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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

People love Sora in no small part because it lets them make videos with their favorite public figure/fictional character in them.

OpenAI knew that, played fast and loose with IP laws because… they wanted that bit of popularity to impress investors or something… then the lawyers got nervous and now they’re dialing it back down.

It’s a trick they can pull once but that’s it.

I suspect the more limited it inevitably becomes due to lawyers being lawyers, the more its popularity will wane.

Ironically enough, that’s why I think open-source models will still come out ahead in the long term. People really want to make videos with Pikachu in them.

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Arguably not the first time OAI has played fast and loose, didn't Altman preview a voice for the Live feature that was an obvious clone of Scarlet Johansson (a la Her), and they immediately walked it back once she complained? The publicity they got for that stuck around...

They hired an actress that sounded like the AI in Her.

(who is played by Scarlett Johansson)

You can't ban people from roles because they sound like a more famous person.

I think you're right. I must say though, it pleases me to see them playing it a bit loose with copyright. Copyright law is a very polarizing issue, and I think it's important to remember there are multiple sides (copyright holders v. consumers, etc), but as a mostly consumer and part-time producer who has had the copyright sharks go after me for my own content because some algorithm or something made them think it was theirs, I want to see those assholes die in a fire. Small and medium creators are the ones most hurt I think. The giant companies have absolutely weaponized every ounce of the IP laws against everyone else, and it's disgusting to me.

The ability to make videos with public figures / copyrighted fictional characters was taken away in the first few days. Unless you’re referring to the few public figures that signed up in the app and set themselves to public.

You could make them with public figures that aren’t alive any more for a day or two longer, but those get blocked now, too.

That said: I think you’re ultimately right, it’s just that it’s more of a past tense thing. My primary remaining fun use case is to push as close to the guardrails as possible to make embarrassing funny videos of my friends and family members, who are doing the same to me.

Every single video I’ve seen from Sora has been a real person or IP. Stephen Hawking skateboaring, Diddy, Sam Altman shoplifting. They might have blocked it fast but those first few days of videos are still going viral and what everyone knows Sora for.

If you can’t generate videos of real people or movie characters getting arrested or doing insane things, no one is going to care about Sora anymore.

>that’s why I think open-source models will still come out ahead in the long term

In what data centers would these open models be run such that copyright laws will not apply?

Serious question. Trying to figure all this out.

Is it that you think people will run the models on their own laptops or phones? Or will there be some offshore municipality where the models can be served from that is out of the reach of copyright laws? Do you have another idea in mind entirely? How are you thinking on all this?

You should look up the local llama and stable diffusion sub Reddits to see what is possible to do locally. If you have 24gb of vram you can do A LOT!

Who is going to pay to train these "open source models" and why?

Based on what goes on at Civitai: Horny people, mostly, and because horny people, mostly

I don’t know about the “why” but Alibaba is definitely paying to train open weight models (https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI)

I wonder if someone can figure out how to leverage 100,000,000 volunteers donating a dollar of compute electricity to train these models.

Doesn’t that simplify down to just donating a dollar?

It does not. The $1 of electricity can be simplified to just a $1

However, the way the parent worded it ie $1 of compute electricity - requires the compute to exist and temporarily be loaned. Otherwise “just a $1” would require a massive capex to buy/build compute.

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