News Microsoft engineer begs FTC to stop Copilot's offensive image generator – Our tests confirm it's a serious problem

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I don't see how this thread won't get locked, but I'll try...

While making offensive images is protected free speech (not in all countries, but we'll use USA here) under the First Amendment, it does not protect you from its consequences.

I am not the LegalEagle, nor a lawyer, so please forgive the butchered example.
So, for example, let's say an easily recognizable and copyrighted character was doing something awful that they would never do. This lead to financial losses for the owner of said character, and they went to sue the creator in civil court for defamation.

Who would get sued?

Copilot owner, microsoft?
Dall-E owner, openAI?
The person who typed in the prompts?
Some other person in the chain?

AFAIK, all of this AI art and free speech stuff has not been tested in court.
I know of some lawyers/lawfirms using chatGPT to write cases and losing badly, but beyond that? untested.
 
Lets just hope they are incapable of manufacturing images that would be considered illegal to own.
They do so easily. Its only the after the fact "guard rails" the front end puts in place that make it less easy to output that kind of content. Its pretty obvious all the "AI" tools have ingested a non-trivial amount of CP into their training data.

All of these "guard rails" don't' exist if you run a self hosted version.

Just goes to show they really didn't do any filtering at all of the input data. Nor did anyone bother to check if the most obvious bad & illegal thing an image generator could spit out was possible before they released it to the public.
 
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I don't see how this thread won't get locked, but I'll try...

While making offensive images is protected free speech (not in all countries, but we'll use USA here) under the First Amendment, it does not protect you from its consequences.

I am not the LegalEagle, nor a lawyer, so please forgive the butchered example.
So, for example, let's say an easily recognizable and copyrighted character was doing something awful that they would never do. This lead to financial losses for the owner of said character, and they went to sue the creator in civil court for defamation.

Who would get sued?

Copilot owner, microsoft?
Dall-E owner, openAI?
The person who typed in the prompts?
Some other person in the chain?

AFAIK, all of this AI art and free speech stuff has not been tested in court.
I know of some lawyers/lawfirms using chatGPT to write cases and losing badly, but beyond that? untested.
I'm not sure what Disney and Warner Brothers are waiting for. Their copyrighted IP is being abused and the image generators are absolutely doing contributory infringement. Once, when I was in college, I went to the copy machine store to photocopy a t-shirt I had bought on a trip to a foreign country. I wanted to give out copies of the shirt's picture to a bunch of people in my class (for an assignment). Despite the fact that this shirt came from another country, Kinkos would refused to photocopy it because it had a copyright symbol on it. And who was going to go to international court and sue them for making 30 copies of a shirt?

AI image generators are not only saying yes to any infringement people ask for but infringing even when nobody asked them to.
 
I am questioning why we need to have AI generate images in the first place.
Are we that far gone that we cannot produce our own images anymore?
No, but it takes time and skill to become a good artist.

There are a couple use cases that are genuinely helpful.
1. Comic artists who are good at drawing people, but are slow/bad at drawing background images or objects.
2. For fun personal use. Like when you want to create a rough sketch of your own making (for roleplay, D&D, screenplay, etc) and you have a general idea, but lack the talent to draw it.

Other than those two? I haven't seen or heard a good argument.
I think it quickly falls apart when you suddenly have an influx of people claiming to be "prompt artists" who think they did all the work. It's kind of like claiming you traveled 100miles... in a train, when all you did was buy a ticket with the correct destination.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230


I wonder with the amount of Ai generated good and bad if the old section-230 will still be a get out of trouble card.
Google has counted on that to not be the responsible party when you can search some pretty un kind stuff.

Throw Ai in the mix and if Mini Mouse ends up in Ai on it's a small world ride at Disneyland in a adult only version. Google can post it. There off the hook.

Who made it is a ghost. There off the hook.

And some kid will see it.
 
I think it quickly falls apart when you suddenly have an influx of people claiming to be "prompt artists" who think they did all the work. It's kind of like claiming you traveled 100miles... in a train, when all you did was buy a ticket with the correct destination.
Like people who post Chatbot responses, attempting to answer a question here.
New person, that all of a sudden has a experience in a wide range of issues. Graphics, networking, hard drive issues....and all 'responses' curiously structured the same.
 
Its pretty obvious all the "AI" tools have ingested a non-trivial amount of CP into their training data
I am sure you mean this comment as a joke. I have never in my life seen such pictures on the web, on image search results, etc.
If you don’t explicitly search for it, these kinds of images are extremely hard to find on the regular internet. And even then you probably won’t find it.
Google, Microsoft and others use software to detect these kinds of images, and also make use of various international databases to filter out known CSAM that is found on or uploaded to their servers.

Also: Your comment shows that you do not fully understand how these AI image generators work.

I am questioning why we need to have AI generate images in the first place.
You don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. No one forces you to use software you don’t need (except maybe your boss at work).

Are we that far gone that we cannot produce our own images anymore?
No, but it’s cheaper, faster, easier, and in many cases also better than manually generated art.

You don’t.

"guard rails"
If you want to use a ...., censored AI image generator, feel free to use Google Gemini.
 
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So you're defending AI artwork?
Absolutely.
In some cases, the creator should note that the image, video, etc. is AI generated (just like one would list the sources for one’s pictures).
And while we’re at it: I’m also defending the use of image generators for “offensive” uses such as nude images of celebrities of legal age. (Yes, those Taylor Swift AI nudes were completely fine and I did not understand what all the fuss was about).

For what use case?
Hobbyist or commercial?
Any and all use cases. AI image generation and chat bots are only useful when it’s unrestricted and uncensored. That’s also true for their use. What use do these tools have if you can’t use their output anywhere?

Commercial AI image generators will have to bow to political and social interests and therefore become quite useless in the long term. Open source software will be better in this area and provide more benefits to its users (i.e. give more honest answers).
 
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Absolutely.
In some cases it should be noted that it’s AI generated (just like one would normally note the sources for your pictures).
And while we’re at it: I’m also defending the use of image generators for “offensive” uses such as nude images of celebrities of legal age. (Yes, those Taylor Swift AI nudes were completely fine and I did not understand what all the fuss was about).


All of them. AI image generation and chat bots are only useful when it’s unrestricted and uncensored. That’s also true for their use. What use do these tools have if you can’t use their output anywhere?

Commercial AI image generators will have to bow to political and social interests and therefore quite useless in the long term. Open source software will be better in this area and provide more benefits to its users (i.e. give more honest answers).
If you create content via some AI, either art, text, or whatever...and state it was generated via AI, no harm no foul.
People will see that and know the AI provenance.

But if you instead claim it as your own work, that's where I have a problem.
 
And remember, human artists have, are, and will continue to produce pictures with "offensive content" and copyright violations, despite it being quite illegal to profit from such material, yet aside from the very occasional DMCA there hasn't, isn't, and will continue not to be such an outroar about it as when AI does it.
 
I'm not sure what Disney and Warner Brothers are waiting for. Their copyrighted IP is being abused and the image generators are absolutely doing contributory infringement. Once, when I was in college, I went to the copy machine store to photocopy a t-shirt I had bought on a trip to a foreign country. I wanted to give out copies of the shirt's picture to a bunch of people in my class (for an assignment). Despite the fact that this shirt came from another country, Kinkos would refused to photocopy it because it had a copyright symbol on it. And who was going to go to international court and sue them for making 30 copies of a shirt?

AI image generators are not only saying yes to any infringement people ask for but infringing even when nobody asked them to.

I think their waiting for the dust to settle in a few cases first because the AI folks are absolutely going to argue "substantial transformation" and with how murky parts of that law are, WD / WB stand to lose way more if a Federal Court rules against them. And while I complete agree that all the generative AI's out there are blatantly stealing and plagiarizing, the law simply hasn't caught up yet and everyone's trying to manage risk.
 
If you create content via some AI, either art, text, or whatever...and state it was generated via AI, no harm no foul.
People will see that and know the AI provenance.

But if you instead claim it as your own work, that's where I have a problem.

To be quite direct, while some AI generated content is from enthusiasts just playing around, most is done by professionals trying to make money. It takes lots of time, effort and energy to create digital artwork, but if you can get an algorithm to do it for you, then it becomes a matter of coding some automation and then scaling it up. One coder can get generative AI to do the work of 10~100+ humans, and while that work is mediocre they still make money from quantity.

Kyle HIll did a good video about how generative AI is already creating a "Dark Forest" internet scenario.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrcbH0ge2WE&ab_channel=KyleHill
 
Double edge sword for content owners. I'm sure they want to use these tools to "reduce costs" but at the same time are losing their brand. Tough decisions for CEOs looking to buy their 5th yacht.
 
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One coder can get generative AI to do the work of 10~100+ humans
I've yet to find generative AI capable of outputting useful programs. Simple things yeah, create me a web page that does play and sends ajax requests to xyz. However, getting it to style the site, handle xmpp callbacks for streaming data and/or probably update a redux model is another story. You often have to take what it created and tweak the hell out of it, which IMO ends up being equal in time.

I'm sure if you feed it 100s of entries you could get something complex to work, but IMO most of these things would take equal time to code.

I'm sure it will get there someday, but I found the code generators to be lacking at the moment and really are only useful for templating.
 
I'm not sure what Disney and Warner Brothers are waiting for. Their copyrighted IP is being abused and the image generators are absolutely doing contributory infringement. Once, when I was in college, I went to the copy machine store to photocopy a t-shirt I had bought on a trip to a foreign country. I wanted to give out copies of the shirt's picture to a bunch of people in my class (for an assignment). Despite the fact that this shirt came from another country, Kinkos would refused to photocopy it because it had a copyright symbol on it. And who was going to go to international court and sue them for making 30 copies of a shirt?

AI image generators are not only saying yes to any infringement people ask for but infringing even when nobody asked them to.
Disney's problem is they plan on being one of the biggest users of AI since it will reduce their cost to produce content dramatically.
 
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