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Comment by CaptainFever | Hacker News Reader

> A Loki season 2 poster has been linked to a stock image on Shutterstock that seemingly breaks the platform’s licensing rules regarding AI-generated content.

A human-made poster uses a stock photo for the background, which is suspected to be AI.

This is such a non-issue.

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Holy moly this article is indeed terrible. I figured the outrage was because they were knowingly using an GenAI image that was trained without licensing or something along those lines.

Ironically, articles from The Verge increasingly feel like they were written by a particularly inept AI.

Even if it was 100% AI generated it would still be a non-issue

I had to read the article carefully before I got it. It wasn't Disney that was using generative AI. One of their artists used a licensed stock image for a background element (which is 100% acceptable thing to do!) and people are complaining that this background element from the stock image company was AI generated.

"Disney" isn't the culprit here!

100% acceptable

Acceptable to whom? Consumers? Or Luddites and a guild whose interests aren’t entirely aligned with consumers?

I think they were referring to using a licensed stock image in a background element as acceptable, not the stock image company using generative ai.

I am no fan of Disney, but they appear to have been doing everything by the book.

Sometimes a news story is really an advertisement.

I feel like all stories are advertisements.

Hollywood might well spend a decade fighting this AI straw-man, with increasingly kooky demands. How stupid of them :(

From the crowd earning a living with copying code from SO and tutorials, I wouldn't expect they see any issue with copied imagery. Let's chat again when AI does some proper coding.

It really is a fundamental difference in goal, for it is the duty and objective of a dedicated software engineer to replace themselves.

this made my monday morning, thank you (i am a member of the society you describe however i too appreciate the irony you have pointed out).

The end game for AI generation technology is almost certainly not that it will pit studios and IP owners versus artists so much as it will pit artists versus artists. The copyright issues become moot once several companies pay a lifetimes fortune to a thousand or so artists for exclusive and complete rights to their collections to seed their algorithms. And I can't believe for a second that professional solidarity is going to extend to every talented visual creative on the planet.

> The copyright issues become moot once...

Only some of the copyright issues. The issue of whether AI creations are protected by copyright, for example, would remain.

If AI is cheap to use, that category of protection becomes irrelevant. A studio can crank out content so fast that it's irrelevant if someone else plagarizes, remixes, or reshares it.

The studios will lobby heavily to prevent that. If content becomes that abundant how could they charge so much for it?

Mmmm. So I don't know how many people are old enough to remember the tale of how iTunes, for a short time, completely owned the music market.

Long story short is that they played ball with every demand the recording industry made regarding how selling audio clips would work when other nascent music store experiments wouldn't. Industry gets to dictate quality? Got it. Online store releases after physical releases? Got it. Encrypted? Strongest stuff the government will let us put in.

And then one day... Apple just stopped selling the music encrypted. The recording industry had a bloody fit about it. And Apple's response was "Well, customers hate it. And honestly, who else will you do business with? You gave us all the contracts. What are you gonna do, found your own software companies from scratch to compete with us? If that was on the table you'd have done it already. You don't know how." It took a little while for streaming alternatives to crop up, but it was amazing to watch Apple call an entire industry's bluff.

All this to say... Wouldn't be the first time a content gatekeeping industry's myopia let it become the instrument of its own unmaking. People heavily invested in the old model have some of the hardest challenges fully realizing what new model novel technology can enable.

I predict the Disneys of the world will discover that their memetic monopolies become badly challenged in a world where content creation is so cheap that, while of course they can build their staple of wholly-owned IP for AI generation... So can everyone else, which means the shape of the competitive field will change, close to overnight. And if they try to compete by standing in front of the tide and bidding it to not come in, they'll eventually be cut down by someone who promises to give them everything they want... And then takes their empire from them.

That's a nice example of how it can turn out, but it's not always like that. Land is abundant, but in many places housing can't be built. Water is abundant, but Nestle still makes a fortune selling it. If someone could find a way to sell air, they'd apply for a government sponsored monopoly (a patent) on it, and lobby government agencies to recommend it over the natural air.

Far too many people make their fortunes gatekeeping access to resources.

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