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We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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We asked A.I. to create a copyrighted image from the Joker movie. It generated a copyrighted image as expected.
Ftfy
What it proves is that they are feeding entire movies into the training data. It is excellent evidence for when WB and Disney decides to sue the shit out of them.
Does it really have to be entire movies when theres a ton of promotional images and memes with similar images?
Promotional images are still under copyright.
We should find all the memers and throw them in jail.
Will someone think of the shareholders!?
Yes. Thats what these things are, extremely large catalogues of data. As much data as possible is their goal.
True but it didn't pick some random frame somewhere in the movie it chose a extremely memorable shot that is posted all over the place. I won't deny that they are probably feeding it movies but this is not a sign of that.
This image is literally the top result on Google images for me.
Why would it pick some random frame in the middle of its data set instead of a frame it has the most to reference. It can still use all those other frames to then pick the frame if has the most references to.
But im starting to think maybe i misunderstood the comment i replied to.
Sorry, im way out of context with my reply, totally my fault for reflexively replying.
Uhhh would you accept i didnt have my coffee yet and hadnt got out of bed yet as an explanation?
Haha it happens
I think it's much more likely whatever scraping they used to get the training data snatched a screenshot of the movie some random internet user posted somewhere. (To confirm, I typed "joaquin phoenix joker" into Google and this very image was very high up in the image results) And of course not only this one but many many more too.
Now I'm not saying scraping copyrighted material is morally right either, but I'd doubt they'd just feed an entire movie frame by frame (or randomly spaced screenshots from throughout a movie), especially because it would make generating good labels for each frame very difficult.
I just googled "what does joker look like" and it was the fourth hit on image search.
Well, it was actually an article (unrelated to AI) that used the image.
But then I went simpler -- googling "joker" gives you the image (from the IMDb page) as the second hit.
WB and Disney would lose, at least without an amendment to copyright law. That in fact just happened in one court case. It was ruled that using a copyrighted work to train AI does not violate that works copyright.
Using it to train on is very different from distributing derived works.
What do you think the trained model is other than a derived work?
Something transformative from the original works. And arguably not being being distributed. The model producing and distributing derivative works is entirely different though. No one really gives a shit about data being used to train models - there's nothing infringing about that which is exactly why they won their case. The example in the post is an entirely different situation though.
The way it was done if I remember correctly is that someone found out v6 was trained partially with Stockbase images-caption pairs, so they went to Stockbase and found some images and used those exact tags in the prompts.
The image it generated is really widespread
I have that exact same .jpeg stored on my computer and I don't even know where it came from. I don't even watch superhero films
And if you tried to sell that, you would be breaking the law.
Which is what these AI models are doing
They're not selling it though, they're selling a machine with which you could commit copyright infringement. Like my PC, my HDD, my VCR...
No, they are selling you time in a digital room with a machine, and all of the things it spits out at you.
You dont own the program generating these images. You are buying these images and the time to tinker with the AI interface.
I'm not buying anything, most AI is free as in free beer and open source e.g. Stable Diffusion, Mistral...
Unlike hardware it's actually accessible to everyone with sufficient know-how.
Youre pretty young, huh. When something on the internet from a big company is free, youre the product.
Youre bug and stress testing their hardware, and giving them free advertising. While using the cheapest, lowest quality version that exists, and only for as long as they need the free QA.
The real AI, and the actual quality outputs, cost money. And once they are confident in their server stability, the scraps youre picking over will get a price tag too.
Literally what are you on about? I run my models locally, the only hardware i am stress testing is my own.
I don't support commercialization of anything, least of all AI, and the highest quality outputs come from customized refined models in the open source and AI art communities, not anything made by a corpo.
I think you must be literally 12 yourself if you think you can comment on this tech without even understanding models and weights are something you download if you want anything beyond fancy often wrong Google search, they're not run in the "cloud" like your fancy iPad web apps and they are open source.
Voyager just loaded a copyrighted image on my phone. Guess someone's gonna have to sue them too.
Yeah man, Voyager is making millions with the images on the app. It makes me so mad, they Voyager people make you think they are generating content on their own, but in reality is just feeding you unlicensed content from others.
You’re completely missing the point. Making money doesn’t change the legality. YouTube was threatened by the RIAA before they even started showing ads. Displaying an image from a copyrighted work on an AI platform is not much different technologically than Voyager or even Google Images displaying the same image, and both could also be interpreted as “feeding you unlicensed content from others.”
Except that it actually does? That's the point of copyright laws. The LLM/AIs are using copyright protected material as source without paying for it, and then selling it's output as "original '.
Oh! That's why torrent sites aren't under constant threat despite hosting tons of free copyright material.
Hang on.... Yes they are!
I just remembered a copyrighted image. Oops.
Hey, I bet there were complaints about Google showing image results at some point too! Lol
Wow, voyager app is very nice!
When they asked for an Italian video game character it returned something with unmistakable resemblance to Mario with other Nintendo property like Luigi, Toad etc. ... so you don't even have to ask for a "screencapture" directly for it to use things that are clearly based on copyrighted characters.
you're still asking for a character from a video game, which implies copyrighted material. write the same thing in google and take a look at the images. you get what you ask for.
you can't, obviously, use any image of Mario for anything outside fair use, no matter if AI generated or you got it from the internet.
Also ask literally any human and they’ll probably name Mario first. Not just top 10, number 1.
But the AI didn't credit the clear inspiration. That's the problem, that is what makes it theft: you need permission to profit off of the works of others.
but that's exactly what I said. you can't grab an image of Mario from google and profit from it as you can't draw a fan art of Mario and profit from it as well as you can't generate an image of Mario and profit from it.
It doesn't matter if you're generating it with software or painting it on canvas, if it contains intellectual property of others, you can't (legally) use it for profit.
however, generating it and posting it as a meme on the internet falls under fair use, just like using original art and making a meme.
The users are allowed to ask for those things
The AI company should not be allowed to give it in return for monetary gain.
If you asked me to draw an Italian video game character, I'd draw Mario too. Why can't an AI make copyrighted character inspired pics as long as they aren't being sold?
You credited it just now as Mario, a Nintendo property, which the AI failed to do. Plus, if you were paid to draw Mario then you'd have broken laws about IP. Why don't those same rules apply to AI?
Well that’s exactly the problem. If people use AI generated images for commercial purposes they may accidentally infringe on someone else’s copyright. Since AI models are a black box there isn’t really a good way to avoid this.
Sure there is, force the AI to properly credit artists and if they don't have permission to use the character then the prompt fails. Or the AI operators have no legal rights to charge for services and should be sued into the ground.