by tpmoney | 2025-04-13 02:38:30+00:00
> This is not merely a machine that can be misused if desired by a bad actor, this is a machine that specializes in infringement.

So is a xerox machine. It's whole purpose is to make copies of things whatever you put into it with no regard to whether you have a license to make that copy. Likewise with the record capability on your VCR. Sure you could hook it up to a cam corder and transfer your home movie from a Super-8 to a VHS with your VCR (or like one I used to own, it might even have a camera accessory and port that you could hook a camera up to directly) and yet, I would wager most recordings on most VCRs were to commit copyright infringement. Bit-torrent specializes in facilitating copyright infringement, no matter how many Linux ISOs you download with it. CD ripping software and DeCSS is explicitly about copyright infringement. And let's be real, while MAME is a phenomenal piece of software that has done an amazing job of documenting legacy hardware and its quirks, the entire emulation scene as a whole is built on copyright infringement, and I would wager to a rounding error none of the folks that write MAME emulators have a license to copy the ROMs that they use to do that.

But in all of these cases, the fact that it can (and even usually is) used for copyright infringement is not in and of itself a reason to restrict or ban the technology.

> And if you want to disagree with this point, it'd be most persuasive then to explain why, if this is not the case, AI images regularly end up infringing on various aspects of various popular artworks, like characters, styles, intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt.

Well for starters, I'd like to clarify to axioms:

1) "characters" as a subset of "intellectual properties"

2) "style" is not something you can copyright or infringe under US law. It can be part of a trademark or a design patent, and certainly you can commit fraud if you represent something in someone else's style as being a genuine item from that person, but style itself is not protected and I don't think it should be.

So then to answer the question, I would argue that AI images don't "regularly end up infringing on ... intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt". I've generated quite a few AI images myself in exploring the various products out there and not a one of them has generated an infringing work, because none of my prompts have asked it to generate an infringing work. It is certainly possible that a given model with a sufficiently limited training set for a given set of words might be likely to generate an infringing image on a prompt, and that's because with a limited set of options to draw from, the prompt is inherently asking for an infringing image no matter how much you try to scrape the serial numbers off. That is, if I ask for an image of "two Italian plumbers who are brothers and battle turtles", everyone knows what that prompt is asking for. There's not a lot of reference options for that particular set of requirements and so it is more likely to generate an infringing image. It's also partly a function of the current goals of the models. As it stands, for the most part we want a model that takes a vague description and gives us something that matches our imagined output. Give that description to most people and they're going to envision the Mario Brothers, so a "good" image generation model is one that will generate a "Mario Brothers" inspired (or infringing) image.

As the technology improves and we get better about producing models that can take new paths without also generating body horror results, and as the users start wanting models that are more creative, we'll begin to see models that can respond to even that limited training set and generate something more unique and less likely to be infringing.

> No, you aren't, because an artist is a person that doesn't want to suffer legal consequences for drawing something owned by someone else.

Sorry, I think you're wrong. If you commission it for money from someone with enough potential visibility, you might encounter people who go out of their way to avoid anything that could be construed as Indiana Jones, but I bet even then you'd get more "Indiana Jones with the serial numbers filed off" images than not.

But if you just asked random artists to draw that prompt, you're going to get an artists rendition of Indiana Jones. It's clear thats what you want from the prompt and that's the single and sole cultural creative reference for that prompt. Though I suppose you and I are going to have to agree to disagree on what people will do unless you're feeling like actually asking a bunch of artist on Fiver to draw the prompt for you.

And realistically what do you expect them to draw when you make that request? When that article showed up with the headline, EVERYONE reading the headline knew the article was talking about an AI generating Indiana Jones. Why did everyone know that? Because of the limited reference for that prompt that exists. "Archeologist that wears a hat and uses a whip" describes very uniquely a single character to almost every single person.

There's a reason no one is writing articles about AIs ripping off Studio Ghibli by showing the output from the prompt "raccoon with giant testicles." No one writes articles talking about how the AI spontaneously generated Garfield knockoffs when prompted to draw an "orange stripped cat". There's no articles about AIs churning out truckloads of Superman images when someone asks for "super hero". And those articles don't exist because there's enough variations on those themes out there, enough different combinations of those words to describe enough different combinations of images and things that those words don't instantly conjure the same image and character for everyone. And so it goes for the AI too. Those prompts don't ask specifically for infringing art so they don't generally generate infringing art.