Reid Southen is a successful concept artist who has worked for many of the biggest studios (Marvel, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, Paramount etc) on a lot of huge films (Matrix Resurrections, The Hunger Games, Transformers, and Alien, among others).
It also suggests that Midjourney has been trained on high-resolution copyright images, to which they may or may not have a license.
This will always be a stupid question. Especially when people don’t know how to conjugate “copyrighted.”
Yes, the draw-anything machine was fed with all the images they could find. What else was it going to use?
No, none of it is licensed. And it never will be. And that’s fine. It’s supposed to be trained on basically all images ever, and a film is one hundred thousand images in a row. The more images you shovel in, the less any specific one matters.
Ask for a popular character in a scene like the movie they’re from and of course you might get something vaguely resembling some frame from the movie. There’s a lot! They’re kinda formulaic. The only one here that’s not an egregious hand-wave is the Joker example, and it’s exactly the kind of output these things love to generate for any prompt: centered figure, looking at the camera, blurry background.
Ask a human artist to sketch any of these prompts from memory and you’d get similar results. You wanna say they’re violating copyright law, just by remembering a movie?
You wanna pretend a truly from-scratch AI would be incapable of violating copyright law? Like if it came up with something that already exists, we’d have to shrug and say, welp, guess that AI owns Batman now. Because that’s totally how it works when humans draw bespoke new frames of existing characters. Or brand-new variations on those characters. Or genuinely novel characters that happen to resemble those characters.
Basically - if you expect anything coming out of these image-generators to be immune to copyright and trademark laws, you don’t understand those laws. Ditto if you expect everything coming out to be illegal. But if you think being able to draw Batman on a tricycle means the AI contains a copy of exactly that, you don’t understand these AIs.
This will always be a stupid question. Especially when people don’t know how to conjugate “copyrighted.”
Yes, the draw-anything machine was fed with all the images they could find. What else was it going to use?
No, none of it is licensed. And it never will be. And that’s fine. It’s supposed to be trained on basically all images ever, and a film is one hundred thousand images in a row. The more images you shovel in, the less any specific one matters.
Ask for a popular character in a scene like the movie they’re from and of course you might get something vaguely resembling some frame from the movie. There’s a lot! They’re kinda formulaic. The only one here that’s not an egregious hand-wave is the Joker example, and it’s exactly the kind of output these things love to generate for any prompt: centered figure, looking at the camera, blurry background.
Ask a human artist to sketch any of these prompts from memory and you’d get similar results. You wanna say they’re violating copyright law, just by remembering a movie?
You wanna pretend a truly from-scratch AI would be incapable of violating copyright law? Like if it came up with something that already exists, we’d have to shrug and say, welp, guess that AI owns Batman now. Because that’s totally how it works when humans draw bespoke new frames of existing characters. Or brand-new variations on those characters. Or genuinely novel characters that happen to resemble those characters.
Basically - if you expect anything coming out of these image-generators to be immune to copyright and trademark laws, you don’t understand those laws. Ditto if you expect everything coming out to be illegal. But if you think being able to draw Batman on a tricycle means the AI contains a copy of exactly that, you don’t understand these AIs.