| > if you ask for an image of an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip, it's weighted averages are going to lead it to create something extremely similar to Indiana Jones because it has seen Indiana Jones so much. If you ask a human artist for an image of "an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip" you're also going to get something extremely similar to Indiana Jones unless you explicitly ask for something else. Let's imagine we go to deviantart and ask some folks to draw us some drawing from these prompts: A blond haired fighter from a fantasy world that wears a green tunic and green pointy cap and used a sword and shield. A foreboding space villain with all black armor, a cape and full face breathing apparatus that uses a laser sword. A pudgy plumber in blue overalls and a red cap of Italian descent I don't know about you but I would expect with nothing more than that, most of the time you're going to get something very close to Link, Darth Vader and Mario. Link might be the one with the best chance to get something different just because the number of publicly known images of "fantasy world heroes" is much more diverse than the set of "black armored space samurai" and "Italian plumbers" > Disintegrating IP into trillions of pieces and then responding to an instruction to create it with something so close to the IP as to barely be distinguishable is still infringement. But it's the person that causes the creation of the infringing material that is responsible for the infringement, not the machine or device itself. A xerox machine is a machine that disintegrates IP into trillions of pieces and then responds to instructions to duplicate that IP almost exactly (or to the best of its abilities). And when that functionality was challenged, the courts rightfully found that a xerox machine in and of itself, regardless of its capability to be used for infringement is not in and of itself infringing. |
That's simply not good enough. This is not merely a machine that can be misused if desired by a bad actor, this is a machine that specializes in infringement. It's a machine which is internally biased, by the nature of how it works, towards infringement, because it is inherently "copying:" It is copying the weighted averages of millions perhaps billions of training images, many of which depict similar things. No, it doesn't explicitly copy one Indiana Jones image or another: It copies a shit ton of Indiana Jones images, mushed together into a "new" image from a technical perspective, but will inherit all the most prominent features from all of those images, and thus: it remains a copy.
And if you want to disagree with this point, it'd be most persuasive then to explain why, if this is not the case, AI images regularly end up infringing on various aspects of various popular artworks, like characters, styles, intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt.
> If you ask a human artist for an image of "an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip" you're also going to get something extremely similar to Indiana Jones unless you explicitly ask for something else.
No, you aren't, because an artist is a person that doesn't want to suffer legal consequences for drawing something owned by someone else. Unless you specifically commission "Indiana Jones fanart" I in fact, highly doubt you'll get something like him because an artist will want to use this work to promote their work to others, and unless you are driven to exist in the copyright gray area of fan created works, which is inherently legally dicey, you wouldn't do that.