What I found surprising is I didnt even have one sale. Somehow someone had notified Nintendo AND my shop had been taken down, to sell merch that didn't even exist for the market and if I remember correctly - also it didnt even have any imagery on it or anything trademarkable - even if it was clearly meant for pokmeonGo fans.
Im not bitter I just found it interesting how quick and ruthless they were. Like bros I didn't even get a chance to make a sale. ( yes and also I dont think I infringed anything).
A possible (probably already exists) business is setting up truly balanced learning sets, that is, thousands of unique images that match the idea of an italian plumber, with maybe 1% of Mario. But that won't be nearly as big a learning set as the whole internet is, nor will it be cheap to build it compared to just scraping the internet.
I thought that a lot of the issues were the opposite of this, where Google put their thumb on the scale to go against what the prompt asked. Like when someone would ask for a historically accurate picture of a US senator from the 1800s and repeatedly get women and non-white men. The training set for that prompt has to be overwhelmingly white men so I don't think it was just a matter of following the training data.
Of course the irony is that if the people who get offended whenever they see images of non-white people asked for a picture of "Vikings being attacked by Godzilla" , they'd get worked up if any of the Vikings in the picture were Asian (how unrealistic!). It's a made-up universe! The image contains a damn (Asian) Kaiju in it, and everyone is supposed to be pissed because the Vikings are unrealistic!?
They'll eventually have open source competition too. And then none of this will matter.
OmniGen is a good start, just woefully undertrained.
The VAR paper is open, from ByteDance, and supposedly the architecture this is based on.
Black Forest Labs isn't going to sit on their laurels. Their entire product offering just became worthless and lost traction. They're going to have to answer this.
I'd put $50 on ByteDance releases an open source version of this in three months.
It was removed on Copyright claims before I could order one item myself. After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let me buy one item for personal use.
My point is: Doesn't have to be Sony, doesn't have to be a snitch - overzealous anticipatory obedience by the shop might have been enough.
I used Spreadshirt to print a panel from the Tintin comic on a T-shirt, and I had no problem ordering it (it shows Captain Haddock moving through the jungle, swatting away the mosquitoes harassing him, giving himself a big slap on the face, and saying, 'Take that, you filthy beasts!').
The big advertisers had all furnished us a list of their trademarks and acceptable domains. Any advertiser trying to use one that wasn’t on the allow-list had their ad removed at review time.
I suspect this could be what happened to you. If the platform you were using has any kind of review process for new shops, you may have run afoul of pre-registered keywords.
Nintendo is also famously protective of their IP: to give another anecdote, I just bought one of the emulator handhelds on Aliexpress that are all the rage these days, and while they don't advertise it they usually come preloaded with a buttload or ROMs. Mine did, including a number of Nintendo properties — but nary an Italian plumber to be found. The Nintendo fear runs deep.
That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation and they'll never create.
Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.
There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.
For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.
That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can.
And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince the average person that ideas are in fact property. That the first person to think something and write it down rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are "stealing."
This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.
(Trademarks aside) Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to create a profitable game for them.
If they all go bankrupt today I won't lose any sleep over it.
People also try to make a living selling bananas and apples. Should we create an elaborate scheme for them to make sure they survive? Their product is actually important to have. Why can't they own the exclusive right to sell bananas similarly? If anyone can just sell apples it would hurt their profit.
It is long ago but that is how things use to work. We do still have taxi medallions in some places and all kinds of legalized monopolies like it.
Perhaps there is some sector where it makes sense but I can't think of it.
If you want to make a movie you can just do a crowd funder like Robbert space industry.
Do you want more games (movies, books...)? Then you want studios to make money in that type of game. Because and if they make money they have incentive to do so. Now if you are happy with the number and quality of free games a few hard core people who will do it even if they make nothing then you don't care. However games generally take a lot of effort to create and so by paying people to make them we can ensure people who want to actually have the time - as opposed want to but instead have to spend hours in a field farming for their food.
Now it is true that games often do look alike and many are not worth making and such. However if you want more you need to ensure they make money so it is worth investing.
We can debate how much they should make and how long copyright should be for. However you want them to make money so they make more.
If I was running the trade emergency room in any European state right now, I'd have "stop enforcing US copyright" up there next to "reciprocal tarrifs".
Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use, which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own profit.
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-faqs#...
[2] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset.
If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years.
The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that goes public domain after 20.
Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I don’t know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But 120->20? Maybe not.
A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist.
In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn’t have the LOTR movies.
Not so, because of net present value.
The return from investing in normal stocks is ~10%/year, which is to say ~670% over 20 years, because of compounding interest. Another way of saying this is that $1 in 20 years is worth ~$0.15 today. A dollar in 30 years is worth ~$0.05 today. A dollar in 40 years is worth ~$0.02 today. As a result, if a thing generates the same number of dollars every year, the net present value of the first 20 years is significantly more than the net present value of all the years from 20-120 combined, because money now or soon from now is worth so much more than money a long time from now. And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.
The reason corporations lobby for copyright term extensions isn't that they care one bit about extended terms for new works. It's because they don't want the works from decades ago to enter the public domain now, and they're lobbying to make the terms longer retroactively. But all of those works were already created and the original terms were sufficient incentive to cause them to be.
50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue. Today, it’s $25. That’s a 50x increase… a dollar in 50 years might be worth $0.02 today, but a movie ticket in 50 years is worth about a movie ticket today.
For the crown jewel IP that the studios are most interested in protecting, the opposite of this assumption is true. Star Wars, for example, is making more money than ever. Streaming revenues will probably invalidate that assumption for an even wider pool of back catalog properties.
Make copyright last for a fixed term of 25 years with optional 10-year renewals up to 95 years on an escalating fee schedule (say, $100k for the first decade and doubling every subsequent decade) and people—and studios—would have essentially the same incentive to create as they do now, and most works would get into the public domain far sooner.
Probably be fewer entirely lost works, as well, if you had firmer deposit requirements for works with extended copyrights (using the revenue from the extensions to fund preservation) with other works entering the public domain soon enough that they were less likely to be lost before that happened.
That would be fine, if the studios didn't want to have it both ways. They want to retain full copyright control over their "asset", but they also use Hollywood Accounting [1] to both avoid paying taxes and cheat contributors that have profit-sharing agreements.
If studios declare that they made a loss on producing and releasing something to get a tax break, the copyright term for that work should be reduced to 10 years tops.
Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of the threat.
I feel like the less advanced generations, maybe even because of their limitations in terms of size, were better at coming up with something that at least feels new.
In the end, other than for copyright-washing, why wouldn't I just use the original movie still/photo in the first place?
To me, this article is further proof that LLMs are a form of lossy storage. People attribute special quality to the loss (the image isn't wrong, it's just got different "features" that got inserted) but at this point there's not a lot distinguishing a seed+prompt file+model from a lossy archive of media, be it text or images, and in the future likely video as well.
The craziest thing is that AI seems to have gathered some kind of special status that earlier forms of digital reproduction didn't have (even though those 64kbps MP3s from napster were far from perfect reproductions), probably because now it's done by large corporations rather than individuals.
If we're accepting AI-washing of copyright, we might as well accept pirated movies, as those are re-encoded from original high-resolution originals as well.
A new MCU movie is released, its 60 second trailer posted on Youtube, but I don't feel like watching the movie because I got bored after Endgame.
Youtube has very strict anti-scraping techniques now, so I use deep-scrapper to generate the whole trailer from the thumbnail and title.
I use deep-pirate to generate the whole 3 hour movie from the trailer.
I use deep-watcher to summarize the whole movie in a 60 second video.
I watch the video. It doesn't make any sense. I check the Youtube trailer. It's the same video.
To a viewer, a human-made work and an AI-generated one both amount to a series of stimuli that someone else made and you have no control over; and when people pay to see a movie, generally they don't do it with the intent to finance the movie company to make more movies -- they do it because they're offered the option to spend a couple hours watching something enjoyable. Who cares where it comes from -- if it reached us, it must be good, right?
The "special status" you speak of is due to AI's constrained ability to recombine familiar elements in novel ways. 64k MP3 artifacts aren't interesting to listen to; while a high-novelty experience such as learning a new culture or a new discipline isn't accessible (and also comes with expectations that passive consumption doesn't have.)
Either way, I wish the world gave people more interesting things to do with their brains than make a money, watch a movies, or some mix of the two with more steps. (But there isn't much of that left -- hence the concept of a "personal life" as reduced to breaking one's own and others' cognitive functioning then spending lifetimes routing around the damage. Positively fascinating /s)
[0] https://imgur.com/a/wqrBGRF Image captions are the impled IP, I copied the prompts from the blog post.
Recent benchmark on unseen 2025 Math Olympiad shows none of the models can problem solve . They all accidentally or on purpose had prior solutions in the training set.
Certainly there's an aspect of people using the chat interface like they use google: describe xyz to try to surface the name of a movie. Just in this case, we're doing the (less common?) query of: find me the picture I can vaguely describe; but it's a query to a image /generating/ service, not an image search service.
So I asked it to make 4 random and generic superheroes. It created Batman, Supergirl, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman. Then at about 90% finished it deleted the image and said I was violating copyright.
I doubt the model you interact with actually knows why the babysitter model rejects images, but it claims to know why and leads to some funny responses. Here is it's response to me asking for a superhero with a dark bodysuit, a purple cape, a mouse logo on their chest, and a spooky mouse mask on their face.
> I couldn't generate the image you requested because the prompt involved content that may violate policy regarding realistic human-animal hybrid masks in a serious context.
(hard to formulate why I was too lazy to test myself :) )
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
“Copyright does not protect • Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, or discoveries”
Not sure why this is even controversial, this has been the case for a hundred years.
I really, really hope the multimedia-megacorps get together and class-action ChatGPT and every other closed, for-profit LLM corporation into oblivion.
There should not be a two-tier legal system. If it's illegal for me, it's illegal for Sam Altman.
Get to it.
That’s a fine philosophical debate, but the law is designed by the rich to favor the rich and while there are a number of exceptions there is little you can do with the legal system without money and lots of it. So while having a truly just system would be neat it just isn’t in the cards for humanity (IMHO) so long as we allow entities to amass “fuck you” money and wield it to their liking.
There is a lack of consent here that runs even deeper than what copyright was traditionally made to protect. It goes further than parody. We can't flip our standards back and forth depending on who the image is made to reproduce
Large corporations and their execs live by different laws than the rest of us.
That’s how it is.
Anything is else is, unfortunately, a fiction in this country.
I’m just stating a fact. No discussion of wrong or right or whatever.
Just pointing out how there is no more rule of law in the US. Idk when exactly it disappeared, but it’s definitely not present anymore
One thing I would say, it's interesting to consider what would make this not so obviously bad.
Like, we could ask AI to assess the physical attributes of the characters it generated. Then ask it to permute some of those attributes. Generate some random tweaks: ok but brawy, short, and a different descent. Do similarly on some clothing colors. Change the game. Hit the "random character" button on the physical attributes a couple times.
There was an equally shatteringly-awful less-IP-theft (and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations).... An equally shattering recent incident for me. Having trouble finding it, don't remember the right keywords, but an article about how AI has a "default guy" type that it uses everywhere, a super generic personage, that it would use repeatedly. It was so distasteful.
The nature of 'AI as compression', as giving you the most median answer is horrific. Maybe maybe maybe we can escape some of this trap by iterating to different permutations, by injecting deliberate exploration of the state spaces. But I still fear AI, worry horribly when anyone relies on it for decision making, as it is anti-intelligent, uncreative in extreme, requiring human ingenuity to budge off its rock of oppressive hypernormality that it regurgitates.
Are you telling me that our culture should be deprived of the idea of Indiana Jones and the feelings that character inspires in all of us forever just because a corporation owns the asset?
Indiana Jones is 44 years old. When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done since humans first started sitting down next to a fire and telling stories?
edit: this reminds of this iconic scene from Dr. Strangelove, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ9B7owHxMQ
Mandrake: Colonel... that Coca-Cola machine. I want you to shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.
Guano: That's private property.
Mandrake: Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame, outlook, way of life, and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of the United States? Can you imagine? Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twit!
Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what's gonna happen to you?
Mandrake: What?
Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.
Some great video games to feature adventurer archaeologists:
* NetHack (One of the best roles in the game)
* Tomb Raider series (Lara Croft is a bona fide archaeologist)
* Uncharted series (Nathan Drake is more of a treasure hunter but he becomes an archaeologist when he retires from adventuring)
* Professor Layton series
* La-Mulana series (very obviously inspired by Indiana Jones, but not derivative)
* Spelunky (inspired by La-Mulana)
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventurerArchae...
IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively. Make copyright law to be what is best for society and creators as a whole, not for lobbyists representing already copyrighted material.
Sure, assuming the artist has the proper license and franchise rights to make and distribute copies. You can go buy a picture of Indy today that may not be printed by Walt Disney Studios but by some other outfit or artists.
Or, you mean if the artist doesn't have a license to produce and distribute Indiana Jones images? Well they'll be in trouble legally. They are making "copies" of things they don't own and profiting from it.
Another question is whether that's practically enforceable.
> Where did I (or the artist) violate any copyright (or other) laws?
When they took payment and profited from making unauthorized copies.
> It is the artist that is replaced by the AI, not the copyrighted IP.
Exactly, that's why LLMs and the companies which create them are called "theft machines" -- they are reproducing copyrighted material. Especially the ones charging for "tokens". You pay them, they make money and produce unauthorized copies. Show that picture of Indy to a jury and I think it's a good chance of convincing them.
I am not saying this is good or bad, I just see this having a legal "bite" so to speak, at least in my pedestrian view of copyright law.
If they traced a photo they might be violating the copyright of the photographer.
But if they are drawing an archaeologist adventurer with a whip and a hat based on their consumption and memory of Indiana Jones imagery there is very little anyone could do.
If that image was then printed on an industrial scale or printed onto t-shirt there is a (albeit somewhat theoretical) chance that in some jurisdictions sale of those products may be able to be restricted based on rights to the likeness. But that would be a stretch.
Ok, my sister can draw, and she gifts me an image of my favorite Marvel hero she painted to hang on my wall. Should that be illegal?
If you make money off it, it's no longer fair use; it's infringement. Even if you don't make money off it, it's not automatically fair use.
My own favorite crazy story about copyright violations:
Metallica sued Green Jello for parodying Enter Sandman (including a lyric where it says "It's not Metallica"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Harley_House_(of_Love...
They lost that case. The kicker? Metallica were guest vocalists on that album.
What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones but he's carrying a bow and arrow instead of a whip? Is it infringement?
What if it's a really bad drawing of Indiana Jones, so bad that you can't really tell that it's the character? Is that infringement?
What if the drawing is of Indiana Jones, but in the style of abstract expressionism, so doesn't even contain a human shape? Is it infringement?
What if it's a good drawing that looks very much like Indiana Jones, but it's not! The person's name is actually Iowa Jim. Is that infringement?
What if it's just an image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, but otherwise doesn't look anything like Indiana Jones? Is it infringement?
I don't think this is about reproduction as much as how you got enough data for that reproduction. The riaa sent people to jail and ruined their lives for pirating. Now these companies are doing it and being valued for hundreds of billions of dollars.
A human friend can get tired and there's so many request he/she can fulfill and at a max rate. Even a team of human artists have a relatively low limit.
But Gen AI has very high limits and speeds, and it never gets tired. It seems unfair to me.
Ah, I thought I knew this account from somewhere. It seems surprisingly easy to figure out what account is commenting just based on the words used, as I've commented that only a few active people on this site seem to use such strong words as shown here.
> Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.
It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.
A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.
AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.
In the first case, there's only one static image for an entire scene, scrolled and zoomed, and if they feel generous, there would be an overlay with another static image that slides over the first at a constant speed and direction. It feels dead.
In the second case, each frame is different. There's chaotic motions such as wind and there's character movement with a purpose, even in the background, there's always something happening in the animation, there's life.
I bet that a good animator could make a really impressive 4-second scene if they were given a month, instead of a year. Possibly even if they were given a day.
So if we assume that there is not a binary "cheap animation vs masterpiece" but rather a sort of spectrum between the two, then the question is: at what point do enough people stop seeing the difference, that it makes economic sense to stay at that level, if the goal is to create as much high-quality content as possible?
That lowest-accepted quality also declines over time, as generations after generations of people become used to rock-bottom quality. In the end, there's only slop and AI will make the cheapest slop ever. Welcome to a brave new world. We don't even need people anymore. They're too expensive.
To be clear, I am not saying it's not valuable, only that to the vast majority, it's not.
Social media and generative AI may be good business because the capture the attention of the majority, but maybe they are not valuable to anyone.
Perhaps it's not for everyone.
There are many valid answers.
Maybe you want to create it to tell a story, and you have an overflowing list of stories you're desperate to tell. The animation may be a means to an end, and tools that help you get there sooner mean telling more stories.
Maybe you're pretty good at making things people like and you're in it for the money. That's fine, there are worse ways to provide for your family than making things people enjoy but aren't a deep thing for you.
Maybe you're in it because you love the act of creating it. Selling it is almost incidental, and the joy you get from it comes down to spending huge amounts of time obsessing over tiny details. If you had a source of income and nobody ever saw your creations, you'd still be there making them.
These are all valid in my mind, and suggest different reasons to use or not to use tools. Same as many walks of life.
I'd get the weeds gone in my front lawn quickly if I paid someone to do it, but I quite enjoy pottering around on a sunny day pulling them up and looking back at the end to see what I've achieved. I bake worse bread than I could buy, and could buy more and better bread I'm sure if I used the time to do contracting instead. But I enjoy it.
On the other hand, there are things I just want done and so use tools or get others to do it for me.
One positive view of AI tools is that it widens the group of people who are able to achieve a particular quality, so it opens up the door for people who want to tell the story or build the app or whatever.
A negative side is the economics where it may be beneficial to have a worse result just because it's so much cheaper.
In this case, yes it is.
People do pay attention to the result overall. Studio Ghibli has got famous because people notice what they produce.
Now people might not notice every single detail but I believe that it is this overall mindset and culture that enables the whole unique final product.
Which might indicate an environment were quality is above quantity
The author is so generous... but Sam Altman literally has a Ghibli-fied Social profile and in response to all this said OpenAI chooses its demos very carefully. His primary concern is that Ghibli-fying prompts are over-consuming their GPU resources, degrading the service by preventing other ChatGPT tasks.
Doesn't he have a pretty bad disagreement with Elon?
Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new. Everything is simply a blend of prior work. I am not saying that this doesn't have economic value, but it means these AI models are closer to lossy compression algorithms than they are to AGI.
The following quote by Sam Altman from about 5 years ago is interesting.
"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we build this sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return."
That's a statement I wouldn't even dream about making today.
How could you possibly know this?
Is this falsifiable? Is there anything we could ask it to draw where you wouldn't just claim it must be copying some image in its training data?
We got brass bands with brass instruments, synth music from synths.
We know therefore, necessarily, that they can be nothing novel from an LLM -- it has no live access to novel developments in the broader environment. If synths were invented after its training, it could never produce synth music (and so on).
The claim here is trivially falsifiable, and so obviously so that credulous fans of this technology bake it in to their misunderstanding of novelty itself: have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.
Yet an artist which paints with a new kind of black pigment can, trivially so.
> Everything is simply a blend of prior work.
I generally consider these two to be the same thing. If novelty is based on something else, then it's highly derivative and its novelty is very questionable.
A quantum random number generator is far more novel than the average human artist.
> have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.
Put someone in jail for the last 15 years, and ask them to make a smartphone. They obviously cannot do it either.
To borrow Chomsky's framework: what makes humans unique and special is our ability to produce an infinite range of outputs that nonetheless conform to a set of linguistic rules. When viewed in this light, human creativity necessarily depends on the "linguistic rules" part of that; without a framework of meaning to work within, we would just be generating entropy, not meaningful expressions.
Obviously this applies most directly to external language, but I hope it's clear how it indirectly applies to internal cognition and--as we're discussing here--visual art.
TL;DR: LLMs are definitely creative, otherwise they wouldn't be able to produce semantically-meaningful, context-appropriate language in the first place. For a more empirical argument, just ask yourself how a machine that can generate a poem or illustration depicting [CHARACTER_X] in [PLACE_Y] doing [ACTIVITY_Z] in [STYLE_S] without being creative!
[1] Covered in the famous Chomsky v. Foucault debate, for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
As an example, let's talk about "vibe coding" - It's a new term describing heavy LLM usage in programming, usually associated with Generation Z.
If I am asking an LLM to generate a German translation for "vibe coder" it comes up with the neutral "Vibe-Programmierer". When asking it to be more creative it came up with "Schwingungsschmied" ("vibration smith"?) - What?
I personally came up with the following words:
* Gefühlsprogrammierer ("A programmer, that focuses on intuition and feeling.")
* Freischnauzeprogrammierer ("Free-mouthed programmer - highlighting straightforwardness and the creative expression of vibe coding." - colloquial)
Interesstingly, LLMs can describe both these terms, they just can't create them naturally. I tested this on all major LLMs and the results were similar. Generating a picture of a "vibe coder" also highlights more of a moody atmosphere instead of the Generation Z aspects that are associated with it on social media nowadays.
Your example disproves itself; that's a madlib. It's not creative, it's just rolling the dice and filling in the blanks. Complex die and complex blanks are a difference of degree only, not creativity.
Definitions are always up for debate on instrumental grounds, but I'm dubious of any definition of "creative" that excludes truly unique yet meaningful artifacts. The only thing past that is ineffable stuff, which is inherently not very helpful for scientific discussion.
Though I am also generally opposed to the notion of intellectual property whatsoever on the basis that it doesn't seem to serve its intended purpose and what good could be salvaged from its various systems can already be well represented with other existing legal concepts, i.e deceptive behaviors being prosecuted as forms of fraud.
(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
Arguments that make a case that NN training is copyright violation are much more compelling to me than this.
A regulation that require restaurants to have a public bathroom is more akin to regulation that also require restaurants to check id when selling alcohol to young customers. Neither requirement has any relation with land rights, but is related to the right of operating a company that sell food to the public.
I'll prove it by induction: Imagine that I have a service where I "train" a model on a single image of Indiana Jones. Now you prompt it, and my model "generates" the same image. I sell you this service, and no money goes to the copyright holder of the original image. This is obviously infringment.
There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different, besides the fact that the lines are blurred by the model weights not being parseable
Grok is supposed to be "uncensored", but there are very specific words you just can't use when asking it to generate images. It'll just flat out refuse or give an error message during generation.
But, again, if you go in a roundabout way and avoid the specific terms you can still get what you want. So why bother?
Is it about not wanting bad PR or avoiding litigation?
How they then go about implementing those guardrails is pretty telling about their understand and control over what they've build and their line of thinking. Clearly, at no point before releasing their LLMs onto the world did anyone stop and ask: Hey, how do we deal with these things generating unwanted content?
Resorting to blocking certain terms in the prompts is like searching for keywords in spam emails. "Hey Jim, I got another spam email from that Chinese tire place" - "No worry boss, I've configured the mail server to just delete any email containing the words China or tire".
Some journalist should go to a few of these AI companies and start asking questions about the long term effectiveness and viability of just blocking keywords in prompts.