Remember when copyright infringement and abuse was just as simple as Calvin peeing on everything you didn’t like?
Sure, Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson never bothered to lawyer up and hunt down the crafty sellers of the ubiquitous urinating urchin window stickers found on nearly every pickup truck with a grudge in the latter part of the 90s, but it seems now with the constant evolution of AI, everyone with an IP is breaking out the torches (and the legal briefs) to set things right.
Whether you’re Disney or the people behind nearly every major beloved character in Japanese anime and gaming, you’ve got an axe to grind against Sora 2, the Open AI tool that takes any character it gets its digital hands on and incorporates it into what its owners claim is just a simple bit of “fair use” fun.
At the behest of nearly every entertainment giant you can name, lawyers are lining up to take down the unauthorized Sora 2 generated content, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of new content pieces every day, created without permission.
As of this writing, OpenAI has currently employed an “opt-in” model for those who would prefer their content and characters not be used as the foundation for unauthorized content, but this would require all such copyright holders to switch the default “opt-in” setting to the preferred “out” option. And it honestly makes no difference in most cases. The copyright infringement is already rampant. It does nothing to close the barn door after the horse has already appeared in a feces-spewing Tiktok video alongside the president and Mickey Mouse. And while Pikachu or Superman might be the characters used to create bastardized content, at the same time does OpenAI provide the foundation for other similar, lesser-known applications to perform the same functions in the wild, with less visibility and consequence, for anyone with the skills to replicate the code on their own.
This is the early stages of Napster in the 90s, but on steroids. While bands and record labels were fighting the notorious Napster for making digital music downloads possible for so many, by the time they were able to get into court and begin ruling and sentencing, there were dozens of smaller, custom-coded variants that did just the same, often for just a handful of people, then freely spreading to more users in time.
To stop OpenAI and Sora 2, it would require the government, the technology giants, and the entertainment companies to work together in force with a coordinated effort to block every use of similar AI tools all at once. And that is likely to never happen. Legal actions take forever. AI and those who build these systems (or get AI to build it for them) only continue to get faster.
Meanwhile, whether you’re a comic book artist creating the next Batman or the next DaVinci with an easel with a beguiling figure in front of you or you oversee a phalanx of high end cameras with a $100 million dollar budget at your back, someone, anyone with the ability to craft the perfect prompt can manipulate that work to their own ends, and sometimes profit from it, while your work is diluted at a loss.
It’s a nonstop game of cat and mouse, where the mice reproduce like cockroaches while the cats file slow-tracked briefs with the courts against the mouse with the most visible ears in the crowd. (Did that make sense? Feels like I should have run it through AI just in case.)
Of course, since the entire purpose of AI is to create supposedly unique content based on data that it has previously consumed and collated, it’s no surprise that those screaming about stolen copyrights do much the same when in a pinch to crank out the next blurb or press release for their big budget extravaganza, crammed full of the very characters they’re trying to protect, but also using previously generated art to push out something new rather than pay the human artist who created the character in the first place.
It’s an endless circle of theft, which is nothing new in the world of art, regardless of its medium. At this point, the only way to battle the copyright infringing AI curated dreck pouring out Sora 2 might be to create AI copyright lawyers to keep up the pace.
Sidenote: Those screencapped examples are cool, right? Also, why is it always Michael Jackson and old ladies and mustache man?