Us: "Hey, AI is using copyrighted works!"

Them: "AI is not a dumb copying machine; it processes the work so it becomes a derived work; it's just like how a human learns things from existing works and produces new, authentic works"

Us: "Hey, AI is copying signatures!"

Them: "You should view AI as a dumb copying machine; AI is not organized like the human brain."

> It’s not organized like a human brain, it shouldn’t be surprising that unusual results occur. They are approximating human intelligence from a different angle. It’s interesting to see the improvements in areas like this that require introspection that isn’t fully wired up yet.

AI boosters take note: this sort of thing is exactly what skeptics have in mind when they insist that you are nowhere near "AGI" and have not meaningfully passed Turing tests and your claims of goalpost-shifting are fake. You have been aiming at straw goalposts.

I have used a simple feedback loop to generate AI art: 1) the initial prompt 2) ask for criticism of the generated image 3) apply those changes and generate another image 4) repeat the criticism / fix cycle again

Isn't that somewhat introspective?

Despite what all the clickwrap warnings and "AI can make mistakes" subtitles might lead you to believe, the service offering of AI is explicitly designed to be as "one and done" as possible. The inherent nature of these tools is to service laziness, and disincentivize too much scrutiny.

> my own generated comics

For certain values of "my own".

this is so funny to me. it's not just a false signature. clearly the whole thing is false.

> I often have to put in an extra edit to erase the false signature.

Given that they can reliably do this, I'd think it should be trivial for the harness to automatically insert a "review the image for anything that looks like an artist's signature or other blatant indicator of plagiarism, and fix it" pass.

>I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.

And then people wonder why the default mood of AI is so pessimistic. It's just revealing all of society's broken windows and adding a few more in the process.

The fix is easy: stop generating AI comics. JFC.

A lot of places in the world already have this, where there are "personality rights", and usage of a person's name is automatically protected. As it should. This is part of copyright/IP laws.

Unfortunately, in the US these laws have barely any teeth in the first place, and even if they did, well you are probably familiar with the corruption things and malfunctioning justice system stuff they have going on there, as you hear people often speaking, very matter-of-fact that in a court situation, the party with more money simply wins.

Not unless you actually tried to sell it for money.

If you just draw a cartoon with a fake signature, nobody is coming after you. Even if you posted on Twitter or something, nobody is coming after you.

You'd have to be fraudulently selling it in a book of cartoons or on coffee mugs or something.

If you publish it, no issue in drawing anything for personal use. Same with AI One who published will be liable.

Laws are for poor people

That’s not a copyright issue, it’s a trademark issue.

Artists should be able to personally sue OpenAI for libel every time they forge an artists signature.

There's a lot of space between:

- LLM's can reason

- everything an LLM does is the result of reasoning

This demolishes only the latter point, which as far as I know has no supporters.

I don‘t think any of these pro-AI talking points are in good faith.

I think these talking points are there to hype up the technology or otherwise excuse the mis-allignment (i.e. consumer hostility).

Image generators aren't LLMs.

> This demolishes the "LLMs can reason"

This is completely silly. If you don’t think LLMs can reason, you’ve either never used them to do tasks that require reasoning, or you don’t understand enough to recognize what’s involved in the responses you get.

In this case it’s clearly the latter, because you’re confusing image generation models with LLMs. There are very big differences between the two. No-one is claiming that image generation models are capable of reasoning.

LLMs can very much reason and they do it very well.

But if you look at the image, the image doesn't look like an actual new yorker cartoon; it has the tells of the RL process (notice how it puts random text everywhere for example?)

If you use local models and actually train them on an artist's output, it will look extremely close to that artist's work and will also match the signature.

The image generator shouldn't exhibit the signature problem after it's been reinforcement learning trained.

I think the OpenAI people have trouble with monitoring their model's output because the model has a ton of quirks that shouldn't be there

So it's the user's fault in your opinion?

This is lawsuit material.

And I think maybe it's time for that. People need to learn that there's real, expensive legal liability for doing stuff like this. And AI companies the same.

I am very much not an advocate of "sue everybody for everything". This is major enough that it clears my threshold.

After all that has been said and written on this topic, people still manage to conflate theft with intellectual property violation, real or imagined.

Nothing got stolen as everything is still in its original place. You mean copied. It got copied.

Like the saying goes, if you steal one of the world's books, you have a problem. If you steal a million of the world's books, the world has a problem.

might makes right. this will never change..and is technologically agnostic.

Current defense seems to be that "the cartoonists are using it themselves" and the case is ongoing, at lest based on Disney vs Midjourney[1]. Which means a slap on the wrist at the moment I suppose. It's also absurd.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/disney-univer...

Doesn't suggesting that they should be sued into the oblivion automatically imply that the initial act was also, in fact, a problem?

I'd say the problem is that the only way we seem to have to fix these situations is for someone to sue someone else.

If I take one of the artist's real cartoons, open it in Photoshop, copy their signature, and paste it into another image,

should Adobe be sued?

(sorry not sorry for going against the bandwagon, let the downvotes as disagreement commence!)

Would you sue a hammer for hitting your thumb? You have to sue the one wielding it.

Why would ChatGPT be sued exactly? They didn’t publish the picture, they did what the user asked. The user is responsible because they directed the creation and publishing. The user is the entity who should be sued. Or dmca’d. Or whatever.

Think if the user commissioned the art from an outsourced creative shop nobody has heard of. Then they published it. They wouldn’t go after the creative shop, they would go after the publisher.

(I am just addressing publishing here, training on the artist’s works is a different, well discussed issue)

There are three things that have become very clear to me after the rise of generative AI:

1. The sheer amount of material on the internet that is "free to view but not free to use for any purpose" is the greatest resource of our time, and despite it being easy for individuals to take advantage of it (no one will take you to court for printing a newspaper comic and pinning it to your corkboard,) it's historically been difficult for corporations to exploit it (their best idea pre-AI is to encourage people to post it on social media walled-gardens where they can surround it with ads.)

2. The reason behind the impressive results of generative AI is because it exploits the above "free" resource, which is the greatest resource of our time. The reason behind the industry-wide push for AI and the insane amount of investment in it, is that they know it's their first real chance to exploit the greatest resource of our time. This is the gold rush.

3. Anthropomorphism is the wool that AI labs are pulling over legislators eyes so they can pull off this heist. If you see training and inference as a black box, a process that consumes a copyrighted work (among others) and produces something very similar to the original work that also competes directly with it, is clearly something that's against the spirit of copyright. But if you (afraid of being judged a luddite) see AI as a little man inside the computer who is "learning" and "creating," how could you deny him? Especially if it would deny your jurisdiction access to the above gold rush. A lot of scientific-sounding AI communication is propaganda for this way of thinking, like the Anthropic J-space stuff, which stops just short of claiming AI is conscious, despite leading the reader to that conclusion.

What Microsoft's Director of Applied Science called the, "largest theft of labor in human history".[1]

1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...

Nobody seems to care about AI automating coders out of a job.

If anyone can just prompt all their basic “information needs” however how sloppy, then what remains of the economy? Health care, child care, handyman?

Most people won’t even pay for ad free YouTube. I don’t think any software business can survive AI as a substitute good even if it’s inferior (and it might not be).

You may not like AI but their business model is a silly twitter-worthy dunk. This is obviously not their business model. I didn't know I could've plagiarized all this code myself the entire time!

This is one of the reasons I'm extremely unimpressed by complaints from openai and anthropic that other labs are "distilling" their models based on them... Basically: "You're training your model by running it again our own model which is itself a gargantuan copyright and content violation of a scale never seen before by humankind, HOW DARE YOU"

It's not just plagiarism as a service.

It's also forgery as a service.

IMO this doesn't really capture fully what AI is or does. It is possible to use AI to create artwork that has never been seen before and that is not derivative of an artist that already exists. I've used it myself for my own photos and drawings. It understands the basics of art like composition, lighting, the physics of things to some extent and all of this it uses in the art it creates.

The problem is that copyrighted material is intermingled with non-copyrighted material in a way where it's not obvious how to solve it. But I think in this case, AI is so powerful that we should (gasp) cut it some slack. This would be the perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater if OpenAI were to be sued into oblivion.

If we want to call it what it is: Copyright Laundering.

Layering and placement of copyrighted materials to evade copyright.

Reverse plagiarism, to be exact.

Only if it's intentional, which it's clearly not. So chill.

This is not at all a case of plagiarism.

The narrative is constantly about "when AGI arrives." We're gonna have UBI, it's gonna solve human labor, it's gonna produce better and more music, cinema, art, and literature than all of human history before it. The AI bros from Altman all the way down to the YouTube commenter say anything to keep the conversation off of the present. It's always the pie in the sky that is perennially almost here. The progress is happening "so fast." Next model update we're all gonna get luxury space communism.

AI is here. We've had a good long look at what it does and what it's used for, and it's not going to be something else. This is what it's for. It's for copyright washing other people's work (shitily). It's for astroturfing social media with product placement comments. It's for presidents to make videos of themselves dropping poop on protestors from airplanes. It's for souless "creators" to earn updoots from other bots for their "street photography" generated images of neon lights on puddles in Tokyo. It's rube goldberg automations that almost always accomplish nothing. It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

This is it. This is the AI we've heard so much about. I'd say I can't wait for the hype to end, but after living through several cycles, I'm almost certain that whatever hype cycle emerges from the IT sector next will be even worse.

Claude doesn’t do image generation?

I think what you're seeing is the probability of a particular signature or style of signature appearing on a particular style of cartoon, not an intent to sign.

I mean, the bug is, "it generated the most likely cluster of pixels in the corner of a New Yorker cartoon".

SynthID watermark but no visible signature

No one should be allowed to claim they drew something when they didn’t draw any part of it and LLM’s are not people/can’t work without a person. We don’t credit pens and paintbrushes after all.

One could argue nobody should be allowed to claim it. It just exists.

We call it a "watermark" when a machine "signs" its work. And I wouldn't be surprised if its required as a part of AI disclosure in the coming years.

Why is it a bug? If other parts of the generated illustration are similarly taken from an artist, why not the signature as well? Why is a signature crossing the line but the rest of the image isn't?

Young humans aren't forging signatures.

"you're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen"

Yep. I’d probably be a lot less chastised in some circles for using Claude Code at work if it wasn’t misconstrued as being in support of, I don’t know, encroaching on the hypothetical commissions of a chronically online instagram furry artist or something.

It is very tiring to say “I don’t necessarily disagree with you about AI ‘art’, but in my field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the creative output—AI presents very real productivity gains” for the umpteenth time.

I am skeptical of there being sufficient data to build “ethical” training datasets, and I’m confident that much of the same contingent will (somewhat rightfully) argue that ‘second-generation’ copyrighted AI material has already irreversibly made its way into every modern dataset.

I don't really see the difference, code is protected by copyright (or copyleft) as much as art is, and yet the LLM scrapers use it without scruples. Same goes for math and science publications.

In my experience, the science/math/code crowd don't care about copyright/plagiarism as much as the video/art/literature crowd, so the first crowd turns a blind eye to most of the latter crowd talks about.

Code can be art, and copyright/plagiarism is real. It sort of boils down to how much it bothers us.

I don't think it is likely that they could get enough data without stealing. It would be incredibly costly to have to pay artists to church out art just to train an AI.

I hope thats possible but I am not sure if proper knowledge of science can be had without also learning other literature (and vice versa).

i think math is close to art (just to be a contrarian, but kind of really)

its somewhat funny that math people are in a conundrum as to support or not support but this might partially be because some wish to believe that math itself is and can be useful and therefore accelerating is good

but the art people have no such delusions so they’re just strictly against

imo proof writing is more akin to art than coding/tech but…

> I really wish there'd be a split among these disciplines (science/math/code vs. videos/art/literature) - one is vastly more problematic than the other.

I disagree that they can be separated. Practically, I think they can't. Because the mere invention of new tools inspires even more AI advancement and that in turn will cause the other side (artistic side) to degenerate even more.

I'm anti-LLM all the way, 100%, no exceptions. Zero tolerance.

They can't be ethically sourced and good at the same time.

The current models intelligence depends on massive training dataset of essentially stolen data

Models aren't in school so plagiarism doesn't really apply

> This is a pretty solid argument against people who argue that LLMs are more than just (very massive) next token predictors.

This quote is a pretty solid argument that you need to understand the technology you’re trying to criticize better. This issue has nothing to do with LLMs. LLMs are not image generation models.

Whenever I mention this on HN, Scam Altman keeps downvoting my post from all his accounts. xD