i should be gripping rat

  • 222 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Midjourney is a product that is being sold for money. Midjourney is making money off of providing users with unauthorized images of Disney and Universal characters. Midjourney is not making up original characters that happen to look like the licensed characters; they are just producing the characters themselves:

    For example, if a Midjourney subscriber prompts the AI tool to generate an image of Darth Vader, it immediately obliges, according to the plaintiffs, and the same occurs for images of Minions.

    Furthermore, we know that Midjourney obtained the ability to generate these images by training on Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted properties. This is why Midjourney knows these characters by name.

    To your example, I think one big difference is that if you make a digital drawing of Mickey Mouse and then print it out, you are not going on to share that image with a global marketplace of other Epson users. Additionally, you also need an uncommon level of drawing skill to produce a drawing that is so convincing that people may confuse it for Disney’s own work. Midjourney has a social page where users share their creations, and those pages are littered with people’s low-effort generations of licensed characters:

    With Midjourney, any doofus can generate an image of Mickey Mouse flipping off Goofy, and it will look good enough that most people will think Disney made it. If the internet is littered with images like this, it reduces the value of Disney’s properties.



  • Interesting. I guess I am curious if others find review threads useful? Generally I agree with you, I don’t care that much about most individual reviews. However, I find the aggregators useful as a way of taking the temperature on how critics feel about a new release. The threads also make a good place to focus discussion around specific games. However, most of these threads get zero comments unless the game is hotly anticipated.







  • I do think $80 is steep. But that aside, the game is outstanding

    Isn’t the launch deal essentially getting the game for $30 off? Seems like a fair price for the game when you consider that - if you are buying the Switch 2 at launch, you are buying it to play the new Mario Kart, so I guess the $80 price tag is just to push you towards the bundle? I wonder what kind of discounts they will do this gen. Nintendo has historically been very stingy with deals, but I wonder if $80 price tag will mean slightly deeper discounts in the future?









  • I will repeat what I said in another reply below: if the cost of running these closed source AI models was as negligible as you are suggesting, then these companies would be screaming it from the rooftops to get the stink of this energy usage story off their backs. AI is all investors and hype right now, which means the industry is extra vulnerable to negative stories. By staying silent, the AI companies are allowing people like me to make wild guesses at the numbers and possibly fear-monger with misinformation. They could shut up all the naysayers by simply releasing their numbers. The fact that they are still staying silent despite all the negative press suggests that the energy usage numbers are far worse than anyone is estimating.