Disney’s Loki faces backlash over reported use of generative AI / A Loki season 2 poster has been linked to a stock image on Shutterstock that seemingly breaks the platform’s licensing rules regard…::A promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy amongst professional designers following claims that it was created using generative AI.
I don’t understand the controversy really. A graphic designer at Disney used stock photography in their design of the poster, that’s pretty normal and extremely common. It turns out that whoever uploaded that stock image to the service used AI to create it, but how is that Disney’s fault? I don’t get it.
AI taking the job of someone else by stealing art aside,
The picture was not flagged as AI, so it was sold as real art against their TOS.
I don’t think the artists or even the studio did this maliciously, but there needs to be discussion on how stock art should be vetted when used like this
How is that Disney’s fault?
It isn’t.
Can we talk about how Shutterstock only allows their own AI-generated images? Stock image sites will be the first to face the guillotine of AI generation, and this is how they protect themselves?
Good riddance. I got my video card and several Stable Diffusion models that are way better than the prices they charge.
You’re not a business whose sole purpose is to sell/license images. If you read the article, it explains that their models are trained using only images from their library, which seems like a sensible approach to avoiding copyright issues.
There’s no copyright issues to avoid. Stable Diffusion is not suddenly illegal based on the images it trains on. It is a 4GB database of weights and numbers, not a many petabyte database of images.
Furthermore, Shutterstock cannot copyright their own AI-generated images, no matter how much they want to try to sell it back for. That’s already been decided in the courts. So, even if it’s their own images its trained on, if it was fully generated with their own AI, anybody is free to yank the image from their site and use it anywhere they want.
This is a dying industry trying desperately to hold on to its profit model.
Here we get the very crucial definition between “legal” and “moral”.
It is not currently illegal to build a “database of weights and numbers” by crawling arts and images without permission, attribution or compensation, for the express purpose of creating similar works to replace the work of the artists whose artworks were used to train it and which they rely on to make a living.
That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be legislated.
Really not a fan of this “dying industry” talk in light of this.
It is morally right to be able to use others’ copyrighted material without permission. For analysis, criticism, research, satire, parody and artistic expression like literature, art, and music, In the US, fair use balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and the rights they do not maintain have always been to the benefit of self-expression and discussion. It would be awful for everyone if IP holders could take down any review, reverse engineering, or indexes they didn’t like. That would be the dream of every corporation, bully, troll, or wannabe autocrat. It really shouldn’t be legislated.
AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. After we’ve gone through and gutted all of our rights and protections like too many people want to do, we’ll have handed corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for us to keep developing our own models. Mega corporations will still have all their datasets, and the money to buy more. They might just make users sign predatory ToS too, allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. People who could have had access to a corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility would instead be worse off with fewer resources and rights than they started with.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
You should also read this open letter by artists that have been using generative AI for years, some for decades. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
If that’s correct, then it’s even more understandable why they wouldn’t want an avalanche of pictures anyone can use for free on their service of selling pictures.
I don’t get what your point is. Are you trying to generate images with Stable Diffusion and upload them to Shutterstock? Because that’s the only situation when the thing you’re complaining about applies. Nobody is stopping you from generating images and using them. What they are doing is preventing you from generating them and then trying to profit from them on the Shutterstock platform, unless you use their tools. Why is this an issue, in your opinion?
More reason for Disney to just use AI generated art. I don’t see the point of artists anymore other than being in the way of creating things. Seems like all they do now is sue everyone and help create tools to limit everyone else
Wow that name does NOT check out.
Sure it does. People tell me all the time.
Let me explain though, People create stuff. Artist create over priced same stuff but also sue you if you think about sharing it with anybody or creating your own. And the whole time they demand your attention by invading any cool space to busk. Like tipping culture, it invades everywhere.
Eventually spaces that were collaberative and imaginative and unique are sued to oblivion and threatened with DMCA take downs so that this mediocre and costly mass produced stuff can be sold for 20x its value.
If artist disappeared tomorrow, we would see a boom of content creation like never before. If we removed all the people trying to make their dollar in our spaces we would be left with actual creators not artists. We could chase the corporate social media hacks away. We could get back to a free internet when we remove all the people trying to capitalize on it.
These greedy bottom feeders only get worse the more popular they get.
Think of Justin bieber + psychosocial. Really Fun. Justin bieber or slipknot, not as fun. Try to find that mix on Spotify. You never will. And in a world of spotifies monopoly on online music we all lost the unique creative opportunity the internet provided because we all need to over pay for the artist nobody asked for. Anybody remember downloading crazy remixes on bearshare, how fun was that playing the audio file of 4 song smashed up and getting a truly awesome new song. Never again will we get that unique window of creation in our time.
The internet was a refuge for people to get away from the over produced corporate crap and instead the artist brought them all here and censored and sued and threatened and put up paywall after paywall all to funnel us to their shitty fucking ad supported websites and pateron
You have to be trolling.
There’s absolutely no way anything you just said here is remotely serious.
Funny read tho, thanks for the chuckle.
All it took was a year of some dodgy plagiarism algorithms and all human creativity is moot. Wrap it up everyone, we’re done.
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You can tip me at my pateron or I’ll call my lawyer and take down this whole fucking site. You wouldn’t steal a car.
… okay.
Because the corporation is ALWAYS at fault, duh. This is the internet, there’s only one way to look at things
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No way could this clusterfuck of IP (owning thoughts), the worry of AI “taking jobs” (e.g doing work that would otherwise be done by humans), and selling of the work on a marketplace at all be tied to the idea of capitalism.
In other economic systems, having work automated would be a good thing, not an existential threat to the functioning of our entire global economy. I’m blown away that people don’t understand that.
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Any system with a “work or die” mentality is indeed not long for this world.
It is literally why stock photographs exist in the first place.
There’s one that comes to mind: registration of works with the Copyright Office. When submitting a body of work you need to ensure that you’ve got everything in order. This includes rights for models/actors, locations, and other media you pull from. Having AI mixed in may invalidate the whole submission. It’s cheaper to submit related work in bulk, a fair amount of Loki materials could be in limbo until the application is amended or resubmitted.
AI collides with Copyright. The 2 systems don’t work together at all.
Because if an image is generated, who “owns” it?
It just doesn’t work. And AI is here to stay. So the only possible solution I see is that we revise the entire copyright system.
Which is long overdue anyway. Disney has gotten away with too much already.
If we apply the current ruling of the US Copyright Office then the prompt writer cannot copyright if AI is the majority of the final product. AI itself is software and ineligible for copyright; we can debate sentience when we get there. The researchers are also out as they simply produce the tool–unless you’re keen on giving companies like Canon and Adobe spontaneous ownership of the media their equipment and software has created.
As for the artists the AI output is based upon, we already have legal precedent for this situation. Sampling has been a common aspect of the music industry for decades now. Whenever an musician samples work from others they are required to get a license and pay royalties, by an agreed percentage/amount based on performance metrics. Photographers and film makers are also required to have releases (rights of a person’s image, the likeness of a building) and also pay royalties. Actors are also entitled to royalties by licensing out their likeness. This has been the framework that allowed artists to continue benefiting from their contributions as companies min-maxed markets.
Hence Shutterstock’s terms for copyright on AI images is both building upon legal precedent, and could be the first step in getting AI work copyright protection: obtaining the rights to legally use the dataset. The second would be determining how to pay out royalties based on how the AI called and used images from the dataset. The system isn’t broken by any means, its the public’s misunderstanding of the system that makes the situation confusing.
Why would they use a stock image of Loki? That already seems like its own copyright issue. Any image or likeness of a Disney character isn’t exactly “stock”.
Read the fucking article, man. It’s not a stock image of a character, it’s the spiral clock background.
It’s just the spiraling clock in the background in question, not the Loki stuff.
I mean, besides the Roman numeral mistake and Shutterstock’s licensing rules, which is just a side conversation, what’s the backlash?
Are we supposed to be immediately outraged when some artist uses some level of AI-generation when trying to create something? Is everybody going to be outraged when somebody uses Photoshop Generative Fill, or is that suddenly okay because it’s part of a commercial tool?
“Roman numeral mistake” is not a mistake. Plenty of clocks use “IIII” over “IV”. Here’s why.
I was talking about the V that isn’t well-formed. That was the more glaring issue to me.