Honestly, you all kind of mind fuck me that you're not more pissed off about AI basically replicating a large portion of your skills. This effects so many professions now and it's only going to get worse. I would expect a far greater outcry from software engineers trying to organise to ban this shit. But its like none of you even care?
If there was any thought or underlying thought going on here not putting a signature (at least a real one) would be the right move, despite it being less likely. It would realize, while generating the pixels that eventually became a signature, that it shouldn't do that.
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.
In the course of the conversation a with chatgpt, this image was generated and served by an LLM. It clearly shouldn't have been by any sort of reasoning.
If you do not want to be called a duck, it would help if you stopped quacking like one. Maybe you aren't a duck, but you aren't helping your case with stories like this about how AI generates images.
As you probably suspect, chat gave me a full synopsis of Harry Potter.
I kept asking if that's an original idea, and it kept swearing on it's mothers grave, that the story has never been published before.
Hint: it isn't "image".
Article said
>she wrote she had simply asked ChatGPT to make “a New Yorker-style cartoon.”
A "style" can't be copyrighted, at least in US law. They might have a stronger case of trademark/likeness infringement, but the fact that the person knew it was AI generated would make that difficult. Of course they knew it wasn't made by Brendan Loper. Of course, if they then published it, the other people viewing it might not know this, but who published it?
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)
OpenAI give lip service to the idea of not producing others' intellectual property - go ask it to explicitly make a picture of the genie from Aladdin.
We can all try really hard to pretend that's not the business model, but that's totally the business model.
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.
1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...
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 out of oblivion.
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).
Have people ever really broadly cared about the IT professionals behind their devices?
It's also forgery as a service.
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.
One would hope that the person prompting ChatGPT would notice this sort of thing and do something about it before sharing it publicly, out of a genuine desire not to cause confusion etc. But I guess that's way more personal responsibility than we can expect average people to take on nowadays.
In practical terms, the legal system probably isn't built to withstand blaming the user. I'd like to advocate that everyone who can do something should try to do their part, though.
A technology being flawed does not absolve its users of responsibility. To the contrary, it amplifies it.
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.
[edit] I should add that a human making a New Yorker cartoon is extremely iterative and introspective. Current generative AI is meant to push it out, and you can do the iteration and introspection yourself.
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.
Isn't that somewhat introspective?
Steal one mp3 and you might get fined thousands, steal a book from your local shoppe and the police would come visit you. Forge a signature and you would also be in trouble. Hack a government website and you will have to answer some questions.
Steal all the books in the world, forge millions and this story begins to tell and nothing happens.
For certain values of "my own".
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.
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 same should apply to LLM vendors.
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.
Would you? Always? Suppose I hate Obama drone striking people, so I made a satirical cartoon of him signing an executive order to "bomb brown people" or whatever, affixing his signature[1] to that image. Would that get me in trouble, even if the image was clearly satirical? What if someone takes that, then passes it as non-satire, either intentionally or unintentionally?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Barack_Obama_signature.sv...
I would have thought the fact OpenAI is commercially selling these forgeries (in exchange for subscription payments) would make that fairly straightforward to prove.
- 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.
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.
The thing about a generative language model that’s trained from a massive but unknown corpus is, it’s practically (if not theoretically) impossible to evaluate the extent to which data leakage contributes to any particular output.
But I would argue that, as things currently stand, “sophisticated engine for approximately querying a pastiche of the results of human reasoning that comprise its training corpus” remains a more parsimonious explanation than “it’s doing actual reasoning” for how this neural network architecture produces the phenomena we’ve been observing.
for example if you ask any of these models (just about any image-gen) to produce Japanese ukiyo-e art they will almost always produce it with a hanko[0] that has been seen a lot in historical art pieces, usually having nothing to do with the era or style of the replica but seen so often in 'Japanese artwork' that it's just permanently tokenized into it as a defining characteristic.
[0]: https://theartofzen.org/the-hanko-in-japanese-art-and-ukiyo-...
> Katzenstein considers the reproduction of his signature by ChatGPT to be more than just a violation of intellectual property; to him, it’s closer to false impersonation. “[ChatGPT] is attaching my name to work that I do not endorse or like. It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me.”
> “I’ve had people hack my credit card,” said Joe Dator, a New Yorker contributor for the past 20 years. “That feels like less of a violation than this. When they hacked my credit card, they didn’t dress up like me.”
So this has morphed from plagiarism and copyright infringement (bad) to impersonation (also bad, arguably worse, and maybe more provable in court). It’s chilling to think of the implications of having one’s signature attached to a document or to words that are not one’s own.
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.
Everything is a derivative work, and always has been. AI is just making that salient fact so much more visible, and now everyone who believes in the delusion of Imaginary Property is scared at that truth revealing itself.
Incidentally, this is also what young humans learning to draw will do. They start by copying what they've seen.
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.
The 'bug' here is whatever post-processing step or system prompt is in place to steer the model away from doing this.
One could argue nobody should be allowed to claim it. It just exists.
Even if the person can't claim the copyright of the image produced they ARE responsible for the use of their tools and what they do with the output.
In this case, they released an image with someone else's signature on it. That is wrong, the person should take the blame for that.
The person releasing the image may take it up with the AI service that their tooling led them into making such a mistake. But good luck with that in court...
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.
- prove that you had the rights for all of your training data
- open source the model
Give the labs a 3 month grace period in which to comply, so competition can persist even with dubiously sourced data, but the people can't be locked away from derivatives of their contributions for any significant amount of time.
That’s not a justification. If a company were poisoning the water to your home as a byproduct, would you be satisfied if they told you “we don’t necessarily disagree with you about polluting the water, but in our field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the water pollution—what we’re doing presents very real productivity gains”?
> I am skeptical of there being sufficient data to build “ethical” training datasets
Then you don’t build any. What fucked up world we live in where people think it’s OK to be unethical because they want something and can’t think of any other way to do it. What monumentally selfish rotten babies.
The "gray goo" scenario finally happens... for AI. That's actually the good ending for humanity. I love it! Poetic and believable. Data doesn't "heal" like nature. :D
There are actual models trained on ethical datasets but they are obviously not very high powered. If companies with the resources of an anthropic or openai were doing it (ha) it would be more feasible
Being able to prove such gains in better products would be a start. And an emphasis on how it assists existing engineers/mathmaticians/researchers, not that any accomplishment made with AI assistance is "AI solves problem".
I don't know whatever happened to "words are cheap". I guess it literally made money to say words, so that adage is false for the time being.
>I am skeptical of there being sufficient data to build “ethical” training datasets
Well if all those scam job ads paying 100/hr to create AI training content was not a scam and instead the approach from the start, there may have been a chance to bridge that gap ethically. The industry chose to break things and is trying to act mad that people are mad at all the broken stuff.
These results are entirely a consequences of the actions chosen. And I don't believe there was ever an honest consideration of there being ethical training datasets. They just thought they could brute force society with fearmongering and bribes. The BOTD was already low in the beginning but completely gone now.
But sure, there's um, an ethical way of doing that?
While coders may care about the craft (and I do), it's not as if the value of my code is in the exact variable names I chose.
Code can be art, and copyright/plagiarism is real. It sort of boils down to how much it bothers us.
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.
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…
The current models intelligence depends on massive training dataset of essentially stolen data
google OTOH already had a lot of this dataset in their possession (e.g. Google Books etc), still questionably licensed for how they used it, but not quite as bad. They did apparently break through NYT paywalls and stuff like that though, still theft.
It's like accusing somebody of being a lousy chef because they have such terrible taste in takeout. There's just no connection between these things.
If the machine is like you, the machine is a forger. The machine is not like you, it is simply blending the work of others to order. Adding someone else's signature is simply part of that statistical process.
Somebody “made something.” But just because you do something doesn’t mean you get to claim whole ownership of it and get to sign it with your name. Plenty of examples in life.
1. Only use open source/CC compliant assets.
2. Acquire rights/licenses to any datasets that do not fit #1. e.g. the Google deal with Reddit for 60m/yr.
3. Offer programs to have creatives willingly submit their data, with some sort of residual output based on the number of times their assets are sampled.
4. If all that is still not enough, hire creatives to create assets for you. This is something Spotify did recently with "ghost artists"[0]. The intentions here are suspect, but a non-consumer facing artist providing work for an LLM wouldn't have the same ethical dilemmas
5. Lastly, if all that still isn't enough: governmental programs to either provide grants, subsidies, or more outreach to get the ball rolling.
Would this cost tens, hundreds of billions of dollars? Yes. But clearly, that was not a barrier to entry for the industry anyway. So we can chalk this down to the personality of leadership or the wider culture of modern big tech
[0]: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
Like, legally, I'm sure Reddit had the right to sell it, but probably over half their content was written before ChatGPT was ever announced. The TOS allowing reddit to make "derivative works" was largely understood to mean things like cropping photos, using your viral post in an ad, or maybe auto-translating your comment.
There's nothing illegal unless someone seriously thinks Obama signed it. The easiest example would be his signature on his wikipedia page. Clearly he didn't sign that page, nor (probably) did he authorize it.
These cartoons are intentionally drawn in the style of a cartoonist and feature their signature. The goal is forgery. The whole point of these AI-generated images is to look like the real thing.
You can't seriously claim that the very person who prompted the AI image generator thinks the image it spit out was created by Brendan Loper?
Well if the thing can find and fix bugs in something that is using non-mainstream stuff that is surely not in it's training dataset, that's better than a rubber duck already. Whether it has soul is a different question of course.
As popular as I know the rhetorical tactic is on both sides of these discussions about LLMs, I’d still thank you not to strawman me.
Perhaps you could argue that “appropriately applies syllogism to arrive at correct conclusions” is too high a bar to set, but I don’t think it would be fair to call it a “goofy-ass”, “non-standard” or “fluid” element of a reasoning capacity assessment.
You’re making a lot of things objectively better, but none of them are the essentials that people need.
I’m not saying it’s bad to make AI bots or video games or network apps. I’m saying that the blanket statement “we make things better” is oblivious to a lot of realities.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_P...
What does the case law say on what counts as "misattribution"? If a paste the "BLOPER" signature onto a jpeg, did I commit a crime right then and there? What if I put a notice next to it saying "btw it's not actually Brendan Loper"? What if I took that image (with the notice), uploaded it for the whole world to see, then some guy cropped out the "btw it's not actually Brendan Loper"?
> it may be reproduced, as long as the reproduction cannot be mistaken for an authentic signature.
Which seems applicable in this case, because the image is clearly generated by AI (at least to the guy who prompted it).
Putting a signature on a work is forgery and in most jurisdictions charged as fraud.
If you produce an artwork in the style of someone and then clone the signature of someone who produces art in that style, there is a reasonable case for fraud.
Their wealth has exceeded an escape velocity beyond which they won't be put in prison (or if they are they would quickly be pay-for-play pardoned) unless they are seen as a threat to even wealthier people.
See, for example: Devon Archer, Jason Galanis, Benjamin Delo, Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed, Trevor Milton, Carlos Watson, Paul Walczak, Todd and Julie Chrisley, Lawrence Duran, Marian Morgan, Imaad Zuberi, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Joseph Schwartz, et al.
Some of these people are broke bitches compared to the group of people you're talking about now, and yet still hit the threshold of being above the law as long as they play the corruption game.
I continue to find that people strongly advocate for justice on exactly opposing sides, depending on who they have been told to think the “bad guy” is.
The same orgs that harassed and antagonized Aaron Schwartz are not going after AI for the same thing at a much much larger scale.
What's different? The size of their bank accounts.
One, time went on. The prosecution of Schwartz was seen as an overreach, as demonstrated by Ortiz’s failed political career thereafter.
Two, Schwartz’s charges were only ever charged. No jury or judge signed off on them.
Three, context changed. Schwartz wasn’t 5% of GDP. For better or for worse, that matters to voters.
Compute, however, clearly is not.
Part of my concern here is that simply pointing out that LLMs appear to be performing tasks that can be done through reasoning, and using that in and of itself as evidence of reasoning, is affirming the consequent.
[0]. https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/16/digital-images-photos-gi...
But it's not. The only layer anyone has a handle on is consumers and companies paying AI ridiculous sums for AI. Some of those users are probably justifying it with labour replacement. But a lot may not be. So far, we haven't seen the employment effect outside recent college graduates at enterprise companies.
> as implemented in the United States it's a malignant tumor, a theft of labor by capital, and it must be (minimally) adddressed with confiscatory taxes applied to all those involved with it's creation and operation
It's also a godsend of economic growth. Growth other countries who are trying to balance their books would kill for. Without AI, we'd be in a failure state. Maybe we are, if this is all a bubble. But as it stands, there is paper wealth that can and has–limitedly–been taxed. That gives everyone options.
> If a single AI billionaire exists in the year 2030, then the US is a failed state
This is silly and projecting a narrow view of the world onto a larger voting population. Voters don't care so much that there are billionaires as that living standards haven't kept up with the rate at which they're being minted. Double tax brackets, add more on top, raise the minimum wage, raise Social Security taxes and benefits, expand Medicare, beef up antitrust, establish a progressive property tax on wealth that starts at 1,000x the median American's wage (about $65mm) and billionaires are fine.
VCs are paying ridiculous sums for AI. Consumers are not - we get tokens subsidised by VCs.
> if this is all a bubble
Interesting to see that revenue growth for both Anthropic and OpenAI has levelled off recently. Once this fact percolates through to the VCs, it's going to cause problems. All those valuations are based on projections of vastly greater revenue than they're getting now (and, ofc, achieving AGI and "winning" everything immediately that happens). This is looking less and less likely - the current batch of AIs are very, very, useful tools, but as we learn how to use them commercially they're not generating those limitless revenues that were anticipated.
This tech, like all the rest, will go through the Gartner Hype Cycle, and that includes the Trough of Despair where it all looks shit and the bubble pops. I think we're approaching that rapidly.
