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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a whole bunch of unnecessarily liability. Once you place yourself in the position of moderator of what people may use their computers for, you are arguably liable for failures of moderation.

To put it another way, nobody's ever sued Canon for making cameras which are used to take illegal photos, but if Canon suddenly started screening your photos to make sure they were acceptable per local laws or whatnot, they suddenly are actually a responsible party in the creation and distribution of whatever it is people use their cameras for.

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You and the oil paint commenter are missing a very obvious difference. Oil paints and canon lenses are just tools. Dumb objects even. They do not suggest or create from thin air something. The lens just directs photons in front of it to a sensor. The oil paint just is and gets smeared around into whatever the painter does with it. This is totally different in that you can draw a simple stick figure, and it creates the realistic work on its own. It did it, not you. Thinking that paint and a lens are on the same level is farcical.

Also the oil paint doesn't have its own memory banks that someone could accuse of being trained on c---- p---. But still, I also wonder if Microsoft's liability would be less if it weren't screening images.

I wonder why nobody is asking where do the images used to produce output come from? Have their creators been asked for permission to use them? I'm guessing they come from the Bing data lake of images scraped off the internet. Better add Bing robot to your robots.txt.

You’re stuffing “wow” into a new tech. Cameras were wow too at the time. Now generative ai is real and common like lens and paint.

Regulating it is as absurd as regulating Skyrim or a similar moddable game to prevent users from having it rough with elfs or whatever. It’s all corporate interests covering behind ethics, nothing more.

> it creates the realistic work on its own. It did it, not you.

It recombined other people's images based on analysis of your drawing. That's all it does.

Oh, well, if that's all it does...

Is the whole being obtuse deliberate, or do you really not see how these two things are different?

It would be cheaper for them if they thought on those two things as similar. A dumb tool does not need a team of lawyers and bunch of moderators/reviewers to make sure there's no legal or PR blowback when someone draws a penis and the tool produces an image of a girthy member.

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