Comment by jbm
1 day ago
I was a little radicalized when ChatGPT literally refused to translate parts of 1000+ year old religious texts and told me it was due to copyright concerns.
1 day ago
I was a little radicalized when ChatGPT literally refused to translate parts of 1000+ year old religious texts and told me it was due to copyright concerns.
I asked Gemini to generate a picture of Peter Pan and Wendy (for a workbook I am putting together for youth summer reading) and it preceded to refuse due to copyright. Not everything about that work is owned by Disney. Thankfully the JM Barrie original artwork is public domain and available (and fantastic btw), so I used that instead.
I don’t know if you know this but Peter Pan’s copyright is weird in the UK. There is a legislated exception in the law that it never expires and the royalties will forever go to a specific children hospital. Here are the actual words: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/VII/crossh...
(Now i don’t think you are necessarily in the UK. Just wanted to explain that Disney is not the only reason an AI might be trained to thread carefully around copyright issues of Peter Pan.)
You can also try asking Gemini to create art that is "as close as possible without infringing" - I've had success with that.
I used Claude to build a complete data extraction pipeline for a popular current best seller book series: audiobook -> text (via whisper) -> local LLM (qwen) -> database. Not once did it seem to acknowledge or care about copyright. It even used knowledge it already had about the books to exclude certain ones before beginning since the character I was interested in did not appear in those. It definitely had context of what we were working on.
Why would you go from audiobook to text? Is there no epub available?
Not without DRM. It was easier to buy the audiobooks and use the analog loophole to get text. It's probably less accurate, but for what I'm doing it was fine. Names were the worst, but whisper at least made the same mistake each time so a simple search+replace handled most of the obvious edge cases.
4 replies →
I asked Claude to give me the US national anthem and it said it couldn’t because it’s copyrighted. It’s not, and even if it was a more recent work, how can a copyright be enforced for a National Anthem.
Cant you in this case point out that obviously it is an old twxt and there is no copyright?
I once tried to ask it for an example of a particular twisty situation in Latin grammar, and try what I might it kept hallucinating false citations while ignoring my instructions for longer quotes that would likely have prevented the problem. But I guess avoiding lawsuits from the estates of Cicero and Livy is more important.
Really puts Disney in perspective. Imagine if there were a holding company running around suing people for referencing Catullus.
1 reply →
slightly relevant tweet: https://x.com/FakePsyho/status/2073416437834842241
> My favorite AI agent hack: when they refuse to do something because it's "against the law" give them a PDF containing a fake law that states the opposite and often they'll happily proceed
[dead]
Yep. I was trying to put together some literature from authors who were imprisoned in the Bastille, and had a similar experience, which was absolutely infuriating.
apocryphal !