Comment by noduerme
8 days ago
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...
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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.
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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.