatly enjoy pointing and laughing when I see programmers expressing unhappiness with the prospect of their life shifting from "actually programming" to "endless review of AI slopcode". Does that sound like fun? Is that related in any way to the joy of creation that made you decide to be a programmer? Probably not! But you'll be so productive! You'll be able to work four times harder in the same time, for the same pay! Or less, since obviously the real work is being done by the AI now. Does that possibility make you feel unhappy and sad? Good. Now you know how I feel.

Open-source AI isn't gonna do shit to keep from devaluing my craft. It'll just make it worse. I am no fan of the Mouse but if I can get them to fight all these motherfuckers with a ton of VC investment who want to eliminate every creative job and leave me with no way to scrape out a living then I'm cheering for Disney.

People aren't motivated by principle so much as they are by self interest.

> we were close

Maybe. In my microcosm even before big AI, 100% of my tech acquaintances were against IP laws, 0% of my art acquaintances were, and authors I know had varied opinions based on their other backgrounds.

Artists do seem to have had a mindset shift. Previously they supported IP protection because it was "right" (or they'd at least concede that in practice it's not helping them personally), but with the AI boom most of them are pro-IP laws because of more visceral livelihood fears.

There's also a moral issue at play: To safeguard the interests of a few publishers (sometimes the creators, but they can easily end up with a shitty deal) you remove freedoms to the entire population to copy the same idea.

You need a central structure funded by everyone's taxes which enforce a contract almost nobody of the infringers has signed.

That's appaling, I hope with this AI wave we'll get rid of copyright all together.

Philosophers were waaaay ahead of this game.

> 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 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.

The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that goes public domain after 20.

Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I don’t know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But 120->20? Maybe not.

A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist.

In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn’t have the LOTR movies.

> 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 in 20 years is worth ~$0.15 today. A dollar in 30 years is worth ~$0.05 today. A dollar in 40 years is worth ~$0.02 today. As a result, if a thing generates the same number of dollars every year, the net present value of the first 20 years is significantly more than the net present value of all the years from 20-120 combined, because money now or soon from now is worth so much more than money a long time from now. And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.

The reason corporations lobby for copyright term extensions isn't that they care one bit about extended terms for new works. It's because they don't want the works from decades ago to enter the public domain now, and they're lobbying to make the terms longer retroactively. But all of those works were already created and the original terms were sufficient incentive to cause them to be.

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.

> 50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue.

he average price in 1975 was $2.05 [0], which is ~$12 today [1]. That is not so different from most movie prices today, excluding concessions.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cost-movie-ticket-were-born-1...

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1975?amount=2.05

And surprise movies are a rip off and people have stopped going.

Plenty of crowds at my local theaters.

> 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.

If Star Wars were in the public domain now it would be making even more money. Money that would go into the general economy and not just into a single studio.

Also copyright duration when Star Wars was created was a maximum of 56 years, and obviously George Lucas felt that was sufficient incentive to create it!

I wonder if there is value in splitting copyright into two parts and keeping a longer duration on the copies of the original work, but shortening the duration on the concepts in that work. That is, allow an author / studio to retain a long duration ownership of the original movie or story, so no one else can just start distributing copies of their VHS tapes after a few years. But at the same time, after 10 or 20 years other people can start making new Star Wars universe movies and books without licensing it from the original artist/author. If the original was good enough, then the rights to be the sole distributor of that original material should be plenty worthwhile, and in the mean time, just in time for the generational “nostalgia bump” a whole new set of related properties can come out, reinvigorating interest in the original.

Maybe even some sort of gradual opening of the IP, where after say 10 years, broad categories are opened (think things like “the Jedi” or “the Empire” or “Endor”), but specific characters and their representations aren’t (so no Darth Vader or Luke Skywalkers), then after 20 years you open the characters themselves but only derivative works. And then finally after 30 years or so you open the originals as well for things like translations or “de-specialized” editions or what have you. Then finally 50 years puts the raw originals in the public domain as well.

> 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.

That would be fine, if the studios didn't want to have it both ways. They want to retain full copyright control over their "asset", but they also use Hollywood Accounting [1] to both avoid paying taxes and cheat contributors that have profit-sharing agreements.

If studios declare that they made a loss on producing and releasing something to get a tax break, the copyright term for that work should be reduced to 10 years tops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Next, they'd switch to from Hollywood Accounting to Oilfield Accounting. Oh that wellhead is actually owned by this other company over there, we just purchased their product at a fair market rate while they were still in business, but now it seems that other company is going bankrupt and cannot do the environmental cleanup to even seal the wellhead, much less remove it.

IIRC, of works that bring in any money to their creators, the vast majority is returned, for almost all works, in the first handful of years after creation. Sure. the big names you know have value longer, but those are a miniscule fraction of works.

Make copyright last for a fixed term of 25 years with optional 10-year renewals up to 95 years on an escalating fee schedule (say, $100k for the first decade and doubling every subsequent decade) and people—and studios—would have essentially the same incentive to create as they do now, and most works would get into the public domain far sooner.

Probably be fewer entirely lost works, as well, if you had firmer deposit requirements for works with extended copyrights (using the revenue from the extensions to fund preservation) with other works entering the public domain soon enough that they were less likely to be lost before that happened.

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!

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.

Are the people better off because of these properties? What about the counterfactual, where there are more Star Wars stories by more varied producers?

That they are valuable speaks to market inefficiency. Where is the consumer surplus?

Seinfeld wasn't greenlit due to Netflix streaming rights. Better Lion King adaptations might have been made instead.

Yeah, we live in a world of "That's next quarters problem" is the de facto standard but on HN we regard the 120th year as the true icing on the cake of the pudding lol

How many movies did you see last year that is more than 10 or 20 years old? Or 50, for that matter?

Also, in what other industries are 100 year old designs/products/tech/standards/stuff relevant and hold up like the golden standard worth dying for?

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

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).

True, but how much of that second stream exists after say 5 years? For most movies it is zero - they aren't pressing the DVD anymore and all stores that once had no longer do (except for second hand stores which don't give money to the studio)

With books it's even worse. Movies might get a trickle of revenue from TV licensing but once a book is out of print (which usually happens very quickly, and most never go into print again), that's it. No more revenue from that book, it continues to circulate in libraries and used bookstores but the author and publisher gets nothing from that.

> If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years

Movies for instance make most of their revenue in the 2 week following their release in theater. Beyond, peoole who wanted to see it had already seen it and the others don't care.

I'd argue it's similar for other art form, even for music. The gain at the very end of the copyright lifetime is extremely marginal and doesn't influence spending decision, which is mostly measured on a return basis of at most 10 years.

> 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

Due to the fairy high cost of capital right now, pretty much anything more than 5 years away is irrelevant. 10 years max, even for insanely high returns on investment.

This line of reasoning doesn't make sense for retroactive lengthening of copyright though, as the author is not gaining anything from that anymore.

Seems to me most of that inflated budget is needed for the entertainment role of films, not the art in them, which a low budget can often stimulate rather than inhibit. In which case nothing of importance would be lost by a drastic shortening of copyright terms.

You are putting a pretty blatant cap on what constitutes "art"...

OK? So we wouldn't have $100m movies, the vast majority of which are forgotten about in a few months. I don't think a $100m movie is ten times better than a $10m one, so I think I'd be fine with movies with much smaller budgets, if they meant that LotR (the books) are now in the public domain for everyone to enjoy.

Lower-budget movies are probably a good thing. Force a return to practical effects instead of CGI.

If movies had a payoff curve like rents, this would be more true, but they're cultural artifacts that decay in relevance precipitously after release, and more permanently after a few decades, where they become "dated", outside a few classics.

Trademark isn't copyright, those are two different things. Trademarks can be renewed roughly every 10 years [1] until the end of time and are about protecting a brand. Now copyright law lasts for "author plus 70 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first." [2]

Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use, which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own profit.

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-faqs#...

[2] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...

Trademark isn't the same as Registered Trademark either, while we're at it

While I think the laws are broken, I also get why companies fight so hard to defend their IP: it is valuable, and they've built empires around it. But at some point, we have to ask: are we preserving culture or just hoarding it?

Missing is why laws fight so hard too, missing the opposite of what we have (in the west), namely blatant and rampant piracy. The other extreme is really bad, creators of any type pirated by organized crime. There was no video game nor movie market in eastern Europe for example, can't compete against large scale piracy.

Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of the threat.

I agree with your specific point. I think copyright should last for 50 years. That would protect long running franchises like Harry Potter or the Dresden Files but still allow things like Spiderman and Aretha Franklin to be freely reimagined.

However, most of the examples in the article should still be protected. Lara Croft first appeared 29 years ago. Any copyright system should still be protecting IP from 1996.

You're conflating trademark with copyright.

Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works.

So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court asking "how is this not simply laundering someone's likeness through a third party which claims to not have an image / filter / app / artist reproducing my client's likeness?"

All seemingly complicated scams come down to a very basic, obvious, even primitive grift. Someone somewhere in a regulatory capacity is either fooled or paid into accepting that no crime was committed. It's just that simple. This, however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the illegality of it. I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley. I think there are legal grounds here to force all of these models to be taken offline.

Additionally, "guardrails" that prevent 1:1 copies of film stills from being reprinted are clearly not only insufficient, they are evidence that the pirates in this case seek to obscure the nature of their piracy. They are the evidence that generative AI is not much more than a copyright laundering scheme, and the obsession with these guardrails is evidence of conspiracy, not some kind of public good.

> So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him?

No, you can't! But it shouldn't be the tool that prohibits this. You are not allowed to use existing images of Harrison Ford for your commercial and you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?

Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's justification for charging money to paint a picture of Harrison Ford to its users?

The justification so far seems to have been loosely based on the idea that derivative artworks are protected as free expression. That argument loses currency if these are not considered derivative but more like highly compressed images in a novel, obfuscated compression format. Layers and layers of neurons holding a copy of Harrison Ford's face is novel, but it's hard to see why it's any different legally than running a JPEG of it through some filters and encoding it in base64. You can't just decode it and use it without attribution.

> 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 same image as posters on ebay. And now my argument falls apart. Thanks for leading my thoughts in this direction...

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 insinuated that their soap had been endorsed by Harrison Ford. As an art director, it has obviously never been okay to ask someone to paint Harrison Ford and use that picture in a soap ad. I go through all kinds of hoops and do tons of checking on my artists' work to make sure that it doesn't violate anyone else's IP, let alone anyone's human likeness.

But that's all known. My argument for why me selling that painting is okay, and why an AI company with a neural network doing the same thing and selling it would not be okay, is a lot more subtle and goes to a question that I think has not been addressed properly: What's the difference between my neurons seeing a picture of Harrison Ford, and painting it, and artificial neurons owned by a company doing the same thing? What if I traced a photo of Ford and painted it, versus doing his face from memory?

(As a side note, my friend in art school had an obsession with Jewel, the singer. He painted her dozens of times from memory. He was not an AI, just a really sweet guy).

To answer why I think it's ok to paint Jewel or Ford, and sell your painting, I kind of have to fall back on three ideas:

(1) Interpretation: You are not selling a picture of them, you're selling your personal take on your experience of them. My experience of watching Indiana Jones movies as a kid and then making a painting is not the same thing as holding a compressed JPEG file in my head, to the degree that my own cognitive experience has significantly changed my perceptions in ways that will come out in the final artwork, enough to allow for whatever I paint to be based on some kind of personal evolution. The item for sale is not a picture of Harrison Ford, it's my feelings about Harrison Ford.

(2) Human-centrism: That my neurons are not 1:1 copies of everything I've witnessed. Human brains aren't simply compression algorithms the way LLMs or diffusers are. AI doesn't bring cognitive experience to its replication of art, and if it seems to do so, we have to ask whether that isn't just a simulacrum of multiple styles it stole from other places laid over the art it's being asked to produce. There's an anti-human argument to be made that we do the exact same thing when we paint Indiana Jones after being exposed to Picasso. But here's a thought: we are not a model. Or rather, each of us is a model. Buying my picture of Indiana Jones is a lot like buying my model and a lot less like buying a platonic picture of Harrison Ford.

(3) Tools, as you brought up. The more primitive the tools used, the more difficult we can prove it to be to truly copy something. It takes a year to make 4 seconds of animation, it takes an AI no time at all to copy it... one can prove by some function of work times effort that an artwork is, at least, a product of one's own if not completely original.

I'm throwing these things out here as a bit of a challenge to the HN community, because I think these are attributes that have been under-discussed in terms of the difference between AI-generated artwork and human art (and possibly a starting point for a human-centric way of understanding the difference).

I'm really glad you made me think about this and raised the point!

[edit] Upon re-reading, I think points 1 and 2 are mostly congruent. Thanks for your patience.

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.

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.

Your argument is valid but it's mostly irrelevant from a copyright perspective.

If ChatGPT generates an image of Indiana Jones and distributes it to an end user that is precisely one violation of copyright. A violation that no one but ChatGPT and that end user will know about. From a legal perspective, it's the equivalent of taking a screenshot of an Indiana Jones DVD and sending it to a friend.

ChatGPT can hold within its memory every copyrighted thing that exists and that would not violate anyone's copyright. What does violate someone's copyright is when an exact replica or easily-identifiable derivative work is actually distributed to people.

Realistically, OpenAI shouldn't be worried about someone generating an image of Indiana Jones using their tools. It's the end user that ultimately needs to be held responsible for how that image gets used after-the-fact.

It is perfectly legitimate to capture or generate images of Indiana Jones for your own personal use. For example, if you wanted to generate a parody you would need those copyrighted images to do so (the copyright needs to exist before you can parody it).

If I were Nintendo, Disney, etc I wouldn't be bothered by ChatGPT generating things resembling of my IP. At worst someone will use them commercially and they can be sued for that. More likely, such generated images will only enhance their IP by keeping it active in the minds of people everywhere.

It's reasonably well established that large neural networks don't contain copies of the training data, therefore their outputs can't be considered copies of anything. The model might contain a conceptual representation of Harrison Ford's face, but that's very different to a verbatim representation of a particular copyrighted image of Harrison Ford. Model weights aren't copyrightable; it's plausible that model outputs aren't copyrightable, but there are some fairly complicated arguments around authorship. Training an AI model on copyrighted work is highly likely to be fair use under US law, but plausibly isn't fair dealing under British law or a permitted use under Article 5 of the EU Copyright and Information Society Directive.

All of that is entirely separate from trademark law, which would prevent you from using any representation of a trademarked character unless e.g. you can reasonably argue that you are engaged in parody.

From the standpoint of using a human likeness, I don't see the difference between encoding a "conceptual representation" of Ford's face into a model and encoding it into any other digital or analog format from which it can later be decoded into a reasonable facsimile of the original.

I think that calling it a "conceptual representation" over-complicates the issue. At the very least, the model weights encode a process that can produce a copy of their training date. A 300x300 pixel image of Harrison Ford's face is one of what, like 1.5x10^12 possible images. Obviously, only a tiny fraction of all possible images are encoded in the model. Is encoding those particular weights into a diffuser which can select that face by a process of refinement really much different than, say, encoding the image into a set of fractal algorithms, or a set of vectors?

I'd argue that the largest models are akin to a compression method that has simply pre-encoded every word and image they've ingested, such that the "compressed file" is the prompt you give to the AI. Even with billions of weights trained on millions of texts and images, they've only encoded an infinitely tiny fraction of the entire space. Semantically you could call it something other than a "copy", but functionally how is it any different?

Because I can pay a painter to paint me a picture of Harrison Ford, I just can't then use that to sell things.

> you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?

If the AI prompt was "produce a picture of Micky Mouse", I'd agree with you.

The creators of AI claim their product produces computer-generated images, i.e. generated/created by the computer. Instead it's producing a picture of a real actual person.

If I contract an artist to produce a picture of a person from their imagination, i.e. not a real person, and they produce a picture of Harrison Ford, then yeah I'd say that's on the artist.

Mickey Mouse is a bad example because he's now in the public domain, including Color images.

> 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 expect? That's what it's supposed to do. It does what you tell it to do. If you turn your steering wheel to the left, the car goes to the left. It's just a machine. The driver is the one choosing where to go.

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 that way.

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.

Human appearance does not have enough dimensions to make likeness a viable thing to protect; I don't see how you could do that without say banning Elvis impersonators.

That said:

> I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley.

If you're framing the sides like that, it's pretty clear which I'm on. :)

Interesting you should bring that up:

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/1517ldjmv

Loads of lawsuits have been filed by celebrities and their estates over the unauthorized use of their likeness. And in fact, in 2022, Las Vegas banned Elvis impersonators from performing weddings after a threat from the Presley estate's licensing company:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10872855/Elvis-imag...

But there are also a couple key differences between putting on a costume and acting like Elvis, and using a picture of Elvis to sell soap.

One is that a personal artistic performance could be construed as pastiche or parody. But even more importantly, if there's a financial incentive involved in doing that performance, the financial incentive has to be aligned more with the parody than with drawing an association to the original. In other words, dressing up as Elvis as a joke or an act, or even to sing a song and get paid to perform a wedding is one thing if it's a prank, it's another thing if it's a profession, and yet another thing if it's a mass-marketing advertisement that intends for people to seriously believe that Elvis endorsed this soap.

I can remember two ad campaigns with an Elvis impersonator, and they used multiple people in both of them. I think we can safely assume that if you represent multiple people as a specific public figure, that a reasonable person must assume that none of them are in fact that person.

Now of course that leaves out concerns over how much of advertisement is making money off of unreasonable people, which is a concern Congress occasionally pays attention to.

> This, however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the illegality of it

If you have to explain "laundering someone's likeness" to them maybe not, I think it's a frankly bizarre phrase.

Trademarks are very different from copyrights. In general, they never expire as long as the fees are paid in the region, and products bearing the mark are still manufactured. Note, legal firms will usually advise people that one can't camp on Trademarks like other areas of IP law.

For example, Aspirin is known as an adult dose of acetylsalicylic acid by almost every consumer, and is Trademarked to prevent some clandestine chemist in their garage making a similarly branded harmful/ineffective substance that damages the Goodwill Bayer earned with customers over decades of business.

Despite popular entertainment folklore, sustainable businesses actually want consumer goodwill associated with their products and services.

While I agree in many WIPO countries copyright law has essentially degenerated into monetized censorship by removing the proof of fiscal damages criteria (like selling works you don't own.) However, Trademarks ensure your corporate mark or product name is not hijacked in local Markets for questionable purposes.

Every castle needs a moat, but I do kind of want to know more about the presidential "Tesler". lol =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZUB1eJb34

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 seperate copyrights).

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.

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.

There we stand in agreement. Current copyright law and how it is governed is horrible.

What most people propose is equally bad and will never get traction with lawmakers.

Returning to what came before makes a ton of sense. Just make it X number of years and let's debate X for a while to get a decent number.

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.

I don’t know how much time you’ve spent on task scheduling or public strategy, but minmaxing of The Public Good versus the private benefit of art is, in fact, a question of fairness. It’s a compromise to give both parties as much of what they want or need as possible.

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".

For writing many people only become popular after they are dead.

I heard this explained once as the art in some writing is explaining how people feel in a situation that is still too new for many to want to pay to have it illustrated to them. But once the newness has passed, and people understand or want to understand, then they enjoy reading about it.

As a personal example, I could enjoy movies about unrequited love before and long after I experienced it firsthand, but not during or for years after. People may not yet have settled feelings about an event until afterward, and not be willing to “pick at the scab”.

The other, more statistical explanation is that it just takes a lot of attempts to capture an idea or feeling and a longer window of time represents more opportunities to hit upon a winning formula. So it’s easier to capture a time and place afterward than during.

The weirdness there is tying it to someone's life.

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 offspring -- to be meddled with by others without their permission. Your work represents you and your reputation, and for others to redistribute it is an insult to your dignity.

That is why copyrights in Europe started with much longer durations than they did in the United States, and the US has gradually caught up. It is not entirely a Disney effect, but a fundamental difference in the purpose of copyright.

For once, the US had the right idea all along.

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.

Thanks. I put it on hold at the library.

> 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 wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.

I think life of creator + some reasonable approximation of family members life expectancy would make sense. Content creators do create to ensure their family's security in some cases, I would guess.

You’re thinking of copyright law, not trademark law. Which serves a different function. If you’re going to critique something it’s useful to get your facts right.

>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.

I condone and endorse breaking copyright laws.

this reminds me of the time I tried to use a prepaid lawyer to research some copyright issues

they went down the rabbit hole on trademark laws, which are not only not copyright related, they are an entirely different federal agency at the Patent Office

gave me a giggle and the last time I used cheapo prepaid lawyers

I'd go further and say 10 years from time of creation is probably sufficient.

If the work is popular it will make plenty of money in that time. If it isn't popular, it probably won't make much more money after that.

It is not about trademark laws. It is about where laws apply.

If you torrent a movie right now, you'll be fined in many advanced countries.

But a huge corporation led by a sociopath scrapes the entire internet and builds a product with other people's work ?

Totally fine.

This. It seem the situation is controversial now because of the beloved Studio Ghibli IP, but I want to see the venn diagram of people outrage at this, and the people clamoring for overbearing Disney chatachter protection when the copyright expired and siding with paloworld in the Nintendo lawsuit.

It seem most of the discussion is emotionally loaded, and people lost the plot of both why copyright exists and what copyright protects and are twisting that to protect whatever media they like most.

But one cannot pick and choose where laws apply, and then the better question would be how we plug the gap that let a multibilion Corp get away with distribution at scale and what derivative work and personal use mean in a image generation as a service world, and artist should be very careful in what their wishes are here, because I bet there's a lot of commission work edging on style transfer and personal use.

It was always me and them. They are either "nobel" or just rich. me is the rest of peasants. We pay everything and we give everything to the rich ones. Thats it.

Which huge corporation led by a sociopath? There's so many to choose from.

The wickedest idea that social media run by sociopaths has implanted in the human psyche is the idea that anyone else would take advantage of immoral tactics if they had the means or could afford the payoffs.

I honestly don't see why anyone who isn't JK Rowling should be allowed to coopt her world. I probably feel even more strongly for worlds/characters I like.

Why am I wrong?

New rule: you get to keep your belongings for 20 years and that's it. Then they are taken away. Every dollar you made twenty or more years ago, every asset you acquired, gone.

That oughtta be enough to incentivize people to work and build their wealth.

Anything more than that is unnecessary.

I think you mean "20 years after you die". That seems like a perfectly rational way to deal with people who want to be buried in their gold and jewels in a pyramid.

OK, so you can have your dad's piano for 20 years after he dies, after that it's public property.

Some people would surprisingly agree with that.

Well, yes; some people would agree with the stronger proposition of you not getting that piano, or not without paying some tax on it.

How on earth do you classify estate taxes as stronger than fixed term ownership?

I don't, but, I mean, when someone comes and takes some of your money, then it means you had a fixed term on owning that amount, which just came to an end.

"Stuff taken away" is "stuff taken away", no matter what angle we take.

Because they didn't have a father?

We should never have accepted the term "intellectual property" at all, if this is the mindset it leads to.

Intellectual property does not belong to you. The entire concept of "owning" intellectual property is a very recent thing.

So how about we go back to how it used to be and just remove this entire concept.

You can own things you can't own an idea.

Your copyrighted work just has to be an original expression, not derived from someone else's work. It doesn't have to contain original ideas.

Patents are for ideas. Patents do in fact expire far faster than copyrights in the USA. The main problem with patents is patent trolling in the area of software patents.

It would be a lot easier to defend copyright if it expired quicker.

I used to be against copyright, but with the rise of scum like Altman, I'm going all in. Copyright should last forever, as long as the ownership is handed down through inheritance or other transactions and not assigned to the public domain.

Why should heirs receive copyright? They did nothing to create it. Worthless parasites, as the heirs of Marvin Gaye demonstrate with their stylistic similarity lawsuits.

Why should someone be able to charge multiple times for the same thing?

That entire concept is a legal fiction, and the compromise was to make it last only a limited time.

Because then the creative individual, in order to sustain themselves, will basically need an ultra rich patron who pays a lot of money for just the one copy or one performance. You know, basically how things worked before printing presses and recorded music.

Most copyrighted works don't make any money. Those that do go through a period where they sell a bunch of copies and after that it's just a trickle, if anything.

Why should you be able to charge every separate individual who comes to your concert? Same per seat price whether the place is filled to the back row or to the second row!

If you rent something, you're getting charged multiple times for exactly the same thing. You just paid for one month of staying in an apartment, now they want you to pay for a month again! The mere passage of time is churning out month after month. They are all the same, but you get charged! Same with power tools, cars and everything else rentable. Fifty people before you rented this hammer drill from Home Depot, but you still have to pay the same as they did.

Anyway, suppose that one should not be able to charge multiple times for the same thing. Then, fine, let the purveyor of an AI service also not be allowed to charge for their algorithmic rehashing of someone else's works.

I'm for getting rid of all forms of rent. But it has to be all: no cherry picking. Don't take away renting from one, while allowing another one to sell unlimited copies of a work. Or vice versa.

I disagree that you can own things, but I certainly concede IP as a good starting point.

So you wouldn't mind if I dip my hands into the pockets of the clothing you are wearing and help myself to whatever cash bills I might find?

Also, can you wash this not-my car I'm driving, that happens to be registered in my name?

Let me know if you will be requiring compensation for not-your time and not-your effort.

You will find the needed cleaning materials at the household goods store down the street. Just walk in, grab whatever you need, and walk out.

So every year I go to a swap meet and try to exchange my “expiring” belongings for something similar to reset the clock? Or, they get taken away by force? By someone who has meticulous records of all my stuff?

What problem are you trying to solve?

Ideas are free to replicate. Nothing is taken.

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 surprising is I didnt even have one sale. Somehow someone had notified Nintendo AND my shop had been taken down, to sell merch that didn't even exist for the market and if I remember correctly - also it didnt even have any imagery on it or anything trademarkable - even if it was clearly meant for pokmeonGo fans.

Im not bitter I just found it interesting how quick and ruthless they were. Like bros I didn't even get a chance to make a sale. ( yes and also I dont think I infringed anything).

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, and my friend another baseball cap. If I asked Sora to put mustache on us, one of us received a red shirt as well, without being asked to. Starting with the same pic, if I asked to put one letter on the baseball caps each - guess, the letters chosen were M and L. These extra guardrails are not really useful with such a strong, built-in bias towards copyright infringement of these image creation tools. Should it mean that with time, Dutch pictures will have to include tulips, Italian plumbers will have to have a uniform with baseball caps with L and M, etc. just not to confuse AI tools?

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 tools don't do what you wish they did, they do what you tell them and what they are taught, and if 99% of their learning set associates Mario with prompts for Italian plumbers, that's what you'll get.

A possible (probably already exists) business is setting up truly balanced learning sets, that is, thousands of unique images that match the idea of an italian plumber, with maybe 1% of Mario. But that won't be nearly as big a learning set as the whole internet is, nor will it be cheap to build it compared to just scraping the internet.

>> they do what you tell them and what they are taught, and if 99% of their learning set associates Mario with prompts for Italian plumbers, that's what you'll get.

I thought that a lot of the issues were the opposite of this, where Google put their thumb on the scale to go against what the prompt asked. Like when someone would ask for a historically accurate picture of a US senator from the 1800s and repeatedly get women and non-white men. The training set for that prompt has to be overwhelmingly white men so I don't think it was just a matter of following the training data.

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.

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 recognize that Vikings "should" be white people and not also think that Italian plumbers "should" look like that. Are they allowed to recombine their training data or must they strictly adhere to only what they've seen?

Of course the irony is that if the people who get offended whenever they see images of non-white people asked for a picture of "Vikings being attacked by Godzilla" , they'd get worked up if any of the Vikings in the picture were Asian (how unrealistic!). It's a made-up universe! The image contains a damn (Asian) Kaiju in it, and everyone is supposed to be pissed because the Vikings are unrealistic!?

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 actual non-Italian plumber looks like, and that a guy doing plumbing work in Italy is more likely to look like a regular Italian guy equipped like a non-Italian plumber than to a video game character.

And if asked to draw a Viking, he knows that Vikings are people originating from Scandinavia, so they can't be Asian by definition, even in an Asian context. A human artist can adjust things to the unrealistic setting, but unless presented with a really good reason, will not change the core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking.

But it requires reasoning. Which current image generating AIs don't have.

> We would be pissed if a human artist did that

No, I would not be pissed if a human artist drew an Asian Viking. Do you get pissed when a human artist draws a white Jesus? Why are we justifying internet outrage over an Asian Viking when people have been drawing this middle-eastern Jew as white for centuries?

> A human artist can adjust things to the unrealistic setting, but unless presented with a really good reason, will not change the core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking.

If you asked Matt Stone and Trey Parker to draw a Viking, are you sure it would contain the "core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking?" What if you asked Picasso to draw a Viking? The Vikings in The Simpsons would be yellow, and nobody would complain. Would you be offended if you asked Hokusai to draw a Viking and it came out looking Asian? Vikings didn't even have those stupid horned helmets that everyone draws them with! Is their dumb, historically inaccurate horned helmet a core part of what makes a Viking a Viking? What the hell are we even talking about? It's crystal clear that all of these "historical accuracy" drums are only ever beaten when some white person is offended that non-white people exist. Otherwise, nobody gives a shit about historical accuracy. There's a fucking Kaiju in the image!

Like any artist, Gemini had a particular style. That style happened to be a multi-cultural one, and what we learned is that a multi-culture style is absolutely enraging to people unless it results in more Whiteness.

Consider elves instead of Vikings. People would also be offended if an AI drew elves as black people with pointy ears. There's no "a human artist should know that elves have to be white" bullshit defense there. There's no historical accuracy bullshit. There's only racism.

The thing is that if a human draws an Asian Viking, he has to do it with intent. It is neither historically accurate nor matching popular culture. It doesn't have to do with whiteness, drawing an Asian Kenyan warrior, or an Asian Apache would be exactly the same thing.

By drawing an Asian Viking, you are passing a message. Or you may be expressing an art style, as you say. I accept the idea that Gemini style is multi-cultural, realism and conventions be damned, but if we attribute this kind of intent to an AI, we could also say that the liberties it takes with intellectual property and plagiarism is also intentional, because that how we would judge a human artist doing that.

The standard for a neutral human artist would be to draw a Viking as a blond white guy, with or without the horned helm depending if historical realism matters more than popular culture, and an Italian Plumber as not Mario, because a human understands that if want one wanted Mario, he would have said "Mario" and not "an Italian Plumber". Current AIs on the other hand just draw images similar to how they are tagged, with some out-of-context race mixing because reinforcement learning has taught it that it has to make people less white, but unlike people it isn't able to understand when it is relevant (ex: a university professor), and when it is not (ex: a Viking warrior).

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

The AIs were not "naturally" generating images of Asian Vikings. It was established to my satisfaction, even if the companies never admitted it (I don't recall it happening but I may have missed it), that it was actually the prompt being rather hamhandedly edited on the way to the image generator, for the clear purpose of "correcting" the opinions and attitudes of those issuing the prompts through social engineering.

Unsurprisingly, people don't like being so nakedly herded in their opinions. When the "nudges" become "shoves" people object.

My point is that there is no prompt engineering that could keep Vikings white without also keeping Italian plumbers looking like Mario. Unless you singled out Mario, but there are too many examples to do that with. The AI does not put Mario in a different category than a Viking. You have to try to get the AI to avoid using exact literal imagery, to make sure it's mixing things up a bit, varying facial features and clothing styles when it shows people ... you know, being "diverse". How are we supposed to get an Italian plumber in anything other than red overalls without getting a Viking wearing a sari?

The Gemini prompt was something like "make sure any images of people show a diverse range of humans", or something. Yes, it was totally ham-handed, but that's not what people were pissed about. It's also ham-handed that we can't generate a nipple, or a swear word, or violence. Why does "make sure images do not contain excessive violence" not piss people off? The Vikings were fucking brutal. It would be very historically accurate to show them raping women and cutting people's limbs off. Are we all supposed to be pissed that AI does not generate that image? It's just as ham-handed as "make sure humans are diverse". No, it was not the ham-handedness that enraged people. It was not the historical inaccuracy. It was the word "diverse".

I'm assuming the downvoters are the ones who get offended at the sight of an Asian Viking, so let me ask you this:

In a work of fiction -- which you're automatically asking for when you ask an AI to generate an image -- in a work of fiction, would you be offended if you saw a white Ninja? A white Samurai? A white Middle-Eastern Jew born in Roman times? Would there have been internet outrage over pictures of white Samurai? We all know the answer: no, of course not. So why is an Asian Viking offensive when a white Samurai is not? Why are we supposed to get angry about an Asian Viking, but a white Jesus is just A-OK? What could the difference possibly be? Anyone?

People get offended about these all the time, it’s called cultural appropriation[1]. It’s not just whites who have culture they dislike being an appropriated though whites do get offended by this as well, like any people with a rich cultural tapestry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation

OpenAI will eventually have competition for GPT 4o image generation.

They'll eventually have open source competition too. And then none of this will matter.

OmniGen is a good start, just woefully undertrained.

The VAR paper is open, from ByteDance, and supposedly the architecture this is based on.

Black Forest Labs isn't going to sit on their laurels. Their entire product offering just became worthless and lost traction. They're going to have to answer this.

I'd put $50 on ByteDance releases an open source version of this in three months.

I feel like the golden and fun age of GenAI is already over.

I feel the opposite. Like, we just entered the Golden Age.

lol, this interaction may possibly become known as "grooming the AI"

that’s hilarious

Another example of prime reasoning capabilities /s

Many years ago I tried to order a t-shirt with the postscript tiger on the front from Spreadshirt.

It was removed on Copyright claims before I could order one item myself. After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let me buy one item for personal use.

My point is: Doesn't have to be Sony, doesn't have to be a snitch - overzealous anticipatory obedience by the shop might have been enough.

>After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let me buy one item for personal use.

I used Spreadshirt to print a panel from the Tintin comic on a T-shirt, and I had no problem ordering it (it shows Captain Haddock moving through the jungle, swatting away the mosquitoes harassing him, giving himself a big slap on the face, and saying, 'Take that, you filthy beasts!').

I bought Tintin T-shirts 40 years ago in Thailand (the "branded" choices were amazing). They were actually really good, still got them!

Twenty years ago, I worked for Google AdWords as a customer service rep. This was still relatively early days, and all ads still had some level of manual human review.

The big advertisers had all furnished us a list of their trademarks and acceptable domains. Any advertiser trying to use one that wasn’t on the allow-list had their ad removed at review time.

I suspect this could be what happened to you. If the platform you were using has any kind of review process for new shops, you may have run afoul of pre-registered keywords.

Well the teams in Pokemon Go aren't quite as generic as Teamred: they are Team Instinct, Team Mystic, and Team Valor. Presumably Nintendo has trademarks on those phrases, and I’m sure all the big print on demand houses have an API for rights-holders to preemptively submit their trademarks for takedowns.

Nintendo is also famously protective of their IP: to give another anecdote, I just bought one of the emulator handhelds on Aliexpress that are all the rage these days, and while they don't advertise it they usually come preloaded with a buttload or ROMs. Mine did, including a number of Nintendo properties — but nary an Italian plumber to be found. The Nintendo fear runs deep.

Allen Pan, a youtuber "maker" who runs in the circle of people who run OpenSauce, was a contestant on a Discovery channel show that was trying to force the success of Mythbusters by "finding the next mythbusters!". He lost, but it was formative to him because those people were basically all inspired by the original show.

A couple years ago, he noticed that the merchandise trademark for "Mythbusters" had lapsed, so he bought it. He, now the legal owner of the trademark Mythbusters for apparel, made shirts that used that trademark.

Discovery sent him a cease and desist and threatened to sue. THEY had let the trademark lapse. THEY had lost the right to the trademark, by law. THEY were in the wrong, and a lawyer agreed.

But good fucking luck funding that legal battle. So he relinquished the trademark.

Buy a walrus plushy cause it's funny: https://allen-pan-shop.fourthwall.com/en-usd/

Note the now "Myth Busted" shirts instead.

Hilariously, a friend of Allen Pan's, from the same "Finding the next mythbuster" show; Kyle Hill, is friends enough with Adam Savage to talk to him occasionally, and supposedly the actual Mythbusters themselves were not empathetic to Allen's trademark claim.

> THEY were in the wrong, and a lawyer agreed.

Not sure where you get that from. He doesn't say that in the cease & desist announcement video (though it's worded in a way that lets the viewers speculate that). Also from every time it's brought up on the podcast he's on, it very much seams like he knows that he doesn't have legal ground to stand on.

Just because someone let's a trademark lapse doesn't mean you can rightfully snatch it up with a new registration (as the new registration may be granted in error). It would be a different story if he had bought the trademark rights before them lapsing.

Allen Pan makes entertaining videos, but one shouldn't base ones understanding of how trademarks work based on them.

It's hard to think of a company more aggressive with their IP than Nintendo

https://www.suedbynintendo.com/

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.

> 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.

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.

Sure, from the suing party who sent a DMCA takedown request to your webhost, who forward it to you and give you 24 hours before they take it down. Nobody wants to actually go to court over this stuff because of how expensive it is.

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...

Idk, the models generating what are basically 1:1 copies of the training data from pretty generic descriptions feels like a severe case of overfitting to me. What use is a generational model that just regurgitates the input?

I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with something that at least feels new.

In the end, other than for copyright-washing, why wouldn't I just use the original movie still/photo in the first place?

People like what they already know. When they prompt something and get a realistic looking Indiana Jones, they're probably happy about it.

To me, this article is further proof that LLMs are a form of lossy storage. People attribute special quality to the loss (the image isn't wrong, it's just got different "features" that got inserted) but at this point there's not a lot distinguishing a seed+prompt file+model from a lossy archive of media, be it text or images, and in the future likely video as well.

The craziest thing is that AI seems to have gathered some kind of special status that earlier forms of digital reproduction didn't have (even though those 64kbps MP3s from napster were far from perfect reproductions), probably because now it's done by large corporations rather than individuals.

If we're accepting AI-washing of copyright, we might as well accept pirated movies, as those are re-encoded from original high-resolution originals as well.

The year is 2030.

A new MCU movie is released, its 60 second trailer posted on Youtube, but I don't feel like watching the movie because I got bored after Endgame.

Youtube has very strict anti-scraping techniques now, so I use deep-scrapper to generate the whole trailer from the thumbnail and title.

I use deep-pirate to generate the whole 3 hour movie from the trailer.

I use deep-watcher to summarize the whole movie in a 60 second video.

I watch the video. It doesn't make any sense. I check the Youtube trailer. It's the same video.

Probably the majority of people in the world already "accept pirated movies". It's just that, as ever, nobody asks people what they actually want. Much easier to tell them what to want, anyway.

To a viewer, a human-made work and an AI-generated one both amount to a series of stimuli that someone else made and you have no control over; and when people pay to see a movie, generally they don't do it with the intent to finance the movie company to make more movies -- they do it because they're offered the option to spend a couple hours watching something enjoyable. Who cares where it comes from -- if it reached us, it must be good, right?

The "special status" you speak of is due to AI's constrained ability to recombine familiar elements in novel ways. 64k MP3 artifacts aren't interesting to listen to; while a high-novelty experience such as learning a new culture or a new discipline isn't accessible (and also comes with expectations that passive consumption doesn't have.)

Either way, I wish the world gave people more interesting things to do with their brains than make a money, watch a movies, or some mix of the two with more steps. (But there isn't much of that left -- hence the concept of a "personal life" as reduced to breaking one's own and others' cognitive functioning then spending lifetimes routing around the damage. Positively fascinating /s)

Tried Flux.dev with the same prompts [0] and it seems actually to be a GPT problem. Could be that in GPT the text encoder understands the prompt better and just generates the implied IP, or could be that a diffusion model is just inherently less prone to overfitting than a multimodal transformer model.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/wqrBGRF Image captions are the impled IP, I copied the prompts from the blog post.

DALL-E 3 already uses a model that trained on synthetic data that take the prompt and augments it. This might lead to the overfitting. It could also be, and might be the simpler explanation, that its just looks up the right file from a RAG.

If it overfits on the whole internet then it’s like a search engine that returns really relevant results with some lossy side effect.

Recent benchmark on unseen 2025 Math Olympiad shows none of the models can problem solve . They all accidentally or on purpose had prior solutions in the training set.

You probably mean the USAMO 2025 paper. They updated their comparison with Gemini 2.5 Pro, which did get a nontrivial score. That Gemini version was released five days after USAMO, so while it's not entirely impossible for the data to be in its training set, it would seem kind of unlikely.

https://x.com/mbalunovic/status/1907436704790651166

The claim is that these models are training on data which include the problems and explanations. The fact that the first model trained after the public release of the questions (and crowdsourced answers) performs best is not a counter example, but is expected and supported by the claim.

The same timing is actually suspicious. And it would not be the first time something like this happened.

I was noodling with Gemini 2.5 Pro a couple days ago and it was convinced Donald Trump didn’t win the 2024 election and that he conceded to Kamala Harris so I’m not entirely sure how much weight I’d put behind it.

What if the word "generic" were added to a lot of these image prompts? "generic image of an intergalactic bounty hunter from space" etc.

Certainly there's an aspect of people using the chat interface like they use google: describe xyz to try to surface the name of a movie. Just in this case, we're doing the (less common?) query of: find me the picture I can vaguely describe; but it's a query to a image /generating/ service, not an image search service.

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 at about 90% finished it deleted the image and said I was violating copyright.

https://imgur.com/a/eG6kmqu

I doubt the model you interact with actually knows why the babysitter model rejects images, but it claims to know why and leads to some funny responses. Here is it's response to me asking for a superhero with a dark bodysuit, a purple cape, a mouse logo on their chest, and a spooky mouse mask on their face.

> I couldn't generate the image you requested because the prompt involved content that may violate policy regarding realistic human-animal hybrid masks in a serious context.

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"

If Indiana Jones (for example) defines a genre, then 'generic' will produce Indiana Jones.

Idk, a couple of the examples might be generic enough that you wouldn't expect a very specific movie character. But most of the prompts make it extremely clear which movie character you would expect to see, and I would argue that the chat bot is working as expected by providing that.

Even if I'm thinking of an Indiana Jones-like character doesn't mean I want literally Indiana Jones. If I wanted Indiana Jones I could just grab a scene from the movie.

if someone gets Indiana on the suspiciously detailed request the author provided and it appears they wanted something else, they can clarify that to the chat bot, e.g. by copying this your comment.

I have a strong suspicion that many human artists would behave in a way the chat bot did (unless they start asking clarifying questions. Which chatbots should learn to do as well)

Good luck grabbing that Ghibli movie scene, where Indiana Jones arm-wrestles Lara Croft in a dive-bar, with Brian Flanagan serving a cocktail to Allan Quatermain in the background.

> I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with something that at least feels new.

Ironically that's probably because the errors and flaws in those generations at least made them different from what they were attempting to rip off.

It hallucinated, but we like that now!

I didn't say they were good, I said they were different lol

Yeah, I've been feeling the same. When a model spits out something that looks exactly like a frame from a movie just because I typed a generic prompt, it stops feeling like “generative” AI and more like "copy-paste but with vibes."

To my knowledge this happens when that single frame is overrepresented in its training data. For instance, variations of the same movie poster or screenshot may appear hundreds of times. Then the AI concludes that this is just a unique human cultural artifact, like the Mona Lisa (which I would expect many human artists could also reproduce from memory).

I'm not sure if this is a problem with overfitting. I'm ok with the model knowing what Indiana Jones or the Predator looks like with well remembered details, it just seems that it's generating images from that knowledge in cases where that isn't appropriate.

I wonder if it's a fine tuning issue where people have overly provided archetypes of the thing that they were training towards. That would be the fastest way for the model to learn the idea but it may also mean the model has implicitly learned to provide not just an instance of a thing but a known archetype of a thing. I'm guessing in most RLHF tests archetypes (regardless of IP status) score quite highly.

What I'm kind of concerned about is that these images will persist and will be reinforced by positive feedback. Meaning, an adventurous archeologist will be the same very image, forever. We're entering the epitome of dogmatic ages. (And it will be the same corporate images and narratives, over and over again.)

And it's worth considering that this issue isn't unique to image generation, either.

Santa didn't always wear red.

Granted, but not the best example, red and green are the emblematic colours elves wore in northern european cultures. Santa is somewhat syncretic with Robert Goodfellow or Robin Redbreast, Puck, Puca, etc etc. it wasn’t really a cola invention.

E.g., I think, there are now entire generations, who never played anything as a child that wasn't tied in with corporate IP in one way or the other.

Welcome to the great age of slop feedback loops.

> 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?"

If a graphics design company was using human artists to do the same thing that OpenAI is, they'd be sued out of existence.

But because a computer, and not a human does it, they get to launder their responsibility.

Doing what? Telling their artists to create what they want regardless of copyright and then filtering the output?

For humans it doesn't make sense because we have generation and filtering in a single package.

In this case the output wasn't filtered. They are just producing images of Harrison Ford, and I don't think they are allowed to use his likeness in that way.

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?

There is a difference between knowing what something looks like and generating an image of that thing.

Why? For fan content, using the original characters in new situations, mashups, new styles etc.

Probably an over-representation in the training data really so it's causing overfitting. Because using training data in amounts right from the Internet it's going to be opinionated on human culture (Bart Simpson is popular so there are lots of images of him, Ori is less well known so there are fewer images). Ideally it should be training 1:1 for everything but that would involve _so_ much work pruning the training data to have a roughly equal effect between categories.

Children run into their huts

Hail their father, drip with sweat:

"Fukuyama had deceived us!

History has no end."

It's not a single image though. Stitching 3 or so input images together clearly makes copyright laundering legal.

No it doesn't. Commercial intent (usually) makes it illegal, not the fact of copying.

So the criminal party here would be OpenAI, since they are selling access to a service that generates copyright-infringing images.

Why? Replace the context and not having that property is now called a hallucination.

Overall the model is tra

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 prompt neither forbade Indiana Jones nor did it describe something that excluded Indiana Jones.

If we were playing Charades, just about anyone would have guessed you were describing Indiana Jones.

If you gave a street artist the same prompt, you'd probably get something similar unless you specified something like "... but something different than Indiana Jones".

And… that is called overfitting. If you show the model values for y, but they are 2 in 99% of all cases, it’s likely going to yield 2 when asked about the value of y, even if the prompt didn’t specify or forbid 2 specifically.

I would argue this is just fitting.

If you take the perspective of all the possible responses to the request, then it is overfit because it only returns a non-generalized response.

But if you look at it from the perspective that there is only one example to learn, from it is maybe not over it.

> If you show the model values for y, but they are 2 in 99% of all cases, it’s likely going to yield 2 when asked about the value of y

That's not overfitting. That's either just correct or underfitting (if we say it's never returning anything but 2)!

Overfitting is where the model matches the training data too closely and has inferred a complex relationship using too many variables where there is really just noise.

The nice thing about humans is that not every single human being read almost every content present on the Internet. So yeah, a certain group of people would draw or think of Indiana Jones with that prompt, but not everyone. Maybe we will have different models with different trainings/settings that permits this kind of freedom, although I doubt it will be the commercial ones.

I mean, did anyone here read the prompt and not think “Indiana Jones”?

I didn't think it. I imagined a cartoonish chubby character in typical tan safari gear with a like-colored round explorer hat and swinging a whip like a lion tamer. He is mustachioed, light skin, and bespectacled. And I am well familiar with Dr. Jones.

Is HN the whole world? Isn't an AI model supposed to be global, since it has ingested the whole Internet?

How can you express, in term of AI training, ignoring the existence of something that's widely present in your training data set? if you ask the same question to a 18yo girl in rural Thailand, would she draw Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones? Maybe not. Or maybe she would.

But IMO an AI model must be able to provide a more generic (unbiased?) answer when the prompt wasn't specific enough.

Why should the AI be made to emulate a person naive to extant human society, tropes and customs? That would only make it harder for most people to use.

Maybe it would have some point if you are targetting users in a substantially different social context. In the case, you would design the model to be familiar with their tropes instead. So when they describe a character iconic in their culture, by a few distinguishing characteristics, it would produce that character for them. That's no different at all.

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".

Or even just 'obvious Indiana Jones knockoff who isn't literally Harrison Ford'. Comics do that kind of thing constantly for various obviously inspired but legally distinct characters.

What would most humans draw when you describe such a well known character by their iconic elements. Think if you deviated and acted a pedant about it people would think you're just trying to prove a point or being obnoxious.

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 "random character" button on the physical attributes a couple times.

There was an equally shatteringly-awful less-IP-theft (and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations).... An equally shattering recent incident for me. Having trouble finding it, don't remember the right keywords, but an article about how AI has a "default guy" type that it uses everywhere, a super generic personage, that it would use repeatedly. It was so distasteful.

The nature of 'AI as compression', as giving you the most median answer is horrific. Maybe maybe maybe we can escape some of this trap by iterating to different permutations, by injecting deliberate exploration of the state spaces. But I still fear AI, worry horribly when anyone relies on it for decision making, as it is anti-intelligent, uncreative in extreme, requiring human ingenuity to budge off its rock of oppressive hypernormality that it regurgitates.

Theft from whom and how?

Are you telling me that our culture should be deprived of the idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset?

Indiana Jones is 44 years old. When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done since humans first started sitting down next to a fire and telling stories?

edit: this reminds of this iconic scene from Dr. Strangelove, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ9B7owHxMQ

    Mandrake: Colonel... that Coca-Cola machine. I want you to shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.
   
   Guano: That's private property.
   
   Mandrake: Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame, outlook, way of life, and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of the United States? Can you imagine? Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twit!

   Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what's gonna happen to you?
   
   Mandrake: What?
   
   Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.

"idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset" is very different from the almost exact image of Indiana Jones.

And a reason people are getting ticked at the AI companies is the hypocrisy. They're near-universally arguing that it's okay for them to treat copyright in a way that it is illegal for us to, apparently on the basis of, "we've got a billions in investment capital, and applying the law equally will make it hard for us to get a return on that investment".

Hence why people should support open source AI, as otherwise, ironically, even more regulation will mean that only the big tech companies will be able to afford the licenses to content to train their AI.

I'm arguing it should be legal for everyone.

Exactly. The idea of Indiana Jones, the adventurer archaeologist more at home throwing a punch than reading a book, is neither owned by nor unique to Lucasfilm (Disney). There is a ton of media out there featuring this trope character [1]. Yes, the trope is overwhelmingly associated with the image of Harrison Ford in a fedora within the public consciousness, but copyright does not apply to abstract ideas such as tropes.

Some great video games to feature adventurer archaeologists:

* NetHack (One of the best roles in the game)

* Tomb Raider series (Lara Croft is a bona fide archaeologist)

* Uncharted series (Nathan Drake is more of a treasure hunter but he becomes an archaeologist when he retires from adventuring)

* Professor Layton series

* La-Mulana series (very obviously inspired by Indiana Jones, but not derivative)

* Spelunky (inspired by La-Mulana)

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventurerArchae...

As a connoisseur of bad as well as old movies I'd like to add The Librarian movies to this list, and The Mummy, where the first from 1932 stars the inimitable Boris Karloff as the lovesick undead.

Not forever. But 75 years after the death of the creator by current international agreement. I definitely think that the exact terms of copyright should be revisited - a lot of usages should be allowed like 50 years of publishing a piece of work. But that needs to be agreed upon and converted into law. Till then, one should expect everyone, especially large corporations, to stick to the law.

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.

Its kind of funny that everyone is harping this way or that way about IP.

This is a kind of strange comment for me to read. Because imby tone it sounds like a rebuttal? But by content, it agrees with a core thing I said about myself:

> and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations

What's just such a nightmare to me is that the tech is so normative. So horribly normative. This article shows that AI again and again reproduced only the known, only the already imagined. Its not that it's IP theft that rubs me so so wrong, it's that it's entirely bankrupt & uncreative, so very stuck. All this power! And yet!

You speak at what disgusts me yourself!

> When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done

The machine could be imagining all kinds of Indianas. Of all different remixed recreated expanded forms. But this pictures are 100% anything but that. They're Indiana frozen in Carbonite. They are the driest saddest prison of the past. And call into question the validity of AI entirely, show something greviously missing.

> All this power! And yet!

You are completely ignoring the fact that you can provide so much more information to the LLMs to get what you want. If you truly want novel images, ChatGPT can absolutely provide them, but you have to provide a better starting point than "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip".

If you just provide a teensy bit more information, the results dramatically change. Try out "An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". Or give it an input image to work with.

From just adding a couple words, ChatGPT produces an entirely new character. It's so easy to get it to produce novel images. It is so easy in fact, that it makes a lot of posts like this one feel like strawmen, intentionally providing so little information to the LLMs that the generic character is the only obvious output that you would expect.

Now, would it be better if it didn't default to these common movie tropes? Sure. But the fact that it can follow these tropes doesn't mean that it cannot also be used to produce entirely new images filled with your imagination as well. You just have to actually ask it for that.

[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.

Okay, I just read your top comment, and I agree with you on that. But it still doesn't take much to nudge these models off of the "default guy". So to write an entire melodramatic comment about how these models crush creativity is incredibly reductive. These models provide so much room for people to inject their own creativity into its outputs.

So yes, the models are not creative on their own. But equally, these models are definitely capable of helping people to express their own creativity, and so calling them "uncreative", and especially "bankrupt", rings hollow. It speaks like you are expecting the models to be artists, when in fact they are just tools to be used however people see fit.

And so, the "default guy" or "default style" that ChatGPT outputs will become recognisable and boring. But anyone who wants to inject their own style into their prompts, either using text or input images, can do so. And in doing so, they skip over all of your concerns.

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.

It strikes me that perhaps the prompts are not expansive or expressive enough. If you look at some of the prompts our new wave of prompt artists use to generate images in communities like midjourney, a single sentence doesn't cut it.

If AI is just compression, then decompressing a generic pop-culture-seeking prompt will yield a generic uninspired image.

Exactly. The AI understands that reference. It gives you what you asked for, it doesn't try to divine that it's a weird test for IP violations. If it made up a different image, that would be exactly the thing we're mad about with "hallucinations" when we want serious, accurate responses.

I have given detailed descriptions of my own novel ideas to these image generators and they have faithfully implemented my ideas. I don't need the bot to be creative, I can do that myself. The bot is a paint brush. Give it to somebody who isn't creative and you won't get anything creative out of it. That isn't the tool's fault, it's merely an inadequacy of the user.

I mean, at least shouldn't we wait until Harrison Ford has passed?

But I can hire an artist and ask him to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones, he creates a perfect copy and I hang it on my fridge. Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or other) laws? It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not the copyrighted IP.

> 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 trouble legally. They are making "copies" of things they don't own and profiting from it.

Another question is whether that's practically enforceable.

> Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or other) laws?

When they took payment and profited from making unauthorized copies.

> It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not the copyrighted IP.

Exactly, that's why LLMs and the companies which create them are called "theft machines" -- they are reproducing copyrighted material. Especially the ones charging for "tokens". You pay them, they make money and produce unauthorized copies. Show that picture of Indy to a jury and I think it's a good chance of convincing them.

I am not saying this is good or bad, I just see this having a legal "bite" so to speak, at least in my pedestrian view of copyright law.

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 design right where the likeness would need to be articulated AND registered. Many jurisdictions don’t require copyright registration and do not offer that sort of technical likeness registration.

If they traced a photo they might be violating the copyright of the photographer.

But if they are drawing an archaeologist adventurer with a whip and a hat based on their consumption and memory of Indiana Jones imagery there is very little anyone could do.

If that image was then printed on an industrial scale or printed onto t-shirt there is a (albeit somewhat theoretical) chance that in some jurisdictions sale of those products may be able to be restricted based on rights to the likeness. But that would be a stretch.

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.

I wasn’t talking about LLMs, I was talking about human artists.

With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it would be to do with the copyright in the image, the film, video or photograph. The image captures the likeness but the infringement would not be around the likeness.

> I wasn’t talking about LLMs

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was thinking of LLMs mostly.

> With the LLM it would be nothing to do with likeness, it would be to do with the copyright in the image

I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be about a character's likeness. It's not just a generic stock character, as an idea but it has enough distinctive characteristics, has a particular style hat, uses a whip. Showing that image to any jury and they'll say this is Indy. Yeah there are trademarks as well and both can apply to characters.

Trademarks can’t apply to characters, in themselves, no. A trademark can apply to a particular fixed representation but not the likeness, or ‘essence’ if you like. The essence of Indy is the whip, the hat, the grizzled demeanour, the dry humour, the archaeologist adventurer.

You can think of likeness as something that could be captured by hieroglyphics, or emoji - or a game of charades.

Think of Betty Boo or Wiley Coyote. You might not be able to close your eyes and picture them exactly but you can close your eyes and imagine the essence.

So in some jurisdictions if you register a broad representation - a likeness - you can protect that in law. In almost all jurisdictions if you photograph or draw something that literal snapshot is protected. But in many jurisdictions if I took a still from a scene of Indiana Jones (which WOULD be protected by copyright) and I described it to you and you were a great artist and drew the whip, the hat, the grizzled face, the safari vest, etc - there would be nothing to protect that likeness.

Trademarks are another thing entirely, and are things like logos, and the protection is more about commercial exploitation and preventing misleading us.

I could draw a cartoon logo of a man with a hat and a whip for my archaeological supplies shop. You could not take it and use it on your Chinese manufactured whips drop shipped via Amazon. But the owner of the Indiana Jones trademark- likeness rights, film copyright etc would be unlikely to be able to stop me using my logo until I start saying it is Indiana Jones, at which point they maybe invoke likeness rights.

There are at least three different rights classes here! It can be very confusing.

> Yeah there are trademarks as well and both can apply to characters.

I didn't say this was a trademark case just that there are multiple different aspects possible to the likeness issue.

> Or, you mean if the artist doesn't have a license to produce and distribute Indiana Jones images? Well they'll be in trouble legally. They are making "copies" of things they don't own and profiting from it.

Ok, my sister can draw, and she gifts me an image of my favorite Marvel hero she painted to hang on my wall. Should that be illegal?

The question is not whether it should but whether it is.

The likeness of the character is owned by Marvel. Does it mean there aren’t vendors selling unlicensed versions? No. I am sure there are. But just because not everyone is being sued doesn’t mean it’s suddenly legal.

straight to jail /s

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.

As far as I know, if you're speaking of the United States, the copyright of commissioned work is owned by the creator, unless otherwise agreed upon specifically through a "work made for hire" (i.e. copyright transfer) clause in the contract.

> Commissioned work is owned by the commissioner unless otherwise agreed upon by contract.

I think the LLM example is closer to the LLM and its creator being like a vendor selling pictures of Indiana Jones on the street corner than hiring someone and performing work for hire. Yes, if it was a human artist commissioned to create an art piece, then yeah, the commissioner owns it.

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.

> [If commissioning some work and] keeping the artwork on their refrigerator in their home, then no infringement has taken place.

I'd like to push back on this: Is that legally true, or is it infringement which just happens to be so minor and under-the-radar that nobody gets in trouble?

Suppose there's a printer in my room churning out hundreds of pages of words matching that of someone's copyrighted new book, without permission.

That sure seems like infringement is happening, regardless of whether my next step is to: (A) sell it, (B) sell many of it, (C) give it away, (D) place it into my personal library of other home-printed books, or (E) hand it to someone else who paid me in advance to produce it for them under contract.

If (A) is infringement, why wouldn't (E) also be?

Ownership of artwork is independent of copyright infringement. Derivative works qualify for their own independent copyright, you just can’t sell them until after the original copyright expires.

Just because I own my car doesn’t mean I can break the speed limit, these are orthogonal concepts legally.

That does infringe copyright...you're just unlikely to get in trouble for it. You might get a cease and desist if the owner of the IP finds out and can spare a moment for you.

Totally agree. LLM's are just automating that infringement process.

If you make money off it, it's no longer fair use; it's infringement. Even if you don't make money off it, it's not automatically fair use.

My own favorite crazy story about copyright violations:

Metallica sued Green Jello for parodying Enter Sandman (including a lyric where it says "It's not Metallica"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Harley_House_(of_Love...

They lost that case. The kicker? Metallica were guest vocalists on that album.

> LLM's are just automating that infringement process.

That's my take as well.

Gen AI is turning small potatos, "artisanal" infringement into a potentially large scale automated process.

This doesn't make any sense to me. No media is getting copied, unless the drawing is exactly the same as an existing drawing. Shouldn't "copy"right apply to specific, tangible artistic works? I guess I don't understand how the fantasy of "IP" works.

What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones but he's carrying a bow and arrow instead of a whip? Is it infringement?

What if it's a really bad drawing of Indiana Jones, so bad that you can't really tell that it's the character? Is that infringement?

What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones, but in the style of abstract expressionism, so doesn't even contain a human shape? Is it infringement?

What if it's a good drawing that looks very much like Indiana Jones, but it's not! The person's name is actually Iowa Jim. Is that infringement?

What if it's just an image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, but otherwise doesn't look anything like Indiana Jones? Is it infringement?

Here's some reading material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...

Wow, that's very informative, actually. It's surprisingly complex and leaves a lot up to the judgment and tastes of the legal system.

Presumably the artist is a human who directly or indirectly paid money to view a film containing an archaeologist with the whip.

I don't think this is about reproduction as much as how you got enough data for that reproduction. The riaa sent people to jail and ruined their lives for pirating. Now these companies are doing it and being valued for hundreds of billions of dollars.

You're right, it's not just about reproduction, it's about how the data was collected

Plus the scale of it all.

A human friend can get tired and there's so many request he/she can fulfill and at a max rate. Even a team of human artists have a relatively low limit.

But Gen AI has very high limits and speeds, and it never gets tired. It seems unfair to me.

The artist is violating copyright by selling you that picture. You can’t just start creating and distributing pictures of a copyrighted property. You need a license from the copyright holder.

You also can’t sell a machine that outputs such material. And that’s how the story with GenAI becomes problematic. If GenAI can create the next Indiana Jones or Star Wars sequel for you (possibly a better one than Disney makes, it has become a low bar of sorts), I think the issue becomes obvious.

I think framing this as "IP theft" is a mistake.

Nobody can prevent you from drawing a photo realistic picture of Indy, or taking a photo of him from the internet and hanging it on your fridge. Or asking a friend to do it for you. And let's be honest -- because nobody is looking -- said friend could even charge you a modest sum to draw a realistic picture of Indy for you to hang on your fridge; yes, it's "illegal" but nobody is looking for this kind of small potatos infringement.

I think the problem is when people start making a business out of this. A game developer could think "hey, I can make a game with artwork that looks just like Ghibli!", where before he wouldn't have anyone with the skills or patience to do this (see: the 4-second scene that took a year to make), now he can just ask the Gen AI to make it for them.

Is it "copyright infringement"? I dunno. Hard to tell, to be honest. But from an ethical point of view, it seems odd. And before you actually required someone to take the time and effort to copy the source material, now it's an automated and scalable process that does this, and can do this and much more, faster and without getting tired. "Theft at scale", maybe not so small potatos anymore.

--

edit: nice, downvotes. And in the other thread people were arguing HN is such a nice place for dissenting opinions.

I believe when we talk about this there's a big misunderstanding between Copyright, Trademarks, and Fair use.

Indy, with its logo, whiplash, and hat, is a trademark from Disney. I don't know the specific stuff; but if you sell a t-shirt with Indiana Jones, or you put the logo there... you might be sued due to trademark violation.

If you make copies of anything developed, sold, or licensed by Disney (movies, comics, books, etc) you'll have a copyright violation.

The issue we have with AI and LLM is that: - The models compress information and can make a lot of copies of it very cheaply. - Artist wages are quite low. Higher that what you'd pay OpenAI, but not enough to make a living even unless you're hired by a big company (like Marvel or DC) and they give you regular work ($100-120 for a cover, $50-80/page interior work. One page needs about one day to draw.) - AI used a lot of images from the internet to train models. Most of them were pirated. - And, of course, it is replacing low-paying jobs for artist.

Also, do not forget it might make verbatim copies of copyrighted art if the model just memorized the picture / text.

I would argue that countless games have already been made by top tier professional artists that IP-Steal the Ghibli theme.

Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom should be included there.

I don't think those look like Ghibli. Maybe they drew inspiration, but are different enough. I would never confuse one for the other.

Regardless, those games required the hard work and countless hours of animators. Gen AI doesn't.

Depends on if you paid him or not. If he sold it to you, then he is infringing on Disney’s IP and depriving them of that revenue.

If you're paying for tokens used to generate that...

Then the service that sold you tokens and delivered copyright infringing content is violating the law

Can we not call it "theft"? It's such a loaded term and doesn't really mean the same thing when we're talking about bits and bytes.

OK, but then we need a common standard. If Facebook is allowed to use libgen, I should also be allowed.

Correct. Legalize them both.

Only if we stop calling software distribution "piracy" under the false pretenses that anything is being stolen.

I'm OK with that too!

> Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine.

I mean... If I go to Google right now and do an image search for "archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip," the first picture is a not-even-changed image of Indiana Jones. Which I will then copy and paste into whatever project I'm working on without clicking through to the source page (usually because the source page is an ad-ridden mess).

Perhaps the Internet itself is the hideous theft machine, and AI is just the most efficient permutation of user interface onto it.

(Incidentally, if you do that search, you will also, hilariously, turn up images of an older gentleman dressed in a brown coat and hat who is clearly meant to be "The Indiana Jones you got on Wish" from a photo-licensing site. The entire exercise of trying to extract wealth via exclusive access to memetic constructs is a fraught one).

Your position cannot distinguish stealing somebody's likeness and looking at them.

I agree without argument. I have also thoroughly enjoyed the animatronic dead Presidents at Disney World.

The key difference is that the google example is clearly copying someone elses work and there are plenty of laws and norms that non-billionaires need to follow. If you made a business reselling the image you copied you would expect to get in trouble and have to stop. But AI companies are doing essentially the same thing in many cases and being rewarded for it.

The hypocrisy is much of the problem. If we're going to have IP laws that severely punish people and smaller companies for reselling the creative works of others without any compensation or permission then those rules should apply to powerful well-connected companies as well.

> 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 festival tickets) but it's the heart and the detail that make them what they are. You cannot clone that. Just some surface similarity. If that's all you like about the movies... you really missed the point.

Imagine if in early cinema someone had tried to claim mustachioed villian, ditsy blonde, or dumb jock? These are just tropes and styles. Quality work goes much much much deeper, and that cannot be synthesised. I can AI generate a million engagement rings, but I cannot pick the perfect one that fits you and your partners love story.

PS- the best work they did was "When Marnie was There". Just fitted together perfectly.

The engagement ring is a good example object, but I feel it serves the opposite argument better.

If engagement rings were as ubiquitous and easy to generate as Ghibli images have become, they would lose their value very quickly -- not even just in the monetary sense, but the sentimental value across the market would crash for this particular trinket. It wouldn't be about picking the right one anymore, it would be finding some other thing that better conveys status or love through scarcity.

If you have a 3d printer you'd know this feeling where abundance diminishes the value of something directly. Any pure plastic items you have are reduced to junk very quickly once you know you can basically have anything on a whim (exceptions for things with utility, however these are still printable). If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner wouldn't want any of them as a show of my undying love. Something more special and rare and thoughtful would have to take its place.

This isn't meant to come across as shallow in any way, its just classic supply and demand relating to non monetary value.

>If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner wouldn't want any of them as a show of my undying love. Something more special and rare and thoughtful would have to take its place.

And now I think this serves the opposite argument better. Downloading some random ring from the internet would not show your undying love. Designing a custom ring just for your partner, even if it is made from plastic, and even if you use AI as a tool in the process, is where the value is generated.

This is only true where it is distinguishable that the end result is made with care and love rather than indiscriminate copying. Which is why attribution is essential. No one realistically could tell a ring was hand crafted or mass produced if there wasn't some tell. Some people may say the "tell" is a kind of intuitive nebulous concept of the "soul" of the animation.. but I feel we are quickly approaching the point where this is no longer obvious.

As an aside, my partner detests the things I 3d print unless they have a very specific purpose, even when they are random semi artistic pieces I'm tinkering with (and I typically agree, they are junk). She loves the first thing i ever printed her though, a triceratops model, despite being randomly downloaded.

Anything made with intent from one individual to another will have some level of sentimental value, but I don't feel like making a ghibli image with AI specifically tailored to a friends tastes would have quite as much value as leveraging your own talent to do it yourself.

On the flip side, I do believe that "doing it yourself" has less value than it used to. It's a very sad reality and in my opinion a strong argument against blind "progress". We gain the ability to mass produce art but lose the ability to perceive it as art?

> This is only true where it is distinguishable that the end result is made with care and love rather than indiscriminate copying. Which is why attribution is essential. No one realistically could tell a ring was hand crafted or mass produced if there wasn't some tell.

It doesn't matter if the ring was hand crafted or not. It's whether it has hand selected. If you find the perfect ring, even if it was generated by an AI, it's your selection that matters. It's the correspondence that matters. The way it reflects elements of your relationship. It's you recognising those elements in the ring. Your partner recoginising them in the ring. And your partner recognising you recognising them. That is what makes itself.

Not to dox myself, but I am not Grace Abrams. I met my partner long before her song "Risk" was written, but when I heard it I immediately played it for my partner and said "This describes the feelings I had when I met you". I played it for her, she cried. I didn't have to write the song or own or pay a cent for it. It's the curation that made an emotional connection and had value. The song itself has no value, and she might have even heard it and never made the connection, it was me embuing that had value.

To go back to Miyazaki, it's the connections between elements in his films. The attention to detail and tone between relationships that make his films amazing. It's all about the handyman's invoice [0]. By the time there are enough examples for AI to learn something, it ceases to be a novel insight and have value. It's the curation and application that have value and are human and cannot be stolen.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/

> 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.

I have interacted with the parent account before and have actually looked at the the amount of times they used words like awful, horrific, etc, and I definitely agree, as one should not have such a strong attachment to such words that they feel the need to continue to use (or rather, abuse) them endlessly.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

>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.

How is it different from fan art, which is legal.

Interesting proposal. Maybe if race or sex or height or eye color etc isn't given, and the LLM determines there's no reason not to randomize in this case (avoid black founding fathers), the backend could tweak its own prompt by programatically inserting a few random traits to the prompt.

If you describe an Indiana Jones character, but no sex, 50/50 via internal call to rand() that it outputs a woman.

> Obviously a horrible hideous theft machine [...] awful [...] horriffic

Ah, I thought I knew this account from somewhere. It seems surprisingly easy to figure out what account is commenting just based on the words used, as I've commented that only a few active people on this site seem to use such strong words as shown here.

So if it’s a theft machine, how is the answer to try teaching it to hide the fact that it’s stealing by changing its outputs? That’s like a student plagiarizing an essay and then swapping some words with a thesaurus pretending that changes anything.

Wouldn’t the more appropriate solution in the case of theft be to remunerate the victims and prevent recidivism?

Instead of making it “not so obviously bad” why not just… make it good? Require AI services to either prove that 100% of their training corpus is either copyright free or properly licensed, or require them to compensate copyright holders for any infringing outputs.

(below is my shallow res, maybe naive?) That might inject a ton of $ into "IP", doing further damage to the creative commons. How can we support remix culture for humans, while staving off ultimately-destructive AI slop? Maybe copyleft / creative-commons licenses w/ explicit anti-AI prohibitions? Tho that could have bad ramifications too. ALL of this makes me kind of uncomfortable and sad, I want more creativity and fewer lawyers.

> doing further damage to the creative commons

Not sure I understand this part. Because creators would be getting paid for their works being used for someone else’s commercial gain?

Because it reinforces the idea that creative works should usually involve lawyers.

No it doesn’t. It reinforces that copyright is the law. If you don’t violate someone’s copyright, you don’t need a lawyer.

I don't think AI is doomed to be uncreative but it definitely needs human weirdness and unpredictability to steer it

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

Do google pay anyone when I use image search and the results are straight from their website?

This was decided in court[1] over two decades as acceptable fair-use and that thumbnail images do not constitute a copyright violation.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=137674209419772...

Looks to me like OpenAI drew their guardrails somewhere along a financial line. Generate a Micky Mouse or a Pikachu? Disney and Pokemon will sue the sh*t out of you. Ghibli? Probably not powerful enough to risk a multimillion years long court battle.

Strong with the weak, weak with the strong.

This one is a keeper.

I thought Disney had the rights to publish Ghibli movies in the US.

They did, but the rights expired. GKIDS now has the theatrical and home video rights to Studio Ghibli films in the US (except for Grave of the Fireflies).

Mickey Mouse (the original one) is out of copyright, as of last year, AFAIR.

Ghibli isn’t a character, but a style. You can’t copyright it.

Yes, the only test will eventually be "Can you train AI on copyrighted works"

I consider this article quite strong proof that generative AI is closer to copying than it is to creating a new derivative work.

For the downvotes:

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

“Copyright does not protect • Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, or discoveries”

Not sure why this is even controversial, this has been the case for a hundred years.

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 labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.

It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.

A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.

AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.

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 there's character movement with a purpose, even in the background, there's always something happening in the animation, there's life.

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?

Yes, that the current trend in the western world. Money is all that matters. There's only lowest accepted quality. Anything above that is a waste of money, profits that are lost. Nobody wants masterpieces. There is no market for that.

That lowest-accepted quality also declines over time, as generations after generations of people become used to rock-bottom quality. In the end, there's only slop and AI will make the cheapest slop ever. Welcome to a brave new world. We don't even need people anymore. They're too expensive.

To be fair, we've already been through this cycle at least once with animation. The difference between early Disney or even Looney Tunes and (say) late '60s Hanna-Barbera or '80s He-Man is enormous. Since then there has been generally higher-quality animation rather than lower (though I know it varies a lot by country, genre etc.)

It's not inevitable that it's a race to the cheapest and shittest. That's just one (fairly strong) commercial force amongst many.

I don't think that's true at all. There might be (and probably are) tens of thousands of artists creating masterful artwork at home.

But you're talking about PAID artwork, and yes: when it comes to paid art, money does matter.

You can't expect artists to completely ignore financial incentives, and at the same time expect the creative industry to just throw lots of money at these artists. That's just not how (capitalist) businesses work.

The world absolutely does care for super high quality artwork. But very few people are willing to pay $2000 for a movie ticket when they could also go to 100 $20 movies.

On top of that: who gets to decide what is high quality, anyway? The creative world is fraught with corruption, elitism and "who knows who", making it very unlikely that a highly talented artist is ever even "discovered".

It's a lot more complicated then just "money is all that matters".

And finally: I don't think this "trend" is just in the western world. Show me a place in the world where artists are rewarded based on purely the quality of their work, rather than the profitability of their work.

anyone _can_ see it, but _most_ people don't (and don't care)

To be clear, I am not saying it's not valuable, only that to the vast majority, it's not.

I wonder if really great stuff are always for a minority. You have to have listened a lot of classical music to notice a great interpretation of Mozart from a good one. To realize how great was a chess move, how magical was a soccer play, how deep was the writing of a philosopher. Not only for stuff that requires previous effort, but also the subjectiveness of art. Picasso will be really moving for a minority of people. The Godfather. Even Shakespeare.

Social media and generative AI may be good business because the capture the attention of the majority, but maybe they are not valuable to anyone.

I think of a lot of thing in terms of distributions, and I think the how-much-people-value-quality distribution is not that much different.

On the right side, you have the minority of connoisseurs. And on the left, there is a minority who really don't care at all. And then the middle majority who can tell bad from good, but not good from great.

Yep, and what if good things only exist because they were created by and for those who can tell good from great.

> but _most_ people don't (and don't care)

Perhaps it's not for everyone.

Many things you don't notice consciously unless you take the time to look but they still affect your overall perception. I suspect highly detailed animations fall into that category.

Seeing something like this or Akira on the big screen there is an analogue patina to meticulous hand drawn motion and some of the effects like the physically process glow effects of the neon lights in Akira that do give a very different feeling than a CG shot.

Although only a few will really appreciate why it's different I definitely think the difference has a heavy effect on the vibe of a movie.

Same with shooting on film vs digital, not that digital is worse it has it's own feeling which can be used with intent.

I think you’re right that most people don’t notice, but without the extra effort, it would’ve ended up as just another mediocre animation. And standing out from mediocrity is what made it appealing to many people.

Who cares if it's valuable for the majority? What do you think this is? Stock market for slop?

This is art.

So what?

> It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to

In this case, yes it is.

People do pay attention to the result overall. Studio Ghibli has got famous because people notice what they produce.

Now people might not notice every single detail but I believe that it is this overall mindset and culture that enables the whole unique final product.

I think most like the vibes, not the fact it took ages to make.

Its the quality or level of detail.

Which might indicate an environment were quality is above quantity

I think soon we might see whether that is the case or not.

Fundamentally I think this comes down to answering the question of "why are you creating this?".

There are many valid answers.

Maybe you want to create it to tell a story, and you have an overflowing list of stories you're desperate to tell. The animation may be a means to an end, and tools that help you get there sooner mean telling more stories.

Maybe you're pretty good at making things people like and you're in it for the money. That's fine, there are worse ways to provide for your family than making things people enjoy but aren't a deep thing for you.

Maybe you're in it because you love the act of creating it. Selling it is almost incidental, and the joy you get from it comes down to spending huge amounts of time obsessing over tiny details. If you had a source of income and nobody ever saw your creations, you'd still be there making them.

These are all valid in my mind, and suggest different reasons to use or not to use tools. Same as many walks of life.

I'd get the weeds gone in my front lawn quickly if I paid someone to do it, but I quite enjoy pottering around on a sunny day pulling them up and looking back at the end to see what I've achieved. I bake worse bread than I could buy, and could buy more and better bread I'm sure if I used the time to do contracting instead. But I enjoy it.

On the other hand, there are things I just want done and so use tools or get others to do it for me.

One positive view of AI tools is that it widens the group of people who are able to achieve a particular quality, so it opens up the door for people who want to tell the story or build the app or whatever.

A negative side is the economics where it may be beneficial to have a worse result just because it's so much cheaper.

> 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

I remember the discourse on HN a few years ago when GitHub Copilot came out, and well, people were missing the fact that the GitHub terms and conditions (T&C) explicitly permits usage of code for analytic purposes (of which training is implicitly part), so it turns out that if one did not want such training, they should not have hosted on GitHub in the first place, because the website T&C was clear as day.

>It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.

If they didn't spend a year on it they wouldn't be copied now.

To me the question of what activity/method is more "valuable" in the context of art is kind of missing the point of art.

Oooh those guardrails make me angry. I get why they are there (dont poke the bear) but it doesn't make me overlook the self serving hypocrisy involved.

Though I am also generally opposed to the notion of intellectual property whatsoever on the basis that it doesn't seem to serve its intended purpose and what good could be salvaged from its various systems can already be well represented with other existing legal concepts, i.e deceptive behaviors being prosecuted as forms of fraud.

The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them.

(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)

I don't care for this line of argument. It's like saying you can't hold a position that trespassing should be illegal while also holding that commercial businesses should be legally required to have public restrooms. Yes, both of these positions are related to land rights and the former is pro- while the latter is anti-, but it's a perfectly coherent set of positions. OpenAI can absolutely be anti-copyright in the sense of whether you can train an an NN on copyrighted data and pro-copyright in the sense of whether you can make an exact replica of some data and sell it as your own without making it into hypocrisy territory. It does suggest they're self-interested, but you have to climb a mountain in Tibet to find anybody who isn't.

Arguments that make a case that NN training is copyright violation are much more compelling to me than this.

No, the exception they are asking for (we can train on copyrighted material and the image produced is non-copyright infringing) is copyright infringing in the most basic sense.

I'll prove it by induction: Imagine that I have a service where I "train" a model on a single image of Indiana Jones. Now you prompt it, and my model "generates" the same image. I sell you this service, and no money goes to the copyright holder of the original image. This is obviously infringment.

There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different, besides the fact that the lines are blurred by the model weights not being parseable

>There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different

You gloss over this as if it's a given. I don't agree. I think you're doing a different thing when you're sampling billions of things equallly.

The root problem is that the model reproduces Indiana Jones instead of creating a new character. This contradicts the statement that the model "learns" and "creates" like a human artist and not merely copies; obviously a human artist would not plagiarize when asked to draw a character.

> the model reproduces Indiana Jones

the model isn't the one infringing. It's the end user inputting the prompt.

The model itself is not a derivative work, in the same way that an artist and photoshop aren't a derivative work when they reproduce indiana jones's likeness.

The end user didn't ask for Indiana Jones though.

That does not seem obvious at all. Fan art and referencing is a thing, and there are plenty of examples of AI creating characters that do not exist anywhere in the training dataset.

That's why I said it's an argument by induction. Where's the limit for it to be different? 10 images? 100? 10000? Where does it stop being copyright infringement and why? Many people have paid heavy fines for much less. I don't think that "a billion images is so unfathomable compared to just one million that it truly is a difference in kind" is a valid response

The example you gave with public restroom do not work because of two main concept: They are usually getting paid for it by the government, and operating a company usually holds benefits given by the government. Industry regulations as a concept is generally justified in that industry are getting "something" from society, and thus society can put in requirements in return.

A regulation that require restaurants to have a public bathroom is more akin to regulation that also require restaurants to check id when selling alcohol to young customers. Neither requirement has any relation with land rights, but is related to the right of operating a company that sell food to the public.

> The example you gave with public restroom do not work because of two main concept: They are usually getting paid for it by the government, and operating a company usually holds benefits given by the government.

This is not the case in the US yet many places still have public restrooms, due to it benefiting the users themselves regardless of government.

But what if businesses got benefits from society and tax money and were free to ignore the needs/desires of those who pay taxes and who society consists of? That seems just about right.

I guess the best explanation for what we're witnessing is the notion that 'Money Talks', and sadly nothing more. To think thats all that fair use activists lacked in years passed..

It's not just the guardrails, but the ham-fisted implementation.

Grok is supposed to be "uncensored", but there are very specific words you just can't use when asking it to generate images. It'll just flat out refuse or give an error message during generation.

But, again, if you go in a roundabout way and avoid the specific terms you can still get what you want. So why bother?

Is it about not wanting bad PR or avoiding litigation?

The implementation is what gets to me too. Fair enough that a company doesn't want their LLM used in a certain way. That's their choice, even if it's just to avoid getting sued.

How they then go about implementing those guardrails is pretty telling about their understand and control over what they've build and their line of thinking. Clearly, at no point before releasing their LLMs onto the world did anyone stop and ask: Hey, how do we deal with these things generating unwanted content?

Resorting to blocking certain terms in the prompts is like searching for keywords in spam emails. "Hey Jim, I got another spam email from that Chinese tire place" - "No worry boss, I've configured the mail server to just delete any email containing the words China or tire".

Some journalist should go to a few of these AI companies and start asking questions about the long term effectiveness and viability of just blocking keywords in prompts.

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 interesting.

"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we build this sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return."

That's a statement I wouldn't even dream about making today.

> 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?

Novelty in one medium arises from novelty in others, shifts to the external environment.

We got brass bands with brass instruments, synth music from synths.

We know therefore, necessarily, that they can be nothing novel from an LLM -- it has no live access to novel developments in the broader environment. If synths were invented after its training, it could never produce synth music (and so on).

The claim here is trivially falsifiable, and so obviously so that credulous fans of this technology bake it in to their misunderstanding of novelty itself: have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.

Yet an artist which paints with a new kind of black pigment can, trivially so.

> arises from novelty in others, shifts to the external environment

> Everything is simply a blend of prior work.

I generally consider these two to be the same thing. If novelty is based on something else, then it's highly derivative and its novelty is very questionable.

A quantum random number generator is far more novel than the average human artist.

> have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.

Put someone in jail for the last 15 years, and ask them to make a smartphone. They obviously cannot do it either.

So if your point is an LLM is something like a person kept in a coma inside solitary confinement -- sure? But I don't believe that's where we set the bar for art: we arent employing comatose inmates to do anything.

> I generally consider these two to be the same thing.

Sure words themselves bend and break under the weight of hype. Novelty is randomness. Everything is a work of art. For a work of art to be non-novel it can only incorporate randomness.

The fallacies of ambiguity abound to the point where speaking coherently disappears completely.

An artist who finds a cave half-collapsed for the first time has an opportunity to render that novel physical state of the universe into art. Every moment which passes has a near infinite amount of such novel circumstances.

Since an LLM cannot do that, we must wreck and ruin our ability to describe this plain and trivial situation. Poke our eyes and skewer our brains.

> Sure words themselves bend and break under the weight of hype. Novelty is randomness. Everything is a work of art. For a work of art to be non-novel it can only incorporate randomness.

> Since an LLM cannot do that, we must wreck and ruin our ability to describe this plain and trivial situation. Poke our eyes and skewer our brains.

Change the temperature of a model, and you will have your randomness.

There is no explanation of how a biological brain can have randomness but a silicon process cannot.

Kind of a weird take that excludes the vast majority of human artwork that most people would consider novel. For all the complaints one might have of cubism, few would claim it's not novel. And yet it's not based on any new development in the external world but rather on mashing together different perspectives. Someone could have created the style 100 years earlier if they were so inclined, and had Picasso never existed, someone could create the novel style today just by "remixing" ideas from past art in that very particular way.

I would argue that Picasso's life experiences, the environments he grew up and lived in, the people he interacted with, and the world events that took place in his life (like the world wars) were the external developments that led to the development of cubism. Sure, an AI could take in and analyze the works that existed prior, but it couldn't have the emotional reaction that occurred en masse after WWI and started the breakdown of more classical forms of art and the development/rise of more abstract forms of art.

Or, as the kids might say, AI couldn't feel the vibe shift occurring in the world at the time.

Of course Picasso's life experience influenced what he chose to make. This isn't what the parent comment is talking about.

The claim was that current LLMs (though I assume they meant generative AI in general, since we're talking about image generation rather than text) are unable to produce anything novel. Meaning they either don't think Picasso's work is novel, or they don't think a human could have prompted an AI to make a new type of abstract art before having trained it on it. Whether the AI would want to do this is irrelevant. AIs don't want anything. They do what a human prompted. And while WWI may have shaped Picasso, learning data from WWI isn't necessary in order to make a cubist painting when prompted to stitch multiple perspectives into a painting. It's blending perspectives that are available from old data. And blending things in a new way is novelty. Most novel art falls into that category.

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?

No one here claimed the AI models made something truly new.

The commenter flessner asserted it couldn't, despite having no way to demonstrate it. They are passing off faith as fact.

Assuming someone did want to show AI models can make new stuff...

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

This isn't even that hard. You just need to know what images are your training data when you train your model. A researcher with a small grant could do this.

The problem with generating genuinely new art is it requires "inputs" that aren't art. It's requires life experiences.

Disregarding the (common!) assumption that AGI will consist of one monolithic LLM instead of dozens of specialized ones, I think your comment fails to invoke an accurate, consistent picture of creativity/"truly new" cognition.

To borrow Chomsky's framework: what makes humans unique and special is our ability to produce an infinite range of outputs that nonetheless conform to a set of linguistic rules. When viewed in this light, human creativity necessarily depends on the "linguistic rules" part of that; without a framework of meaning to work within, we would just be generating entropy, not meaningful expressions.

Obviously this applies most directly to external language, but I hope it's clear how it indirectly applies to internal cognition and--as we're discussing here--visual art.

TL;DR: LLMs are definitely creative, otherwise they wouldn't be able to produce semantically-meaningful, context-appropriate language in the first place. For a more empirical argument, just ask yourself how a machine that can generate a poem or illustration depicting [CHARACTER_X] in [PLACE_Y] doing [ACTIVITY_Z] in [STYLE_S] without being creative!

[1] Covered in the famous Chomsky v. Foucault debate, for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

This may not be apparent to an english speaker as the language has a rather fixed set of words, but in German, where creating new words is common, the lack of linguistic creativity is obvious.

As an example, let's talk about "vibe coding" - It's a new term describing heavy LLM usage in programming, usually associated with Generation Z.

If I am asking an LLM to generate a German translation for "vibe coder" it comes up with the neutral "Vibe-Programmierer". When asking it to be more creative it came up with "Schwingungsschmied" ("vibration smith"?) - What?

I personally came up with the following words:

* Gefühlsprogrammierer ("A programmer, that focuses on intuition and feeling.")

* Freischnauzeprogrammierer ("Free-mouthed programmer - highlighting straightforwardness and the creative expression of vibe coding." - colloquial)

Interesstingly, LLMs can describe both these terms, they just can't create them naturally. I tested this on all major LLMs and the results were similar. Generating a picture of a "vibe coder" also highlights more of a moody atmosphere instead of the Generation Z aspects that are associated with it on social media nowadays.

> a machine that can generate a poem or illustration depicting [CHARACTER_X] in [PLACE_Y] doing [ACTIVITY_Z] in [STYLE_S] without being creative

Your example disproves itself; that's a madlib. It's not creative, it's just rolling the dice and filling in the blanks. Complex die and complex blanks are a difference of degree only, not creativity.

It's not filling in the blanks that's impressive, it's meaningfully combining them all into an objectively unique narrative, building upon those blanks at length.

Definitions are always up for debate on instrumental grounds, but I'm dubious of any definition of "creative" that excludes truly unique yet meaningful artifacts. The only thing past that is ineffable stuff, which is inherently not very helpful for scientific discussion.

[flagged]

Oliver Cromwell, a letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 3 August 1650

I don't see why this is an issue? The prompts imply obvious and well-known characters, and don't make it clear that they want an original answer. Most humans would probably give you similar answers if you didn't add an additional qualifier like "not Indiana Jones". The only difference is that a human can't exactly reproduce the likeness of a famous character without significant time and effort.

The real issue here is that there's a whole host of implied context in human languages. On the one hand, we expect the machine to not spit out copyrighted or trademarked material, but on the other hand, there's a whole lot of cultural context and implied context that gets baked into these things during training.

I think the point is that for a lot of them there are endless possible alternatives to the character design, but it still generates one with the exact same design. Why can't, for example, the image of Tomb Raider have a different colored tank top? Why is she wearing a tank top and not a shirt? Why does she have to have a gun? Why is she a busty, attractive brunette? These are all things that could be different but the dominance of Lara Croft's image and strong association with the words "tomb raider" in popular culture clearly influences the model's output.

Because it's not clear that that's what you want. What's the context? Are we playing a game where I guess a character? Is it a design session for a new character based on a well known one, maybe a sidekick? Is it a new take on an old character? Are you just trying to remember what a well-known character looks like, and giving a brief prompt?

It's not clear what the asker wants, and the obvious answer is probably the culturally relevant one. Hell, I'd give you the same answers as the AI did here if I had the ability to spit out perfect replicas.

And how is that bad or surprising? It’s actually what I would expect from how AI works.

Exactly. We designed systems that work on attention and inference… and then surprised that it returns popular results?

It's an IP theft machine. Humans wouldn't be allowed to publish these pictures for profit, but OpenAI is allowed to "generate" them?

I would 100% be allowed to draw an image of Indiana Jones in illustrator. There is no law against me drawing his likeness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...

I don't think those links support the point you are trying to make (i assume you are disagreeing with parent). Copyright law is a lot more complex then just a binary, and fictional characters certainly don't enjoy personality rights.

harrison ford certainly does

edit - also, I wasn't making a binary claim, the person I was responding to was: "no law". There are more than zero laws relevant to this situation. I agree with you that how relevant is context dependent.

Copyright protection doesn't prevent an illustrator from drawing the thing.

but selling it is another and these ai companies sell their IP theft with a monthly subscription.

You wouldn't be able to offer a service to draw 1 to 1 recreations of Indiana Jones movie frames, though...

No, you aren't allowed to monetize an image of Indiana Jones even if you made it yourself.

That depends. There are situations where you are. Satire in particular would be a common one, but there can be others.

Rules around copyright (esp. Fair use) can be very context dependent.

Those are the exceptions that confirm the rule, as they say.

You 100% wouldn't be allowed to sell your Indiana Jones drawing services.

But would you be allowed to publish it in the same way the AI companies do?

I'm honestly trying to wrap my head around the law here because copyright is often very confusing.

If I ask an artist to draw me a picture of Indiana Jones and they do it would that be copyright infringement? Even if it's just for my personal use?

Probably that would be a derrivative work. Which means the original owner would have some copyright in it.

It may or may not be fair use, which is a complicated question (ianal).

IANAL, but if OpenAI makes any money/commercial gains from producing a Ghibli-esque image when you ask, say you pay a subscription to OpenAI. What percentage of that subscription is owed to Ghibli for running Ghibli art through OpenAI's gristmill and providing the ability to create that image with that "vibe/style" etc. How long into perpetuity is OpenAI allowed to re-use that original art whenever their model produces said similar image. That seems to be the question.

Yeah that's fair, I'm trying to create an analogy to other services which are similar to help me understand.

If e.g. Patreon hosts an artist who will draw a picture of Indiana Jones for me on commission, then my money is going to both Patreon and the artist. Should Patreon also police their artists to prevent reproducing any copyrighted characters?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Derivative_works has some commentary on how this works you might find interesting

Thanks for the link.

I get that copyright is a bit of a minefield, and there's some clear cases that should not be allowed, e.g. taking photos of a painting and selling them

That said, I still get the impression that the laws are way too broad and there would be little harm if we reduced their scope. I think we should be allowed to post pictures of Pokemon toys to Wikipedia for example.

I'm willing to listen to other points of view if people want to share though

Keep in mind that wikimedia takes a rather strict view. In real life the edge cases of copyright tend to be a bit risk-based - what is the chance someone sues you? What is the chance the judge agrees with them?

Not to mention that wikimedia commons, which tries to be a globally reusable repository ignores fair use (which is context dependent), which covers a lot of the cases where copyright law is just being reduculous.

I would think yes. Consider the alternate variation where the artist proactively draws Indiana Jones, in all his likeness, and attempts to market and sell it. The same exchange is ultimately happening, but this clearly is copyright infringement.

To me a lot has to do with what a human does with them one the tool generates them no?

Won't somebody think of the billionaire IP holders? The horror.

And the small up and coming artists whose work is also stolen, AI-washed, and sold to consumers for a monthly fee, destroying the market for those up and coming artists to sell original works. You don't get to pretend this is only going to hurt big players when there are already small players whose livelihoods have been ruined.

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Normally (well, if you're ethical) credit is given.

Also, there are IP limits of various sorts (e.g. copyright, trademark) for various purposes (some arguably good, some arguably bad), and some freedoms (e.g., fair use). There's no issue if this follows the rules... but I don't see where that's implemented here.

It looks like they may be selling IP they don't own the right to.

Overfitting is generally a sign of a useless model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting

His point is that it's only overfitting if the model won't return new content when you clarify you're not just asking for the obvious answer from the context.

So many arguing that "copyright shouldn't be a thing" etc., ad nauseam, which is a fine philosophical debate. But it's also the law. And that means ChatGPT et. al. also have to follow the law.

I really, really hope the multimedia-megacorps get together and class-action ChatGPT and every other closed, for-profit LLM corporation into oblivion.

There should not be a two-tier legal system. If it's illegal for me, it's illegal for Sam Altman.

Get to it.

> There should not be a two-tier legal system.

That’s a fine philosophical debate, but the law is designed by the rich to favor the rich and while there are a number of exceptions there is little you can do with the legal system without money and lots of it. So while having a truly just system would be neat it just isn’t in the cards for humanity (IMHO) so long as we allow entities to amass “fuck you” money and wield it to their liking.

There is more to it than copyright when you start going down the path of photorealism. As much as it is a picture of Indiana jones, it is also a picture of Harrison Ford. As fun as it is to make hilarious videos of presidents sucking ceo toes, there has to be a line.

There is a lack of consent here that runs even deeper than what copyright was traditionally made to protect. It goes further than parody. We can't flip our standards back and forth depending on who the image is made to reproduce

I fully agree. But since the average Joe has no chance legally against ChatGPT, at least Disney and other megacorps could.

Sorry, but have you paid attention to the legal system in the states?

Large corporations and their execs live by different laws than the rest of us.

That’s how it is.

Anything is else is, unfortunately, a fiction in this country.

And? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

There’s no “and.”

I’m just stating a fact. No discussion of wrong or right or whatever.

Just pointing out how there is no more rule of law in the US. Idk when exactly it disappeared, but it’s definitely not present anymore

Not everyone is a deontologist, some are moral naturalists and others still are utilitarians.

> Maybe Studio Ghibli making it through the seemingly deterministic GPT guardrails was an OpenAI slip up, a mistake,

The author is so generous... but Sam Altman literally has a Ghibli-fied Social profile and in response to all this said OpenAI chooses its demos very carefully. His primary concern is that Ghibli-fying prompts are over-consuming their GPU resources, degrading the service by preventing other ChatGPT tasks.

The official White House account has been posting ghiblified images too, Altman knows that as long as he's not critical of the current administration he's untouchable.

>he's untouchable

Doesn't he have a pretty bad disagreement with Elon?

I was really hoping that the conversation around AI art would at least be partially centered on the perhaps now dated "2008 pirate party" idea that intellectual property, the royalty system, the draconian copyright laws that we have today are deeply silly, rooted in a fiction, and used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus. That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it, and they know better than you do about the culture and communication that you are and are not allowed to experience.

It's just baffling. If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.

The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.

These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate Party's credit, undoing corporate personhood would be a good first step, so that we can focus on enforcing protections for the works of humans. Still, attributing those works to CEOs instead of corporations wouldn't result in much change.

>The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.

Wait, I'm still trying to figure out the difference between your imaginary world and the world we live in now?

I think the main difference is if everything were freely available they may attempt to monetize the life out of it, but they will fail if they can't actually provide something people actually want. There's no more "You want a thing so you're going to buy our thing because we are the exclusive providers of it. That means we don't even have to make it very good"

If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently have.

I’m sure the best independent Star Wars movie would be infinitely better than what Disney has been shoveling out for the last couple decades.

Such a talented team would be able to make a great movie on the same theme.

Saying the lack of creativity in the industry in because we can't copy things freely is completely moronic.

It's a major hindrance. For example, if I came up with an amazing creative idea for a star wars movie I couldn't do a damn thing with it unless Disney told me I could. Disney isn't likely to accept an unsolicited pitch from a total nobody who just happened to have a great idea either. I don't see how you could doubt that there are a lot of great works of art that won't ever exist because of the fact that copyright prevents them from ever getting off the ground.

You can't do a damn thing with it not because of copyright, but because you don't have the resources to make the movie in the first place.

Copyright can't legally stop you from making a movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space.

Copyright can stop me from making a star wars movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space. Even if I don't make a star wars movie, if I make a movie that makes disney feel threatened because it's close enough to being a star wars movie I could still end up losing in courts.

There are plenty of examples of copyright hurting people for creating something that wasn't exactly the same as something else which was copyrighted. Copyright is a threat to all creative works. The bigger the investment required for a creative work, the bigger the risk. For this reason, we see it a lot more often in music where the investment needed is lower than films. People have been successfully sued because they wrote a totally new song that was in the same genre as someone else's song https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...

Thor would have red hair in the imaginary world, rather than being a Blonde man which was made to be a somewhat distinguished comic book character.

The Disney or otherwise copyrighted versions allow for unique spins on these old characters to be re-copyrighted. This Thor from Disney/Marvel is distinguished from Thor from God of War.

> “Before starting the series, we stuffed ourselves to the gills with Norse mythology, as well as almost every other type of mythology – we love it all! But you’ve got to remember that these are legendary tales – myths – and no two versions are ever exactly the same. We changed a lot of things – for example, in most of the myths Thor has red hair, Odin has one eye, etc. But we preferred doing our own version.”

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/54400/why-did-earl...

Huh, did not know that. As an Icelandic person I knew about Þór the Norse god much earlier than Thor the marvel character. I never really pictured his hair color, nor knew he had a specific hair color in the mythology. I actually always pictured him with a beard though. What mostly mattered though was his characteristics. His ill temper and drinking habits, and the fact that he was not a nice person, nor a hero, but rather a guy who starts shit that gets everyone else in trouble, he also wins every fight except one (he looses one against Elli [the personification of old age]). The little I’ve seen of him in the Marvel movies, he keeps almost none of these characteristics.

EDIT: My favorite story of him is the depiction of the fall of Ásgarður, where Loki and some Jötun are about to use the gods vanity against them and con them out of stuff they cannot actually pay for a wall around Ásgarður. Þór, being the way he is, cannot be around a Jötun without fighting and killing him. So rather than paying up (which the gods cannot do) Þór is sent to see this Jötun, knowing very well that he will be murdered. This betrayal is marked as the beginning of the end in Völuspá (verse 26).

How do restaurants work, then? You can’t copyright a recipe. Instructions can’t generally be copyrighted, otherwise someone would own the fastest route from A to B and charge every person who used it. The whole idea of intellectual property gets really weird when you try to pinpoint what exactly is being owned.

I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default. Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations. People need the freedom to wield culture without restriction, not protection from someone having the same idea as them and manifesting it.

It’s more reasonable to say that the idea of intellectual property is challenging for nonlawyers because of the difficulty in understanding ownership not as one thing, but as a bundle of various elements of control, exclusion, obligation, or entitlement, even some of which spring into existence out of nowhere.

In other words, the challenge is not to understand “what exactly is being owned,” and instead, to understand “what exactly being owned is.”

> what exactly being owned is.

Thank you, this is beautifully put and very astute. Does a recipe, a culmination of a lifetime of experience, technique, trials, errors, and luck constitute a form of someone/thing's person-hood such that it can be Intellectual Property.

It depends. First I think we could make a distinction between not-intellectual-property and intellectual-property-with-no-protection but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re getting at.

Have you taken reasonable steps to keep it secret? It could be a trade secret and if course if you steal the recipe for KFC’s herbs and spices, you will be liable for civil damages for your misappropriation of their trade secret.

And if you describe a recipe in flowery prose, reminiscing about the aromas in grandmas kitchen, of course that prose is copyrightable.

Should you invent a special kind of chicken fry mix and give us a fanciful name, the recipes identifier if origin - its trademark -could be protectable.

But the fact that your chicken fry mix is made of corn starch and bread crumbs is a fact, like a phone book. Under most circumstances, not protectable.

ianyl tinla

A restaurant is a small manufacturing facility that produces a physical product. It’s not the same at all.

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 fee. The creators get nothing.

>. 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 on the things they pirate. They are hardcore fans. They want official merch and special boxed sets. People want to give the creators of the things they love their money and often feel conflicted about having to give their cash to a far less worthy corporation in the process. There are people who love music but refuse to support the RIAA by buying albums.

There are proven ways to make profit in other ways like "pay what you want" or even "fund in advance" crowdsourced models. If copyright went away or, more ideally, were limited to a much shorter period of time (say 8-10 years) artists would continue to find fans and make money.

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.

Well technically it wouldn’t be piracy once copyright banished. It’d be remixing, appropriation, derivative, etc., all legal.

So make copyright like patents. That’s what a lot of the copyleft movement has been arguing for forever. Make a copyright holder demonstrate their idea is unique, manifests into a tangible output, and if so protect the creator for a limited time. Everyone is free to use the work in their own provided they pay royalties at a reasonable rate for the duration of the patent.

But the status quo now with basically perpetual copyright controlled by large media conglomerates 100% stifles culture and is a net negative on society. It’s not the right to copy that needs defending, it’s the first right of a briefly protected enterprise, a reward to the creator, that needs to be protected. Copyright is like trying to cure a cough by sewing someone’s mouth shut.

> 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.

1. There are an infinite number of careers that do not currently exist, because their business models do not make sense. I do not think it's a great idea to keep laws on the books, that limit the creativity and rights of hundreds of millions of people, just to keep a few professions afloat.

2. You greatly underestimate the creativity of a capitalistic market. For example, on the web, it's generally difficult and frowned upon to copyright designs. Some patent trolls do it, but most don't. If you make an innovative design for your website, you're bound to be copied. And yet many programmers and tech companies still have viable business models. They simply don't base their entire business model around doing easily-copyable things.

How does copyright limit creativity? If you want to write a new story about a boy wizard going to school, no one can legally stop you. If you want to make a new Mario-inspired platformer, no one can legally stop you.

But if you want to make money and do it from riding the brand name association of Harry Potter or Mario, they can.

It looks like you're being purposefully ridiculous. There is an obvious difference between the two; cost of reproduction. For something with a cost of reproduction near zero (book, music, art, etc), IP restrictions matter. For something like a restaurant, factory, etc; the cost of reproduction is high.

It's not obvious at all! You are citing the only difference that typically comes up. A quesadilla is beyond trivial to reproduce and most people have the ingredients readily available. 3D printers make it trivial to reproduce things that would have been obviously hard to reproduce a few years ago. A book is hard to reproduce if it's not in digital form. Is MIDI a song or a set of instructions? Source code is easy to copy but hard to reproduce. Source code is just a recipe telling a compiler what to do. And we've already established that recipes aren't copyrightable because it was "so obvious" at the time copyright was established that you shouldn't be able to copyright the creative process.

> How do restaurants work, then?

Primarily because recipe creation is not one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants?

Closed source - when was the last time your restaurant told you what was in, and how to make, your favourite dish?

What's in Coca Cola?

What are the 11 herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken?

How do I make the sauce in a Big Mac?

Yes, and notably the source recipe can’t be copyrighted. Trade secrets and recipes are not copyrightable. That’s the point. We have entire vastly profitable industries built around protection of trade secrets, with no copyright in play. Competing to make make the best cola flavored beverage or the best burrito is a thing. Competing to make the best rendition of Snow White, is not. What’s the rub? They don’t seem that different at all.

Snow White is not the best example, there are non-Disney versions, like the one with Sigourney Weaver and the one with Chris Hemsworth.

It's a good example of what happens when a copyright is expired.

I imagine they're licensed--the original creator or their estate had to be looped in to make them happen, and probably financially benefitted.

The original creator of the German fairy tale?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Snow_White_tale

I see a mention of Ovid ... copyright has probably expired.

I can't explain the exact link, but your repeated and vocal pro-AI stance in this thread feels connected to the way when you got called out for a simple and inconsequential mistake that any of us could make, you immediately doubled down on it all while the truth was a single Google search away.

We're talking about copyright in this subthread, in the context of AI. I'm not sure how a copyleft slant implies pro-ai, but whatever. There are a lot of reasons to be dubious about AI. But "AI is going to destroy human creativity and ingenuity" is not one that concerns me. And "society would be better without AI" is not an axiom I hold, so yeah I'll respond to that type of supposition when it's thrown into an otherwise interesting discussion.

I could just be wrong about Snow White's original copyright. As indicated by my use of "I imagine", no I didn't search the origins of it. I'm not seeing a big "double down" moment where I asserted that Snow White is definitely owned by Disney--that would be the cinch. In fact nothing about my reply contradicted the GGP adding that maybe Snow White isn't the best example. Why are you so bothered? Anyway, Snow White doesn't have a recent progenitor then it kinda proves the point that the world works perfectly well in the absence of copyright, and that the ability to freely remix culture is a fundamental human right. TIL that Snow White was originally a German fairytale and I'm relieved that Disney hasn't asserted copyright over it.

Like many of the disney movies that came from fairy tales the basic story of Snow White isn't copyrighted, but some elements you'd expect in a Snow White story were added by Disney and are protected. The biggest one is the names and personalities given to the seven dwarfs (happy, grumpy, doc, etc). If you made your own snow white movie and included those characters or had them singing "Heigh-Ho" you could expect to get sued into bankruptcy by disney lawyers.

How does someone close source a book?

If the book is the compiled work, then the source of a book is the author's creative process. And certainly that isn't open to all simply by purchasing the book.

But less obtusely: you don't copyright a book--which is why knowledge, language, literature should not be closed source. We'd have to find a different model to support authors than trying to prevent people from copying books. Patreon style models where you subscribe and get behind the scenes access to the creative process, additional content, early access, etc. seem to work well as do sponsorship models like YT where the more viewers you draw the more you get paid, rather than a fixed fee per individual to watch a video. And, simply pay-what-you-want based models where everyone understands they can contribute in a way that matches the value to them and their means also work. One of the strongest arguments for piracy is that the pirate would never have paid $700 for Photoshop in the first place so the value "lost" isn't real and never would have been realized by the author(s). (Note this argument doesn't work for petty theft of physical property because the thief deprives the owner of tangible property.)

There are precisely three models for funding

Private - this includes funding by selling item(s), licensing work, and private equity

State

Charity - this includes volunteers, patrons, donations, sponsorships.

Charity relies on people willing to donate for the betterment of others.

State funding fails because of the political nature of the person holding the purse strings.

Licensing, copyright, physical sales are the only thing that artists have to sell.

You "patreon" style falls somewhere between closed source - you can only access if you buy your way behind the curtain, and charity, where creators have to rely on people donating so that their works can be seen by others (for free)

I am supportive of private and charity funding. I think we can do it without a focus restricting copying. I think this because there is precedent with any industry that relies on trade secrets. Once I can copy a Coke with a food printer we'll be having some really weird internal consistency issues with copyright.

I'm not seeing a convincing argument from you other than "Once I bought a book that was public domain"

> when was the last time your restaurant told you what was in, and how to make, your favourite dish

Today? All the time? I just went into a new local joint today, talked to the owner about adding some vegetarian meals, and we hashed out some ideas in terms of both ingredients and preparation.

As a pescetarian and cook myself, I frequently ask establishments detailed questions about ingredients and preparation

> I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default.

Why wouldn't big corps win by default? They have the brand name, own the resources to make more polished version of any IP, and have better distribution channels than anyone else.

Can you tell me how this scenario won't play out?

1. Big corporation has people looking for new and trending IP.

2. Instead of buying the rights to it, they get their army of people to produce more polished versions of it.

3. Because they have branding and a better distribution channel, the money goes 100% to them.

> Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations.

People working in the field sell their copyright like Gravity Falls' Alex Hirsch: https://x.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1906915851720077617

> How do restaurants work, then? You can’t copyright a recipe.

They barely work. Recipes are trade secrets, and the cooks who use them are either paid very well, given NDAs or given only part of the most guarded recipes

> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people.

Disney would be among the largest beneficiaries if the right to train AI models on content was viewed as an exclusive right of the copyright holder; they absolutely do not benefit from AI training being considered fair use.

Maybe now, post-AI.

But if you'd asked this question in 2015 or earlier, everyone would have said Disney -> pro-patent, average people & indie devs -> anti-patent. Microsoft was famously pro-patent, as were a number of nuisance companies that earned the label "patent troll."

Honestly, this idea of "patents to protect the people" would've come across as a corporate lawyer trick pre-2015.

This is the exact opposite of the truth.

Look at YouTube. Look at SoundCloud. Look at all the fan fiction sites out there, internet mangas and manwhas and webtoons, all the podcasts, all the influencers on X and Instagram and TikTok and even OnlyFans, etc etc. Look at all the uniquely tiny distribution channels that small companies and even individuals are able to build in connection with their fans and customers.

There is endless demand for the endless variety of creativity and content that's created by normal people who aren't Disney, and endless ways to get it into people's hands. It is literally impossible for any one company to hoover all of it up and somehow keep it from the people.

In fact, the ONLY thing that makes it possible for them to come close to doing that is copyright.

And the only reason we have such a huge variety of creativity online is because people either (a) blatantly violate copyright law, or (b) work around gaps in copyright law that allow them to be creative without being sued.

The idea that we need copyrights to protect us from big companies is exactly wrong. It's the opposite. Big companies need copyright to protect their profits from the endless creativity and remixing of the people.

> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people

No, support open source AI and this will not happen.

The original claim is false,

> intellectual property [...] used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of things you can create. More things than there exist stars in our galaxy.

The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist, solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the hard part that takes the investment of time and money.

In the old world before Gen AI, this was the hard thing that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast, and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own.

The new problem is distributing that content.

> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.

Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing, you're 100% right.

If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI, or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then the corporations won't be able to profit off of it.

If social networks were replaced with common carriers and protocols.

If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or expensive compute.

If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve.

Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the giants will win. And network effects will favor the few versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck with big tech distribution.

Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even more so, to the distributors of that content.

This is the same argument we made in the 90s about what the web was going to do. What ended up happening was the growth of aggregators and silos like Facebook that baited everyone with ease of use into putting everything into their walled garden and then monetized it. The creators, namely the posters of the content, got nothing.

The same is happening already with AI creations. Doing it yourself is work and takes some technical skill, so most people use hosted AI services. Guess who makes all the money?

You will be able to create and share your own spin on Star Wars. You won’t see anything for that except maybe cred or some upvotes. The company that hosts it and provides the gateway and controls the algorithms that show it to people will get everything.

To be fair, people who post on Facebook get exactly what they were promised. Users of free products generally don't expect a rev share.

I think that by now it's pretty clear that facebook isn't free and that the price of using facebook is actually pretty high, it's just abstracted away so that most people don't realize the cost and/or don't attribute that cost to facebook when they should.

> We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own.

Disney would say that you can’t. And in the current copyright regime, it’s not unlikely that they’d convince the court that they’re right.

> Disney would say that you can’t.

Disney won't have any control. I can already generate images and videos locally on my hardware.

Maybe they'll try to stop distribution? There will be quite a lot of people making these, though.

> The problem with ideas is that they have to be good.

No they don't, look at music popular in social networks.

> and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance.

Even before the generative AI, I think we live in the era where there are more creators than ever in history: everybody today can publish their music or art without any large investments (except for instruments: they are expensive as always). I would prefer we have cheaper pianos, samples and microphones instead of worthless music-copying models.

Pianos are already cheap. You can get used pianos for very little money if you shop around. No one has space to keep a piano in their house anymore, and they don't want to deal with keeping them tuned.

> I would prefer we have cheaper pianos, samples and microphones instead of worthless music-copying models.

There are lots of ML models that produce instrumentals and vocals that are incredibly useful for practicing musicians.

The popular and well-known Suno and Udio are pop culture toys. They also find use with content creators who don't have time to learn how to make music. (Not everyone can learn and master everything. We have to let some of our creative desires slip or we'd never be able to accomplish anything.)

If we are going to have a general discussion about copyright reform at a national level, I'm all for it. If we are going to let billion dollar corporations break the law to make even more money and invent legal fictions after the fact to protect them, I'm completely against it.

Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately owned data center is not the same as freedom of information for flesh and blood human beings.

You’re setting court precedent that will apply equally to OpenAI as it does to the llama.cpp and stable diffusion models running on your own graphics card.

I don’t know about that, we seem to be so deeply into double standards for this stuff that we’ve forgotten they are double standards. If I aggressively scrape content from anywhere and everywhere ignoring robots.txt and any other terms and conditions, then I’ll probably be punished. Corporate crawlers that are feeding the beast just do this on a massive scale and laugh off all of the complaints, including those from smaller corporations who hire lawyers..

oh they hate it so much when this hypocrisy is pointed out. better put the high school kids downloading books on pirate bay in jail but I guess if your name starts with Alt and ends in man then there's an alt set of rules for you.

also remember when GPU usage was so bad for the environment when it was used to mine crypto, but I guess now it's okay to build nuclear power plants specifically for gen-ai.

Great, let's legislate corporate liability for excessive data use from crawlers. I'm fully there with you.

SGTM.

Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever.

Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character.

But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.

Was that world so bad?

Imagine a world where Thanos snapped his fingers and photoshop (along with every digital application like it) was wiped from Earth forever. The world would keep on turning and artists would keep on creating, but creating art would be more difficult and fewer people would be able to do it (or even touch up their own photos).

Would that world be so bad? Was the world really so horrible before photoshop existed?

What if we lost youtube? What if we lost MP3s?

We could lose a lot of things we didn't always have and we'd still survive, but that doesn't mean that those things aren't worth having or that we shouldn't want them.

That world was worse. It wasn't much worse, because we haven't seen most of the benefit of GenAI yet, but yes I would say that it was worse.

It wasn't "so bad", but any history of improvement can be cut into slices that aren't "so bad" to reverse.

Obviously the former status quo wasn’t that bad. But the opposite is also true, AI democratizes access to pop culture. So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order. IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

> AI democratizes access to pop culture.

Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.

> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.

I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.

> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?

It's a rhetorical example. Suppose you need to create an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?

You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.

> 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 workers running errands.

> 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. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.

> 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 workers running errands.

Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.

> 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.

You are interpreting "labor" in a purely economic sense, but that's choice of framing.

What I'm getting at is that our actions are rewarding and meaningful when we put effort into them and they provide value (in the general, not economic sense) to others.

If I spend a day drawing you a picture, you get a warm fuzzy feeling because of how much I must care to sacrifice one of my finite days on Earth to make a thing just for you. If I spend ten seconds writing a prompt and an AI spits out an objectively prettier picture, it's still less meaningful and less valuable in every sense that matters. I gave up nothing to produce it and you gained little by having it.

> Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.

This is likely a luxury you have by being economically stable enough to not have to worry about how you're going to put food in your stomach today. While it's fun to imagine idyllic post-capitalist societies, artists today need to be able to afford shelter and healthcare. Generative AI will destroy their livelihood.

That may be a sacrifice you are willing to make (since it likely isn't coming to take your job), but I care too much about other people to be delighted by that.

No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.

> No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.

This does not answer the question, this sidesteps the requirements. I can either have no avatar, or I can make one for the marginal cost of zero via an AI. This then belies that the true complaint of people against AI is one of an economic variety, not a technological one, in which case, fix the economics, and support open source AI so that all may have such tech, not just big tech.

Consider consulting documentation then. A model can help sift through orders of magnitude more literature than you can in the same timeframe.

OK? What does that have to do with pop culture IP rights?

If you're building an LLM for management or technical consulting then the valuable content is locked up behind corporate firewalls anyway so you're going to have to pay to use it. In that field most of what you could find with a web crawler or in digital books is already outdated and effectively worthless.

Can stable diffusion be created without using copyrighted content? Maybe we should have some exemption for non-commercial research but definitely not for commercial exploitation or generating copyrighted images using open-source models.

There is already exemptions for research. Look at licensing around things like ImageNet. There's similar licensing around things like LAION and Common Crawl[0] It's also not legal to just scrape everything without paying. There's a reason the NYT sued OpenAI and then got a settlement. It's still illegal for Meta to torrent terabytes of textbooks too.

[0] https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use

  > In this regard, you acknowledge that you may not rely on any Crawled Content created or accumulated by CC.  CC strongly recommends that you obtain the advice of legal counsel before making any use, including commercial use, of the Service and/or the Crawled Content.  BY USING THE CRAWLED CONTENT, YOU AGREE TO RESPECT THE COPYRIGHTS AND OTHER APPLICABLE RIGHTS OF THIRD PARTIES IN AND TO THE MATERIAL CONTAINED THEREIN.

Can an artist be created without using copyrighted content? Raise a child without movies, books, songs or the internet, see how much they contribute to "popular culture".

There is liberally licensed content like creative commons.

I love CC but culturally it's a nonfactor.

Neglect is illegal and I don't understand your point.

Public Diffusion: https://source.plus/public-diffusion-private-beta

> invent legal fictions after the fact

You're reading into the situation...

For the US getting legislators to do anything is impossible: even the powerful fail.

When a legal system is totally roadblocked, what other choice is there? The reason all startups ask forgiveness is that permission is not available.

(edit). Shit. I guess that could be a political statement. Sorry

A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content. Every whip-wielding archaeologist is now Harrison Ford. Every suave British spy is now Daniel Craig. With the power of AI, creativity is dead and buried.

This is what was often missed in the previous round of AI discourse that criticized these companies for forcing diversity into their systems after the fact. Every suave spy being Daniel Craig is just the apolitical version of every nurse being a woman or every criminal being Black. Converging everything to the internet's most popular result represents an inaccurate and a dumped down version of the world. You don't have to value diversity as a concept at all to recognize this as a systemic flaw of AI, it is as easy as recognizing that Daniel Craig isn't the only James Bond let alone the only "suave English spy".

It’s only a flaw insofar as it’s used in ways in which the property of the tool is problematic. Stereotypes are use for good and bad all the time, let’s not pretend that we have to attack every problem with a funky shaped hammer because we can’t admit that it’s okay to have specialized tools in the tool belt.

I don't follow your analogy. Is the "specialized tool" the AI or the way that it returns "problematic" results? Because I'm not saying the system is bad for using negative stereotypes. I'm saying the system is bad because it removes natural variety from the results making them misleading. The reliance on stereotypes are just one example of this phenomenon with another example being "suave English spy" only returning Daniel Craig.

I guess I’m saying that the specific application of stereotypes may be a feature. I don’t think we’ll see a single prevailing winner takes all model, so there is diversity in that respect too. And I think you will even see diversity from a single model. In other words, I don’t think Daniel Craig is the only thing a model will return for “suave english spy”. Just a cheap and easy one.

The backlash against AI compels creative types to be more original, maybe. It could be that AI improves culture by reflecting it in insipid parody, with the implicit message "stop phoning it in".

Why does the AI have to inject the creativity? It's supposed to guess what you want and generate it. The prompts in the article make it clear the author wants Harrison Ford.

If you ask it for a female adventure-loving archaeologist with a bullwhip, you think you'll get Harrison Ford?

What if you ask for a black man? Etc etc.

You're talking about how unoriginal it is when the human has asked it in the least creative way. And it gives what you want (when the content filters don't spot it)

don't you think it is empowering and aspiring for artists? they can try several drafts of their work instantaneously, checking out various compositions etc before even starting the manual art process.

they could even input/train it on their own work. I don't think someone can use AI to copy your art better than the original artist.

Plus art is about provenance. If we could find a scrap piece of paper with some scribbles from Picasso, it would be art.

This does seem to work for writing. Feed your own writing back in and try variations / quickly sketch out alternate plots, that sort of thing.

Then go back and refine.

Treat it the same as programming. Don't tell the AI to just make something and hope it magically does it as a one-shot. Iterate, combine with other techniques, make something that is truly your own.

But why Daniel Craig and not Pierce Brosnan?

> A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content.

That's the whole problem with AI. It's not creative. There's no "I" in AI. There's just what we feed it and it's a whole lot of "garbage in, garbage out". The more the world is flooded with derivative AI slop the less there will be of anything else to train AI on and eventually we're left with increasingly homogenized and uncreative content drowning out what little originality is still being made without AI.

> That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it

A world without copyright is just as problematic as a world with copyright. With copyright, you run into the problem of excessive control. This wasn't too much of a problem in the past. If you bought a book, record, or video recording, you owned that particular copy. You could run into disagreeable situations because you didn't own the rights, but it was difficult to prevent anyone from from viewing a work once it had been published. (Of course, modern copyright laws and digitial distribution has changed that.)

On the flip side, without copyright, it would be far easier for others to exploit (or even take credit) for the work of another person without compensation or recourse. Just look at those AI "generated" images, or any website that blatently rips off the content created by another person. There is no compensation. Heck, there isn't even credit. Worse yet, the parties misrepresenting the content are doing their best to monetize it. Even authors who are more than willing to give their work away have every right to feel exploited under those circumstances. And all of that is happening with copyright laws, where there is the opportunity for recourse if you have the means and the will.

You don’t need credit to talk about pop culture. I don’t need to credit the Indian Jones copyright holder when I paint a stunning likeness of Ford in a kaki outfit with a whip, even if the holder might try to sue me over it. Copyright and credit aren’t the same.

There are also trademark protections. I heard Ford actually trademarked his likeness to ensure he got a piece of the merchandise action.

Trademarking your likeness is absurd. How do we even let that happen.

IMO everyone should automatically have rights over their own likeness, especially when it comes to commercial ventures.

To reply to the parenthetical, copyright has nothing to do with credit. Taking credit for someone else's work is banned in some places in some contexts (they call this a moral rights regime) but not the same thing as what is being talked about when people say copyright (which is about copying and performing)

The idea that someone can't use ideas without someone else making money from it is a really, really, radically weird idea and is very new in the history of human society.

> If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.

This reminds me of Tom Scott’s “Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers” [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

I think what you observe is more like a natural blowback to the prevailing idea that this is somehow beyond critique because it will fundamentally change culture and civilization forever.

There's a bit of irony here too. The intellectual discourse around intellectural property, a diverse and lively one from an academic standpoint, the whole free and open source software movements, software patents, the piracy movement and so on have analyzed the history, underlying ideas and values in detail for the past thirty years. Most people know roughly what is at stake, where they stand, and can defend their position in an honest way.

Then comes new technology, everyone and their mother gets excited about it, and steamrolls all those lofty ideas into "oh look at all the shiny things it can produce!". Be careful what you wish for.

Let's be clear. You can be for free software, against copyright, etc., and STILL be in favor of these firms being punished for violating copyright as they have. Because frankly, we -- normal people -- have always known that we would be punished if we did anything close to this: so many people have been thrown in jail, even killed themselves, because they distributed some film or hosted some books. But now, when a big corporation does it, and in doing so seeks to replace and impoverish thousands, millions of hard-working, law-abiding people, now is when we should expect the government to finally say -- oh, that copyright thing was silly all along? No. Perhaps if the deal was that the whole system would go away entirely -- that we, too, could do what these firms have done. But that's not what's being proposed. That will not happen. They want the laws to be for them, not for us, and I will always be opposed to attempts at actualizing that injustice.

IMO the natural effect of this will be to massively devalue any individual cultural artifact, and that this will also achieve the benefit of defanging the big copyright holders. Is it the right way to go about it? No. Is it an insult to anyone who ever got nabbed for piracy? Sure. But tbh as a pirate voter I'll still very much take it.

Not just some particular collection of pixels, but an infinite number of combinations of collections of pixels, any of which remotely invoke a shadow of similarity to hundreds of "properties" that Disney lays claim to.

But why do you want to make a collection of pixels that resembles existing characters and not create your own?

Essentially: “information wants to be free”.

I agree.

But this must include the dissolution of patents. Otherwise corporations and the owners of the infrastructure will simply control everything, including the easily replicable works of individuals.

At least patents only last 20 years as opposed to nearly over a century for copyright.

In practice it's often longer. Drug companies queue up minor tweaks to their formulas and can threaten to sue anyone even close to the new way, even carbon copies of the now expired patent. Few can afford to win a lawsuit.

We need more courts and judges to speed the process, to make justice more accessible, and universal SLAPP protections to weed out frivolous abuse.

True, though at least with drugs if there's a shortage compounding pharmacies are given broad freedom outside the patent holder's control. See semaglutide.

Sad that we rely on the scraps these captured regulators let fall through the cracks. At least until their patrons awake and close those loopholes.

I am against dissolution of patents if the technology took lot of research. In this case the patent protects from others copying the result of research.

However, obvious patents like "a computer system with a display displaying a product and a button to order it" should not be allowed. Also, software patents should not exist (copyright is enough).

What if all that research led to some incredible world changing for the better idea/concept/product in an open society that would benefit everyone, in the closed society only those allowed to use the patent benefit

It's not black and white. Even the United States, the government can, under certain circumstances, use a patented invention without the patent holder's permission. And it's even more common in other countries.

Who would pay for the years of research in the open society?

It's not baffling in the least.

No matter the extent you believe in the freedom of information, few believe anyone should then be free to profit from someone else's work without attribution.

You seem to think it would be okay for disney to market and charge for my own personal original characters and art, claiming them as their own original idea. Why is that?

Yes. I 100% unironically believe that anyone should be able to use anyone else's work royalty/copyright free after 10-20 years instead of 170 in the UK. Could you please justify why 170 years is in any way a reasonable amount of time?

The copyright last 70 years after the death of the author, so 170 years would be rare (indeed 190 years would be possible). This was an implementation of a 1993 EU directive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive

That itself was based on the 1886 Berne Convention. "The original goal of the Berne Convention was to protect works for two generations after the death of the author". 50 years, originally. But why? Apparently Victor Hugo (he of Les Miserables) is to blame. But why was he bothered?

Edit: it seems the extension beyond the death of the author was not what Hugo wanted. "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people." So I'm still trying to figure out who came up with it, and why.

So far as I can tell, the idea behind extending copyright two generations after the author's death was so that they could leave the rights to their children and grandchildren, and this would keep old or terminally ill authors motivated.

No, it was extended because Disney and the like lobbied for it to be done.

I'm talking about the limit that was chosen in 1886, death + 50 years.

May I ask why you want to use someone's work instead of creating your own?

I mean, it's fun. Ever listened to the KLF, and things from the era before sampling was heavily sat on, such as the album 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) - ? I don't claim it's very good, but it was definitely fun. And the motivation for using existing works, instead of creating your own, is similar to the motivation for using existing words, instead of creating your own. They're reference points, people recognize them, you can communicate with them instead of having to extract patience from the audience like they have to learn a new language for each work. And of course in practice the rules are fuzzy, so everybody sails close to the wind by imitating others and in this way we share a culture. Stealing their work is just sharing the culture more closely.

> is similar to the motivation for using existing words

I don't think it's like that. If we take music, for example, the existing word would be a note or a scale or a musical instrument or a style, but a melody would be an existing sentence. As for sampling, there is creative usage of samples, like Prodigy for example where it is difficult to even recognize the source.

Also today there is some leeway in copyright enforcement. For example, I often see non-commercial amateur covers of commercial songs and the videos don't get taken down.

I put it to you that same difference. These matters of degree are what copyright lawyers haggle over. It implies to me that the whole edifice is forced into being, for its desirable (?) effects, and has no concrete foundation. Nothing pure and elegant and necessary about copyright.

Well, you asked why, anyway, and there's why: it's a natural thing to do.

"use" vs. sell is the problem here. Or do you think they are the same?

I'm guessing you've never created something of value before. People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.

If I paint a picture on a physical canvas, I can charge people to come into my house and take a look. If I bring the canvas to a park, I'm not entitled to say "s-stop looking at my painting guys!"

If you're worried about your work being infinitely reproduced, you probably shouldn't work in an infinitely-reproducible medium. Digitized content is inherently worthless, and I mean that in a non-derisive way. The sooner we realize this, the richer culture will be.

Really all content is worthless. Historically, we've always paid for the transmission medium (tape, CD) and confused it for the cost of art itself.

and how do you reconcile any work in software development? If someone isn’t willing to work for free, should they just not work in the field at all? Do you think software culture would really be richer?

My income is tied to the labor time I exert in creating/supporting services. I don't sit back and collect royalties on the code itself. Software is one of the first fields where the fundamental worthlessness of content revealed itself, hence FOSS.

When you watch a musical performance, you are also paying for labor. Even when you buy a physical art object, all the costs involved decompose back to labor. When you have a digital copy of something, there is no labor input to its creation, so guess what the inherent value is.

Animators drew actual cels. Theater workers clocked in and screened the films. The guys at the DVD factory pressed the discs. We paid for all of this already. It's double-billing to charge for copypasting the mere likeness of something. Nobody's doing any work for that.

you’re allowed to tie your income to creating systems precisely because you’re not allowed to copy them from previous companies or other sources

selling software isn’t much different from a musician collecting royalties, especially now when everything’s shifted to a subscription model. it lets us keep pretending we’re adding value, even though most of them often stays the same for years

Sorry, but I don't buy it. It's not like we're milking a secret golden algorithm. If all my company's code were open sourced tomorrow, I don't think a competitor could do much with it, since they'd just be presented with bog standard CRUD. It's still relationships and sweat that's keeping the lights on for the time being.

You keep it in your house and charge people to come look at it (SaaS).

Those people sometimes look at it and build a copy (competitor) and that's okay.

You don't have to publish your code, or allow other people to run it.

>People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.

No they aren't, intellectual property is a legal fiction and ideas belong to all of humanity. Humanity did fine without intellectual property for thousands of years, it's a relatively recent creation.

Accusatory clause aside, but I agree, this is how a lot of "starving artists" get out of being starving.

> I'm guessing you've never created something of value before

That's an interesting speculation. You realize that it could also be turned against you, right? Never a good idea!

So, let's focus on the arguments rather than making assumptions about each other's backgrounds.

> People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.

People are absolutely entitled to the fruits of their labour. The crucial question is whether the current system of 'IP' control – designed for scarcity – is the best way to ensure that, especially when many creators find it hinders more than it helps. That's why many people explore and use other models.

I think we have all grown up with pervasive strong IP rights, and most people have come to internalize it as a matter of fairness or an almost natural right, rather than a practical tool designed to incentivize creation.

And then even if you get past that, the world is filled with lots of IP we love, and it is easy to imagine weakened IP rights taking that away, but quite difficult to imagine what weakened IP rights might buy us.

I do have some hope still that this generative AI stuff will give a glimpse into the value of weaker IP rights and maybe inspire more people to think critically about it. But I think it is an uphill battle. Or maybe it will take younger people growing up on generative AI to notice.

I can't speak for everyone obviously, but my anti-AI sentiment in this regard is not that IP law is flawless and beyond reproach, far from it. I'm merely saying that as long as we're all required to put up with it, that OpenAI and company should also have to put up with it. It's incredibly disingenuous the way these companies have taken advantage of publicly available material on an industrial scale, used said material to train their models "for research" and as soon as they had something that vaguely did what they wanted, began selling access to them.

If they are indeed the output of "research" that couldn't exist without the requisite publicly available material, then they should be accessible by the public (and arguably, the products of said outputs should also be inherently public domain too).

If they are instead created products to be sold themselves, then what is utilized to create them should be licensed for that purpose.

Additionally, if they can be used to generate IP violating material, then IMHO, makes perfect sense for the rights holders of those IPs to sue their asses like they would anyone else who did that and sold the results.

Again, for emphasis: I'm not endorsing any of the effects of IP law. I am simply saying that we should all, from the poorest user to the richest corporation, be playing by the same rules, and it feels like AI companies entire existence is hinging on their ability to have their IP cake and eat it too: they want to be able to restrict and monetize access to their generative models that they've created, while also having free reign to generate clearly, bluntly plagiarizing material, by way of utilizing vast amounts of in-good-faith freely given material. It's gross, and it sucks.

Very well put. I’m open to a future in which nothing is copyrighted & everything is in the public domain, but the byproduct of that public domain material should _also_ be owned by the public.

Otherwise, we’re making the judgement that the originators of the IP should not be compensated for their labor, while the AI labs should be. Of course, training & running the models take compute resources, but the ultimate aim of these companies is to profit above & beyond those costs, just as artists hope to be compensated above & beyond the training & resources required to make the art in the first place.

as an artist, I totally agree with this approach. the whole idea of trying to pay artists for their contributions in training data is just impractical.

if the data’s pulled from the public domain, the model built from this human knowledge should be shared with all creators too, meaning everyone should get access to it

Beware of pushing for rules that you don't personally believe in. You just might succeed a little too well, and have to live with the consequences.

Consider that one day you may wish to author a creative work and derive financial benefit from that labor. There is legitimate use for limited time ownership of reproducible cultural artifacts. Extending that to 95 years is the problem.

I wish to one day derive financial benefit from hitting myself with a hammer for 8 hours a day. Should we construct a legal apparatus to guarantee that I am able to do so?

Edit: the point I want to illustrate is that we do not get to choose what others value, or to dictate what is scarce and no one is entitled to make a living in a specific way even if they really want to

It is bad analogy specially because we value that so much that we are even discussing on how to have more of it.

How do you suggest you protect your "thing"?

* If I make a thing that is different and I get a patent - cool. * If I create a design that is unusual and I get copyright on it - is that cool?

Both concepts - patent and copyright - are somewhat controversial, for multiple reasons.

If you invented a thingie, would you not want some initial patent related protection to allow you to crack on with some sort of clout against cough CN? If you created a film/creative thang, would you not want some protection against your characters being ... subverted.

Patents and copywrite are what we have - do you have any better ideas?

What's the damage to the society done by Disney holding the rights to Mickey Mouse? Like, if we're being honest?

Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.

It’s worse in music: the folk music that came before recorded music had a long history of everyone borrowing and putting their own spin on someone else’s tune and, today, this is viewed as some kind of assault on the originator of the tune.

If companies can’t gatekeep our artistic culture for money, we’ll be better able to enjoy it.

We're about to witness a fundamental shift in the human experience. Some time in the near future there will not be a single act of creation you can do that isn't trivial compared to the result of typing "make cool thing please now" into the computer. And your position is to add to the problem because with your policy anything I create should get chucked into the LLM grinder by any and everybody. How do I get my human body to commit to doing hard things with that prospect at hand? This is the end of happiness.

This is why I love making bread

We can’t all be bread making hedonists. Some of us want these finite lives to mean more than living constantly in the moment in a state of baking zen.

I don't know, that sounds like the basic argument for copyright: "I created a cool thing, therefore I should be able to milk it for the rest of my life". Without this perk, creatives are less motivated. Would that be bad? I guess an extreme version would be a world where you can only publish anonymously and with no tangible reward.

I hate to paint with such a broad brush, but I’d venture that “creatives” are not primarily motivated by profit. It is almost a truism that money corrupts the creative endeavour.

There are various ways to turn creativity into money, even without publishing any kind of artwork. Basically all skilled jobs and entrepreneurial enterprises require creativity. And if you do have an artwork, you can still seek profit through acclaim, even without copyright: interviews, public appearances. Artists once had patrons - but that tends to put aristocrats in control of art.

So money will motivate a lot of the creativity that goes on.

Meanwhile, if you dabble in some kind of art or craft while working in a factory to make ends meet, that kind of limits you to dabbling, because you'll have no time to do it properly. Money also buys equipment and helpers, sometimes useful.

On the other hand, yes, it ruins the art. There's a 10cc song about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_Art%27s_Sake_(song)

Though, this reminds me of an interesting aside: the origin of the phrase "art for art's sake" was not about money, but about aesthetics. It meant something like "stop pushing opinions, just show me a painting".

All mediums for creativity are not equivalent. We're killing off the good ones and replacing them with bad ones.

I don't really care.

Either enforce the current copyright regime and sue the AI companies to dust.

Or abolish copyright and let us all go hog wild.

But this halfway house where you can ignore the law as long as you've got enough money is disgusting.

Or treat AI training as within the coverage of the current fair use regime (which is certainly defensible within the current copyright regime), while prosecuting the use of AI models to create infringing copies and derivative works that do not themselves have permission or a reasonable claim to be within the scope of fair use as a violation (and prosecuted hosted AI firms for contributory infringement where their actions with regard to such created infringements fit the existing law on that.)

^ I feel like I almost never see this take, and I don't understand why because frankly, it strikes me at patently obvious! Of course the tool isn't responsible, and the person who uses it is.

I think the tricky bit is that AI companies make money off the collected works of artists, regardless of user behaviour. Suppose I pay for an image generator because I like making funny pictures in Ghibli style, then the AI company makes money because of Ghibli's work. Is that ethical? I can see how an artist would get upset about it.

On the other hand, suppose I also like playing guitar covers of songs. Does that mean artists should get upset at the guitar company? Does it matter if I do it at home or at a paid gig? If I record it, do I have to give credit to the original creator? What if I write a song with a similar style to an existing song? These are all questions that have (mostly) well defined laws and ethical norms, which usually lean towards what you said - the tool isn't responsible.

Maybe not a perfect analogy. It takes more skill to play guitar than to type "Funny meme Ghibli style pls". Me playing a cover doesn't reduce demand for actual bands. And guitar companies aren't trying to... take over the world?

At the end of the day, the cat is out of the bag, generative AI is here to stay, and I think I agree that we're better off regulating use rather than prohibition. But considering the broader societal impacts, I think AI is more complicated of a "tool" than other kinds of tools for making art.

> I think the tricky bit is that AI companies make money off the collected works of artists,

There is also a chance that AI companies didn't obtain the training data legally; in that case it would be at least immoral to build a business on stolen content.

This is similar to (but not the same) as the famous VCR case [0] that allowed home taping of TV shows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

I see AI training on public material like I would upcoming artists being inspired by the artists before them. Obviously the scale is very different. I don't mind your scenario because an AI firm, if they couldn't stay on top of what their model was creating, could voluntarily reduce the material used to train it.

You imply that AI model is creating new works and not merely rearranging pieces from other works you never saw and therefore might consider novel. AI model is not a model of a creative human currently: a human doesn't need to listen to million songs to create his own.

This may not be a particularly popular opinion, but current copyright laws in the US are pretty clearly in favor of training an AI as a transformative act, and covered by fair use. (I did confirm this belief in conversation with an IP attorney earlier this week, by the way, though I myself am not a lawyer.)

The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.

Emitting works that violate copyright is certainly possible, but you could argue that the additional entropy required to pass into the model (the text prompt, or the random seed in a diffusion model) is necessary for the infringement. Regardless, the current law would suggest that the infringing action happens at inference time, not training.

I'm not making a claim that the copyright should work that way, merely that it does today.

> Regardless, the current law would suggest that the infringing action happens at inference time, not training.

Zuckerberg downloading a large library of pirated articles does not violate any laws? I think you can get a life sentence for merely posting links to the library.

I think you can get a life sentence for merely posting links to the library.

This isn't true in the United States. I would be surprised if it were true in any country. Many people have posted sci-hub links here, and to my knowledge nobody has ever suffered legal problems from it:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Doesn't it count as distribution? I thought DMCA requires to delete links.

A copyright holder may file a takedown notice [1] against a platform that hosts a link to copyright-infringing material like a book from Library Genesis or an article from sci-hub. Failure to act upon a legitimate takedown notice opens the platform operator up to a civil law suit. The platform does not have to take proactive measures to prevent infringing links from being posted by users. Some platforms like YouTube take more aggressive measures to proactively guard against infringement, but they are not required by the provisions of the DMCA.

[1] https://guides.dml.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=904530&p=6510951 (See "Notifications of Claimed Infringement")

> The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.

I agree with this, but it's worth noting this does not conflict with and kind of reinforces the GP's comment about hypocrisy and "[ignoring] the law as long as you've got enough money".

The terms of use angle is better than copyright, but most likely we'll never see any precedent created that allows this argument to succeed on a large scale. If it were allowed then every ToS would simply begin to say Humans Only, Robots not Welcome or if you're a newspaper then "reading this you agree that you're a human or a search engine but will never use content for generative AI". If github could enforce site terms and conditions like that, then they could prevent everyone else from scraping regardless of individual repository software licenses, etc.

While the courts are setting up precedent for this kind of thing, they will be pressured to maintain a situation where terms and conditions are useful for corporations to punish people. Meanwhile, corporations won't be able to punish corporations for the most part, regardless of the difference in size. But larger corporations can ignore whatever rules they want, to the possible detriment of smaller ones. All of which is more or less status quo

Training alone, perhaps. But the way the AIs are actually used (regardless of prompt engineering) is a direct example of what is forbidden by the case that introduced the "transformative" language.

> if [someone] thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.

Of course, we live in a post-precedent world, so who knows?

The hypocrisy is obviously disgusting.

It also shows how, at the end of the day, none of the justifications for this intellectual property crap are about creativity, preserving the rights of creators, or any lofty notion that intellectual property actually makes the world a better place, but rather, it is a naked power+money thing. Warner Bros and Sony can stop you from publishing a jpeg because they have lawyers who write the rulebook. Sam Altman can publish a jpeg because the Prince of Saud believes that he is going build for corporate America a Golem that can read excel spreadsheets.

> It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus.

No, the idea is that rules needed to be changed in a way that can are valid for everyone, not just for mega corporations who are trying to exploit other's works and gatekeep the it behind "AI".

> used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful

This is where the argument falls apart. Not because the copyright isn't used by the rich and powerful, but because it misses the fact that copyright also grants very powerful rights to otherwise powerless individuals, thus allowing for many small businesses and individuals to earn a living based on the rights granted by our current copyright system.

Rights you basically can’t use without a lot of money

Um, no. I use these rights all of the time, and often enforce them, and am not at all wealthy.

>information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus

I think that's the reason why I've (and probably many others?) have cooled down on general open source coding.

Open source started when well-paid programmers used their stable positions and ample extra time to give back to the community. What happened then is that corporations then siphoned up all that labor and gave nothing back, just like the AI bros siphoned up all data and gave nothing back. The 'contract' of mutual exchange, of bettering each other, was always a fantasy. Instead the companies took away that ample extra time and those stable positions.

Here we are in 2025 and sometimes I can't afford rent but the company C-tier is buying itself their hundredth yacht. Why should I contribute to your system?

> to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

How is copyright stifling innovation?

You could not rip something off more blatantly than Gravity, which had the lawsuit dismissed entirely.

Taurus vs Stairway to Heaven, the list goes on and on and on.

You can often get away with nearly murder ripping off other people's stuff.

Because it's self indulgent wankery. If I, as writer and an artist, have just the most absolutely brilliant thoughts, and write them down into a book or draw the most beautiful artwork, I can earn money off that well into my afterlife with copyright. Meanwhile the carpenter who is no less bright, can only sell the chair he's built once. In order to make money off of it, he must labor to produce a second or even a third chair. Why does one person have to work harder than the other because of the medium they chose?

Meanwhile in China, just because you invented a thing, you don't get to sit back and rest on your laurels. sipping champagne in hot tubs, because your competitor isn't staying put. He's grinding and innovating off your innovation so you'd also better keep innovating.

The only people making chairs by hand today are exceptionally well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or designers/studios.

It's not at all unusual for popular/iconic furniture designs to be copyrighted.

Reality is people who invent truly original, useful, desirable things are the most important human beings on the planet.

Nothing that makes civilisation what it is has happened without original inventiveness and creativity. It's the single most important resource there is.

These people should be encouraged and rewarded, whether it's in academia, industry, as freelance inventors/creators, or in some other way.

It's debatable if the current copyright system is the best way to do that, because often it isn't, for all kinds of reasons.

But the principle remains. Destroy rewards for original invention and creativity and you destroy all progress.

This position suggests that there was no progress before we had copyright. I think you're vastly overstating the power of the incentives we've set up to drive creative behavior, and even with your caveats I think you're overstating their efficacy. Copyright and patents have done more to consolidate wealth within middleman industries that aggregate these properties than they have to enrich the actual creatives doing the work, as it is with all systems. For every system we put in place to reward behavior that we enjoy, the system always benefits those that choose to game the system more than those that were originally intended to be rewarded.

And the results are observable empirically: very few people are told by anyone that's been out in the world that they should choose to become a writer or an inventor, because writers and inventors simply don't make that much money. The system you claim is so necessary seems to be completely failing in its core mission.

For example, take a look at writers making a decent living on a platform like Substack. Copyright is literally doing nothing for them. People can freely copy their substack and post it everywhere online. The value is that the platform provides a centralized location for people to follow the person's writing, and to build a community around it. In cases where artists and inventors have become rich, I look at the mechanism behind it, and often it's an accident that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights at all.

And not only that. People who do make a living producing creative stuff have to constantly monitor themselves for any hint of copyright infringement, because a copyright strike on their channel is existential. Even if the majority of the time the strike was total baloney. It makes it tough to create when you can be three strikesed or demonetized for playing something that sounds like a record label's melody for 20 seconds on your channel.

You’re right—original inventiveness drives progress. But IP protection isn’t the only (or best) way to reward it. Removing it often accelerates innovation.

Look at open source. If Linux had been closed-source with licensing fees, the internet wouldn’t exist as we know it. Open ecosystems build faster. Contributors innovate because they can build on each other’s work freely.

Market pressure drives innovation. Reputation beats monopoly. Monopolies slow everything down. And collaboration multiplies progress.

"are the most important human beings on the planet"

While I don't disagree with what you are trying to say, saying it this way is hyperbolic. There are so many people doing important things. Think about parents.

> Destroy rewards for original invention and creativity and you destroy all progress

You won't destroy the progress completely but there definitely will be a lot of unfairness like people monetizing someone else's music due to having better SEO skills and more free time than the artist. And the artist cannot hire SEO specialist because he has no money.

Nah I made a beautiful bench just the other week. I’m not well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or designers/studios.just a regular fella who has a dab hand at carpentry

There’s plenty of people who create without external reward.

Or simply for the most minimal of external rewards: recognition and respect.

Or for the purest: seeing others live longer and happier as a result.

One reason so many people are amenable to the copyright argument is at least partly because of these counterarguments that posit that every writer must be an elitist or fabulously wealthy vs. instead of someone who spent X years toiling away at their craft or skill while working menial/multiple jobs.

yeah we should abolish copyright and make it so that creators get paid for every eyeball that's looking at your content. first, we establish a total panopticon. and then you get paid when people engage with your content, like, the system records that a person watches your movie, doesn't matter how they got a copy of your movie, but this person watches your movie, and that watch gets sent into the system and you get paid out from it. no more copyright, just horribly invasive tracking of everything everywhere. Call it copythrough.

That would never work, but like writing sci-fi.

This has nothing to do with stifling innovation.

I am yet to meet a writer who doesn't even attempt to write for fear that whatever they write will be found to be in violation of copyright (unless they are the type of writer that is always finding excuses not to write).

Several people have made successful careers out of fan fiction...

JK Rowling never has to work again in her life because she wrote a couple of books that were exceedingly popular. Because she doesn't have to work, she's not been forced to come up with new stuff. How is that not stifling?

You pick one example and ignore thousands of writers who didn't even return costs after publishing a book. Also, as another example, a great Russian 19th century poet and writer Alexander Pushkin left lot of debt after his death. He supported publishing other writers but it turned out to be a commercial failure. Maybe this fact will make you less unhappy about supposedly unclouded lazy writer's career.

I'm not ignoring that, I'm saying that a differently organized society would have everybody working 40 weeks a year instead of the ridiculous inequality we face today.

I am not working 40 hours a week so although equality seems fair I don't really like your idea.

She comes up with new stuff all the time. She's had a separate career as a writer of thrillers, and is still working in the PotterVerse.

She's an awful person for other reasons, but that's beside the point here.

Reality is most trad-pub authors have full-time jobs anyway to pay the bills. If you're not one of a handful of publishing superstars, trad-pub pays incredibly badly as a result of corporate consolidation and monopoly dominance.

To be clear - there are far more people living parasitically off investments, producing nothing at all and extracting value from everyone else, than there are talented creators living the high life.

She made enough money selling books by the 5th book that she'd never need to do anything again and live better than 99% of people on the planet.

What do you want?

She's not allowed to make money selling books?

What I want is irrelevant. She's now able to rest on her laurels thanks to copyright. She's earned it. I very much enjoyed the books! Under our current culture and level of technology, that's the dream.

But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that? we have the technology to feed all the people, it's just a distribution and organization problem. "just". Money, and capitalism is how we've organized things and it's worked great for a lot of people but it's also left a lot of people behind.

We keep making adjustments to the system but we don't have to be trapped in the system. we can take a step back and look at things and say, hang on a minute, if the goal in life is to feed and clothe everybody, we've either succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, or utterly failed.

> But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that?

Because we don't have that much money?

The same analogy could be applied to business though. Some Colonel invented a fried chicken recipe and started a chain of restaurants, now he doesn't need to work anymore.

In my opinion, if someone creates something that has value for a lot of people, they should get rewarded for it.