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Comment by Insimwytim | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not that ChatGPT is doing that, the problem is that it's not being sued into oblivion after.

Doesn't suggesting that they should be sued into the oblivion automatically imply that the initial act was also, in fact, a problem?

The former just implies a bad actor, the latter implies a broken system.

Isn't both is what's happening?

OpenAI being bad actor would not have been a problem if OpenAI suffered relevant consequences, like everyone else would have in that scenario. Or at least this is how I understood this.

At most you might try to argue negligence, but there's no sign that OpenAI is being a malicious bad actor here. Adding unwanted elements to image generation is undesirable by all parties, including OpenAI.

IANAL but there should be an amount of negligence after which you become a bad actor. I think OpenAI crossed that several times over.

Current defense seems to be that "the cartoonists are using it themselves" and the case is ongoing, at lest based on Disney vs Midjourney[1]. Which means a slap on the wrist at the moment I suppose. It's also absurd.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/disney-univer...

I'd say the problem is that the only way we seem to have to fix these situations is for someone to sue someone else.

As opposed to what?

Ethics?

Would you sue a hammer for hitting your thumb? You have to sue the one wielding it.

It's not a good analogy cause no one sues each other for little hammer injuries. It's more like the guy who gets wacked saying 'hey what the heck man that's my distinct hammer design but you made a machine that makes almost precisely my exact hammer and I hold a patent for this'...(or something like that)

"You've made a machine that can be easily tuned to produce almost precisely my exact hammer and people who use the machine get freaked out that I can sue them."

You should atleast give it a thought if the same hammer refuses to hit certain people's thumb but will happily hit yours.

ChatGPT refuses to colorize private family photos if there's any Mickey Mouse comics in view.

That Chinese censorship! Oh wait..

Why would ChatGPT be sued exactly? They didn’t publish the picture, they did what the user asked. The user is responsible because they directed the creation and publishing. The user is the entity who should be sued. Or dmca’d. Or whatever.

Think if the user commissioned the art from an outsourced creative shop nobody has heard of. Then they published it. They wouldn’t go after the creative shop, they would go after the publisher.

(I am just addressing publishing here, training on the artist’s works is a different, well discussed issue)

Seems to me like producing an artist's stylised signature would be a trademark infringement.

OpenAI give lip service to the idea of not producing others' intellectual property - go ask it to explicitly make a picture of the genie from Aladdin.

well because Aladdin is public domain

The original story is, the Disney movie’s version isn’t.

Edit: This sort of thing is common in Hollywood. For example James Bond (first book) hits public domain in ten years, but not all of the elements we associate with the movies are from there. Q and his gadgets are inventions of the movies and don’t enter public domain. There’s a reason patent/tm/copyright firms make money.

https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

    OpenAI closes Sora video-making app and cancels $1bn Disney deal

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w3e467ewqo

    What to know about the Sora discontinuation

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001152-what-to-know-ab...

It is certainly not trademark infringement, I can say that for sure -- no reasonable person would prompt ChatGPT to create a "new yorker style cartoon" and then think the result is produced by the actual cartoonist in mere seconds for their viewing pleasure. So there's no confusion in the marketplace.

The user could cause confusion in the marketplace of course, but that would be her doing, not the app's. Surely we can all agree that suing adobe illustrator for facilitating trademark infringement of logomarks and such would be silly?

It could be copyright infringement, which should drive home how absurd copyright is as a concept. Everyone's all up in arms about Anthropic reporting a user to the police today -- imagine if the thing they were reporting was that she had written a sacred symbol in her personal notebook...

> no reasonable person would prompt ChatGPT to create [...] and then think the result is produced by the actual cartoonist

There's also a narrower situation to consider, where the user describes something they "want"--implicitly to find--but the system generates a fraudulent one instead.

In that case ChatGPT would be committing a trademark violation, at least within a nation of laws rather than lobbying.

The article is evidence there is confusion in the marketplace - people are contacting the cartoonists about the fraudulent works.

Now the argument can be where does the infringement land - does it land with the person who generates the cartoon, fails to remove the signature and uploads it to instagram? Maybe. But I don't think we should be giving these AI companies yet another get out of jail "oops you made a machine that does a bad thing" card.

I also firmly believe there are contexts in which merely producing the trademark and attaching it to something is enough to be infringement but I'm not going to do the legal legwork to get there to your satisfaction, sorry.

As I said, I am talking about the publishing, not the training. If it produces his signature, which basically claims he created the art, then that is the line he believes was crossed. I am saying that it is up to the user to understand when those lines are crossed. The user could have done this in photoshop as well without ai, would we blame photoshop? Training is a separate argument, it is not what the article tackles.

It’s their hardware and their web response. Especially more heinous if it’s being served as part of a subscription. I don’t think it’s functionally the same as me opening Microsoft Paint and recreating pixel-for-pixel a New Yorker artist’s signature.

I don't see that as a reasonable argument unless you're claiming the user was lying:

> In the comments section of her post, she wrote she had simply asked ChatGPT to make “a New Yorker-style cartoon.”

If you commissioned me to record music onto a CD for you, and then I put in the credits that Jimi Hendrix recorded the guitar parts without you asking, it seems pretty reasonable that I should get in trouble for that rather than you.

I don’t think she was lying. She created a cartoon and published it irresponsibly. In my opinion, that makes it her fault. And I think that AI is not going to be found culpable for issues like this in the future. The user needs to understand they can’t just publish whatever it creates. There are open source AI models that would have near zero culpability and in that case I believe very, very clearly it will be the users responsibility. And I think that will extend to paid models as well.

> They didn’t publish the picture, they did what the user asked.

You think the user asked for a signature?

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