this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Imagine you have a magic box that can generate any video you want. Some people ask it to generate fan fiction-like videos, some ask it to generate meme-like videos, and a whole lot of people ask it to generate porn.
Then there's a few people that ask it to generate videos using trademarked and copyrighted stuff. It does what the user asks because there's no way for it to know what is and isn't copyrighted. What is and isn't parody or protected fair use.
It's just a magic box that generates videos... Whatever the human asks for.
This makes some people and companies very, very upset. They sue the maker of the magic box, saying it's copying their works. They start PR campaigns, painting the magic box in a bad light. They might even use the magic box quite a lot themselves but it doesn't matter. To them, the magic box is pure evil; indirectly preventing them from gaining more profit... Somehow. Just like Sony was sued for making a machine that let people copy whatever videos they wanted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios%2C_Inc.).
Before long, other companies make their own magic boxes and then, every day people get access to their own, personal magic boxes that no one can see the output from unless they share.
Why is this different from the Sony vs Universal situation? The AI magic box is actually worse at copying videos than a VCR.
When a person copies—and then distributes—a movie do we say the maker of the VCR/DVD burner/computer is at fault for allowing this to happen? No. It's the person that distributed the copyrighted work.
Now imagine it's not a magic box. Imagine it is a computer program, written with intent, that was intentionally fed copyrighted material so it could make those things people asked for.
Giant companies operating outside the law at "the cost of doing business" built plagiarism machines off the life's work of thousands of people so that horny weirdos could jerk it to Pikachu with tits.
To be fair, a horny weirdo would still probably pay a human artist for a Pikachu with tits. Image generators probably wouldn't get the nuance exactly right. An image generator is better for like, Azula getting her toes sucked by a Dai Li agent or something. Probably. I'm only speculating
as a totally off-topic aside, I find that people tend to dislike AI in areas they are deeply familiar with.