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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Grok will let you make anything right now.

Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.

I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.

Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.

As far as I can tell, it still has most of the same restrictions as the others? It won't do nudity, won't do gore, and won't show the prophet mohammed. The one thing it will do, that the others won't. is make pictures of copyrighted characters. So ironically, it refuses to do all the things that are clearly legal under US law (just contraversial), but it will do something that is clearly illegal (trademark infringement).

Making embarassing images of famous people is probably fine as long as it's obviously fake and satire, but could potentially be illegal libel if it gets realistic enough that people actually start to believe it.

Just the act of drawing something trademarked isn't illegal by itself though?

Im not a lawyer. But i think selling a subscription service for something explicitly marketed with pics like mario drinking beer, is very different from just drawing it. They're making money with these drawings, and also damaging the brands.

Obviously they can't use trademarked stuff in the marketing but the model being able to produce trademarked characters isn't meaningfully different from Photoshop or internet browsers dreaded by NTF-fans feature "right-click save as" unless we consider the model to be agentic.

I wouldn't consider the model agentic, but it seems meaningful that every other AI image generator specifically blocks this kind of stuff, whereas this one not only allows it, but seems to encourage it, with a sort of "wink wink, nudge nudge, there are no rules!" marketing. And in fact it still has rules, lots of them, it's just this one rule that it bypasses. So it seems like they intentionally built a tool that has "trademark violation" as its main use case. If nothing else, they're distributing images that violate trademark, since all those images come off of their web servers.

So is every cloud service.