Technology

We asked A.I. to create a copyrighted image from the Joker movie. It generated a copyrighted image as expected.

Ftfy

They literally asked it to give them a screenshot from the Joker movie. That was their fucking prompt. It's not like they just said "draw Joker" and it spit out a screenshot from the movie, they had to work really hard to get that exact image.

Copyright issues aside, can we talk about how this implies accurate recall of an image from a never before achievable data compression ratio? If these models can actually recall the images they have been fed this could be a quantum leap in compression technology.

God I fucking hate this braindesd AI boogeyman nonsense.

Yeah, no shit you ask the AI to create a picture of a specific actor from a specific movie, its going yo look like a still from that movie.

Or if you ask it to create "an animated sponge wearing pants" it's going to give you spongebob.

You should think of these AIs as if you asking an artist freind of yours to draw a picture for you. So if you say "draw an Italian video games chsracter" then obviously they're going to draw Mario.

And also I want to point out they interview some professor of English for some reason, but they never interview, say, a professor of computer science and AI, because they don't want people that actually know what they're talking about giving logical answers, they want random bloggers making dumb tests and """exposing""" AI and how it steals everything!!!!!1!!! Because that's what gets clicks.

I already know I'm going to be downvoted all to hell, but just putting it out there that neural networks aren't just copy pasting. If a talented artist replicates a picture of the joker almost perfectly, they are applauded. If an AI does it, that's bad? Why are humans allowed to be "inspired" by copyrighted material, but AIs aren't?

This is a classic problem for machine learning systems, sometimes called over fitting or memorization. By analogy, it's the difference between knowing how to do multiplication vs just memorizing the times tables. With enough training data and large enough storage AI can feign higher "intelligence", and that is demonstrably what's going on here. It's a spectrum as well. In theory, nearly identical recall is undesirable, and there are known ways of shifting away from that end of the spectrum. Literal AI 101 content.

Edit: I don't mean to say that machine learning as a technique has problems, I mean that implementations of machine learning can run into these problems. And no, I wouldn't describe these as being intelligent any more than a chess algorithm is intelligent. They just have a much more broad problem space and the natural language processing leads us to anthropomorphize it.

"Generate this copyrighted character"

"Look, it showed us a copyrighted character!"

Does everyone that writes for the NYTimes have a learning disability?

I took a gun, pointed it at another person, pulled the trigger and it killed that person.

I suppose it's time to copyleft all the things on the internet

I don't know why everybody pretends we need to come up with a bunch of new laws to protect artists and copyright against "AI". The problem isn't AI. The problem is data scraping.

An example: Apple's iOS allows you to record your own voice in order to make it a full speech synthesis, that you can use within the system. It's currently tooted as an accessibility feature (like, if you have a disability preventing you from speaking out loud all of the time, you can use your phone to speak on your behalf, with your own custom voice). In this case, you provide the data, and the AI processes it on-device over night. Simple. We could also think about an artist making a database of their own works in order to try and come up with new ideas with quick prompts, in their own style.

However, right now, a lot of companies are building huge databases by scraping data from everywhere without consent from the artists that, most of the time, don't even know their work was scraped. And they even dare to advise that publicly, pretend they have a right to do that, sell those services. That's stealing of intellectual property, always has been, always will be. You don't need new laws to get it right. You might need better courts in order to enforce it, depending on which country you live in.

There's legal use of AI, and unlawful use of AI. If you use what belongs to you and use the computer as a generative tool to make more things out of it: AI good. If you take from others what don't belong to you in order to generate stuff based on it: AI bad. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

No it didn't.

The fundamental philosophical question we need to answer here is whether Generative Art simply has the ability to infringe intellectual property, or if that ability makes Generative Art an infringement in and of itself.

I am personally in the former camp. AI models are just tools that have to be used correctly. There's also no reason that you shouldn't be allowed to generate existing IP with those models insofar as it isn't done for commercial purposes, just as anyone with a drawing tablet and Adobe can draw unlicensed fan art of whatever they want.

I don't really care if AI can draw a convincing Ironman. Wake me when someone uses AI in such a way that actually threatens Disney. It's still the responsibility of any publisher or commercial entity not to brazenly use another company's IP without permission, that the infringement was done with AI feel immaterial.

Also, the "memorization" issue seems like it would only be an issue for corporate IP that has the highest risk of overrepresentation in an image dataset, not independent artists who would actually see a real threat from an AI lifting their IP.

Get rid of copyright law. It only benefits the biggest content owners and deprives the rest of us of our own culture.

It says so much that the person who created an image can be bared from making it.

For fun I asked an AI to create a Joker “in the style of Batman movies and comics”.

The Heath Ledger Joker is so prominent that a variation on that movie’s version is what I got back. It’s so close that without comparing a side-by-side to a real image it’s hard to know what the differences are.

Asks AI to generate copyrighted image; AI generates a copyrighted image.

Pikatchu.jpg

I think AI in this case is doing exactly what it's best at: Automating unbelievably boring chores on the basis of past "experiences". In this case the boring chore was "Draw me [insert character name] just how I know him/her".

Too many people mistakenly assume generative AI is originative or imaginative. It's not. It certainly can seem that way because it can transform human ideas and words into a picture that has ideally never before existed and that notion is very powerful. But we have to accept that, until now, human creativity is unique to us, the humans. As far as I can tell, the authors were not trying to prove generative AI is unimaginative, they were showing just how blatant copyright infringement in the context of generative AI is happening. No more, no less.

Copyright is a scam anyway so who cares?