So there are times when corporations make mistakes. And there are other times (more often times) in which corporations want something and when they can’t get it, they find a way to do it anyway and try to get away with it. Famously Sam Altman of OpenAI posted about loving the movie HER and repeatedly asked Scarlett Johansson to use her voice for OpenAI new voice, only to be rebuffed. Then, amazingly, in a group of new voice releases there was one female voice that eerily people thought was Scarlett Johansson’s. OpenAI, of course, had a paper trail and witnesses saying they never even thought of Johansson for this use-case and no one ever mentioned it. I’m sure that Signal chat is deleted somewhere.
Well now comes the case of Elon Musk repeatedly requesting to use images from Blade Runner 2049 in a cybercab event, and being rebuffed, only to display an image that seems quite clearly to be AI generated and trying to pass itself as being link to the film. Here’s the article with the image comparison, you be the judge. This case is not new, but the fact that it just got greenlit to go forward is. This will be a test to whether someone using AI to clearly copy and associate with a particular IP’s style and content without permission is something that can be tried and won in court.
If it is not winnable, goodbye the rest of copyright, as advertisers will just feed the content they want to copy in and ask for a match for their new ad. And who cares about the artists and all the people who went into making that original piece possible. AI … continuing to give access to skilled work to useless people.
PS Gen AI featured image “futuristic cybercab” brought to you by still the San FranTokyo future rather than Blade Runner. This one looks cool, unlike everything that comes out of Tesla.
