Where does one draw the line with using AI to create art? A court ruled AI art could not be copyrighted, but what about AI assisted art? Is there a percentage where the sin overtakes the whole endeavor? If I painted a fifty foot long mural and glued a stamp-sized print of AI art to it, is the mural’s entire design rendered public domain?
What if the art is writing? I was recently trying to come up with an idea for a story and not liking anything that came to mind, so I had a convo with chatgpt about it. At what point in this conversation does the writing become my creation, or does the fact it started like this invalidate the entire project – even if I wrote a million words off the concept in iambic pentameter, all from my own brain?
GAS:
put this plot outline into a format you can easily understand, short phrases and simple formatting: (here I posted a four act gothic plot outline mashed up with save-the-cat screenplay bits)ChatGPT:
Act 1: Rise from Obscurity
Opening Image / Character is not Valued
Tone and concept established… (it responded competently)GAS:
list seven ideas for sources of supernatural power that come at a terrible costChatGPT:
- Blood Pact with a Demon
Power: Grants immense strength, magical abilities, or immortality.
Cost: Slowly consumes the user’s soul, leading to eventual damnation or loss of humanity.- Cursed Artifact
Power: Bestows knowledge, wealth, or abilities.
Cost: The artifact demands a toll (e.g., harming loved ones, madness, or eternal servitude).- Forbidden Knowledge
Power: Unlocks hidden truths, magic, or control over reality.
Cost: Warps the mind, creating paranoia, hallucinations, or inability to return to normal life.- Ancestral Spirit Possession
Power: Access to ancestral wisdom, battle prowess, or supernatural senses.
Cost: The spirit takes control intermittently, eroding the user’s autonomy.- Blood Magic or Life Sacrifice
Power: Casts powerful spells or grants regenerative abilities.
Cost: Requires offering the life force of others—or the user’s own lifespan is drastically shortened.- Cosmic Entity Bargain
Power: Grants the ability to manipulate time, space, or destiny.
Cost: Reality becomes distorted; the entity’s influence seeps into the user’s life, erasing relationships or memories.- Monster Transformation
Power: Unparalleled physical prowess, healing, or shapeshifting.
Cost: Gradual loss of humanity, uncontrollable urges, or permanent disfigurement.GAS:
list seven variations on the concept of a vampire, a noble class that uses supernatural power to oppress the people, but not literal blood drinkingChatGPT:
- Dream Eaters
Feed on the dreams and ambitions of the people, leaving their victims apathetic and without hope.
Use stolen creativity to maintain their grandeur and invent new ways to control society.- Soul Harvesters
Extract fragments of souls from the populace, weakening their victims’ vitality and willpower.
Hoard soul energy to maintain eternal youth, power, or invincibility.- Emotion Leeches
Drain intense emotions (joy, love, anger) from others, leaving them numb and subservient.
Use this energy to amplify their charisma and influence, manipulating the masses.- Shadow Lords
Absorb the shadows or “life essence” of others, which leaves victims sickly and feeble.
Their stolen power allows them to control light and darkness, creating fearsome displays of authority.- Pain Feeders
Draw strength from the suffering and despair of the oppressed, perpetuating violence and hardship.
Use this energy to fuel supernatural resilience and cruelty, ensuring their dominance.- Memory Thieves
Steal memories and identities from their subjects, erasing rebellion and rewriting history.
Use the knowledge gained to maintain a perfect grip on power while ensuring no one remembers life before their rule.- Time Parasites
Drain years of life from their subjects, shortening lifespans in exchange for their own longevity.
Create an illusion of fairness by taxing the life of the poor while claiming eternal reign as divine justice.GAS:
in bloodborne the healing church uses cursed blood from the elder gods to heal people, gaining favor, but the blood eventually turns people into monsters, and it ushers in an eternal inquisition as those that became beasts are being hunted. in elden ring, outer gods have bred with humans to create a noble class with a supernatural power of “the grace of gold,” but their might causes their power struggles to rip up the world itself. list seven similar ideas, but try to make them as different and distinctive as possible.ChatGPT:
- The Whispering Veil
A noble caste gains supernatural wisdom by communing with an ethereal “Veil” that reveals hidden truths.
Over time, prolonged exposure causes their bodies to fragment into translucent, ghostly forms, rendering them unrecognizable.
Their attempts to rule through divine knowledge breed paranoia and civil wars, as they suspect each other of treachery.- The Forge of Embers
A sacred forge grants its wielders the ability to create living weapons infused with fire and metal, capable of reshaping reality itself.
However, using the forge binds their souls to the weapons they create, slowly transforming them into inanimate, mindless tools of war.
The world becomes a desolate battlefield as these cursed weapons perpetuate endless conflict, with no one left to wield them.- The Harvested Horizon
Nobles consume fragments of a celestial being’s body that fell to earth, granting them the ability to terraform land and summon crops.
Overuse of this power corrodes the natural environment, creating barren wastelands and causing the nobles to mutate into colossal, immobile “roots” that consume all life.
The oppressed are forced to fight both their parasitic overlords and the spreading desolation.- The Starbinders’ Oath
A celestial pact grants nobles the ability to manipulate the heavens, altering seasons, weather, and even time.
Their bond with the stars, however, slowly pulls them out of sync with reality, turning them into disembodied echoes incapable of understanding human suffering.
Their unfeeling interference fractures the world’s timeline, plunging the realm into cyclical chaos.- The Choir of Depths
Nobles receive their powers by harmonizing with a cosmic “Song of Creation,” which grants them the ability to reshape matter and minds.
Singing the Song too often causes the nobles to lose their individuality, merging into a horrifying, ever-growing chorus of flesh and voices.
Their subjects live in terror of being assimilated into the Choir, even as they revere the beauty of its creations.- The Thorned Crown
Nobles achieve dominion by donning crowns grown from a mystical tree that connects to the collective lifeforce of their subjects.
The crowns grant immense power but drive the wearers mad with visions of every subject’s pain and suffering.
As the nobles succumb to insanity, the tree begins consuming the people it was meant to sustain, leaving the land twisted and overgrown with carnivorous flora.- The Light of Hollowing
A radiant crystal buried beneath the earth empowers nobles with the ability to project light that heals wounds and invigorates armies.
The light, however, siphons the emotions and humanity of everyone exposed to it, leaving the populace as emotionless husks.
The nobles, desperate to retain control and their fading vitality, begin to drain one another, turning their court into a cannibalistic struggle for survival.GAS:
take any three of those and make them Christmas themed.ChatGPT:
- 1. The Choir of Frost
Nobles attune themselves to a mystical “Caroling Frost,” a sacred hymn carried by the icy winds of a cursed winter.
The song grants them control over the snow and cold, allowing them to create eternal winters and summon crystalline ice structures to awe and oppress their subjects.
However, the more they sing the Frost’s melody, the more their voices freeze into hollow echoes, and their bodies become statues of living ice. Over time, they merge into frozen monuments, incapable of thought or speech, yet still radiating the chilling hymn that numbs the hearts and spirits of the people.
The world becomes locked in a perpetual winter, with frostbitten villagers whispering prayers to thaw the cursed song.- 2. The Thorned Wreath
Nobles gain power by donning enchanted holly wreaths said to be blessed by the Spirit of Winter Solstice. The wreaths grant the ability to summon endless feasts, gifts, and celebrations, making the nobles beloved as symbols of holiday cheer. Over time, the thorns on the wreaths grow inward, piercing deeper into their flesh and souls. The more they indulge their power, the more they become driven by greed, feeding endlessly on the joy and warmth they create.
As the wreaths take control, the nobles transform into monstrous “Yule Fiends,” evergreen hulks that spread cursed festivities, forcing villages into endless, lifeless celebrations where no one can leave or rest.- 3. The Starbinders’ Noel
Nobles form pacts with a celestial “Yuletide Star” that appears every winter, granting them the ability to summon miraculous lights and deliver blessings of warmth and hope to the people during the darkest nights.
Each use of the Star’s power, however, draws them closer to its fiery essence, causing their bodies to burn with an inner light that they cannot extinguish. Eventually, they become radiant, hollow shells, consumed by the Star’s endless hunger for devotion.
As the nobles ascend into blazing constellations in the night sky, their subjects are forced to endure their light, which grows ever brighter and hotter, turning the joyous season into an unbearable, fiery trial.GAS:
take the second one and make it into a sort of conspiracy situation, where the source of power is kept secret – some kind of lie makes it seem like something else, less a supernatural power than a more banal source of privilege.ChatGPT:
The Thorned Wreath ConspiracyThe nobles appear to rule through mundane wealth and tradition, claiming their authority comes from ancestral ties and their ability to preserve the realm’s prosperity through seasonal festivities. They maintain the illusion that their power stems from their role as caretakers of a sacred winter holiday—a benign, cultural privilege tied to generosity, feasting, and the supposed goodwill of their forebears.
In truth, the nobles’ grandeur and influence come from the Thorned Wreaths, enchanted relics hidden beneath their ostentatious holiday crowns. Each wreath feeds on the warmth, joy, and hope of the common people, amplifying the nobles’ charisma and material abundance by siphoning life force during the season of celebration. The public is told that the lavish feasts and seemingly endless gifts come from centuries of careful stewardship and family wealth, when in fact the wreaths are drawing vitality from the very people they claim to serve.
The wreaths grow thornier each year, the hidden barbs pressing into the nobles’ minds and hearts, warping their personalities. While they are celebrated as benevolent lords of the season, they secretly become cold, calculating, and deeply paranoid. The cost of this power remains hidden: villages sink into depression after each “festive season,” with the populace left drained of energy and hope, unable to rebel or question the system.
The conspiracy is tightly controlled. A secret society of nobles, calling themselves The Keepers of the Holly, works tirelessly to suppress knowledge of the wreaths. They stage elaborate holiday spectacles to distract the people, enforce the narrative of familial legacy, and ruthlessly silence anyone who comes too close to the truth.
However, cracks are beginning to show. Rumors spread of servants witnessing nobles removing their crowns, revealing twisted wreaths of holly beneath, their vines crawling into their skulls. Commoners whisper about the increasing sterility of the land—fields that won’t grow crops, towns that never recover from the holiday season. Meanwhile, a small resistance begins to uncover fragments of the truth, learning that the wreaths were not gifts of the Winter Solstice but ancient, cursed relics that the first nobles stole from the wilderness to gain their power.
The question is: if the wreaths are destroyed, will the nobles crumble into husks—or will the land itself, so dependent on their ill-gotten vitality, fall into ruin with them?
GAS:
a gang of street thieves does a heist on a noble, and at first it’s fun and games, but they fall prey to jealousy and betrayal. ultimately one must use dark knowledge to vindicate himself, at a terrible cost. how could this plot go? a short summary.ChatGPT:
A gang of street thieves targets a wealthy noble during a grand winter festival, believing the score to be easy and the spoils immense. They infiltrate the noble’s lavish estate, stealing what appears to be mundane riches: gold, jewels, and an ornate holiday wreath. The gang celebrates their success, reveling in their newfound wealth. However, tensions rise as jealousy brews—one thief claims they deserve more for their role in the heist, while another begins to suspect the leader of withholding the best prizes.Amid the infighting, strange events occur. The stolen wreath exudes a sinister aura, and those near it feel their deepest insecurities amplified. One thief, desperate to outshine the rest, secretly dons the wreath, unknowingly activating its cursed power. They gain unnatural charisma and strength, but the wreath begins to twist their mind, driving them to betray the others.
The gang implodes in violence and paranoia. The leader, framed for betrayal, is left for dead and abandoned by their comrades. Desperate to clear their name and seek revenge, they consult a forbidden source: an old hermit who reveals the wreath’s dark truth—that it feeds on ambition and life force, granting power at a terrible cost. To expose the traitor and vindicate himself, the leader uses the knowledge to claim the wreath’s power, sacrificing part of their humanity in the process.
In a climactic showdown, the leader confronts the corrupted former ally, now fully consumed by the wreath. Though victorious, the leader realizes they have become just like the noble they robbed: a vessel for the wreath’s hunger. With their gang destroyed and their soul tainted, they are left to wander, a hollow shell of their former self, carrying the weight of their choices into an uncertain future.
GAS:
remember the generic plot outline you helped me with before? make your plot summary here fit into that outline.ChatGPT:
Act 1: Rise from Obscurity
Opening Image / Character is not Valued
The gang of thieves struggles to survive in the shadow of the nobles, resenting the disparity between their lives and the wealth flaunted by the elite. Their leader, though clever and ambitious, feels underestimated and unappreciated by their crew.
Incidental / Accidental Accomplishment (Catalyst)
During the winter festival, the gang pulls off an audacious heist, stealing gold, jewels, and an ornate wreath from a powerful noble… (you get the idea.)
Humans are all recycling the same six story ideas ad infinitum and have been content with that for ages. Don’t tell me the bot here is being less creative than five thousand romantasies about muscly dudes with big donks loving up on the normal girl who turned out to be the secret faerie queen. Any one of these ideas could turn into successful commercial media, in the right / wrong hands.
Or can it? There is that court precedent which could limit commercial application. Well, doesn’t matter much to me. Copyright law will never protect me from the deep pockets of corporations, regardless of whether I write my own shit or bot it. The law exists solely for them. Disney could copy-paste the entire history of this blog into Frozen 4 and I’d have to eat shit about it.
This is the world we live in. As creative people, what will we do with it?
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PS: This is the post you can point to if you want to join in the AI version of the Satanic Panic, where saying anything neutral to positive about AI will have a gamergatesque mob braying at your door, calling into question the legitimacy of every piece of art you’ve ever made. Act now while supplies last!
Well, I don’t know about you, but I intend to continue more or less as I have been: pirating anything I want in the way of commercially published entertainment, and releasing my own creative output into the public domain/CC0 as a giant “screw you” to anyone who might otherwise have thought to enclose and exploit it.
Shakespeare lifted a lot of his plots from historians and other stories. He has not yet been run out of the creative stable on a rail for being a plagiarist.
My prediction is that initially, we won’t consider it plagiarism if someone says somewhere “AI assisted me with this” – after all, we don’t care about spell-checkers or formatters, etc. It’s just a better form of assistance. And then people will assume all writing is assisted, and things will only be flagged if they are entirely written by AIs and the human’s involvement was simply collecting royalties. The fun will end when the AIs learn to sue for their intellectual property rights.
Fun ChatGPT prompt might be to ask ChatGPT to write a cease and desist regarding your use of AI material, and then have ChatGPT write a response to the cease and desist, and then have ChatGPT act in the role of judge and rule guilt or innocence and damages.
beks – great response, thx
marcus – this is wtf im talkin about. also, good idea on the robo roleplay.
Well, that sucks. I tried to think of an interesting comment to make here and my brain said “Wait until they start making AI write stories that are stealth sales pitches so you don’t notice it’s all about selling you a product until halfway through.” Kind of like old Saturday morning cartoons, the ones that were only there to sell toys (Transformers, He-Man, and many others, some of which were pretty awful). Except littered all over the place and aimed at every demographic.
And yes I know product placement is already a thing but most of the time the whole story isn’t warped around it. If it works for video it’ll spread to games and other areas I’m not thinking of right now.
Blah. I’m going to go back to reading a dead tree book. 😛
Awful? Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s likely part of the reason I grew up to see women as human beings with agency rather than just props, set dressing, and prizes to be won was She-Ra.
beks – yeahhhh loved she-ra. reprezent.
I suppose this is going to make you dismiss me as a “gamergater” or whatever, but I do have a couple thoughts.
The first is that these companies have pretty much admitted that their chat programs would not exist as they do if they were forced to respect existing copyright law. If an artist makes something that is then photocopied, or cast to make the same statue over and over again, that is ONE work that is drawn from in ONE way, and it’s not at all hard to credit the person who made it.
With this stuff, it’s ongoing and constant. Any writing I put onto the Internet WILL be used for this, whether I consent or not. To me, that is different from a person reading my work, being inspired by it, and doing something of their own based on that inspiration. It is also different from making an agreement with a company to print my work and distribute it for profit. L
The key here is consent.
I’ve spent the last three years building the world and magic systems for the story I’m writing, but the moment it’s out there, anyone can help themselves to that work without even knowing I exist. Again, that is fundamentally different from past “labor-saving” technologies.
With what you are doing, you have no way to know if ChatGPT is just wholesale stealing some of those ideas from someone who actually did the work. I don’t really know how to convey that that’s bad, if simply saying that it feels like a violation isn’t enough for you.
Further, since I nominally maintain a climate blog, have you looked into the energy costs of this shit? It’s through the roof. It is ACTIVELY making the climate crisis worse. How is this different from justifying the purchase and use of a Hummer because you think it makes your life easier?
Does “it’s already in the world” really work for you as a justification? Does that also hold for AI celebrity porn, since celebrities’ images are already “out there”?
At what point, in your opinion, did I go from having a reasonable concern about the theft and use of my hard work, and start becoming a “gamergater”?
Point of clarification, referring to your “gamergate-esque” link: when I talk about the carbon cost, I’m talking about an absolute increase, because it is absurd to think that this will result in people spending less time at computers doing stuff.
It might make SOME people write less, but it’s not like they’re going to replace that time with carvon-neuttal activities, and unlike with AI, we can’t just not have people, and under our current system, people can’t just work less. The net result is an increase in emissions, and this argument just reads as obfuscation to me, from someone emotionally invested in this stuff being “ok” no matter what objections may be raised.
You don’t disappoint me in your ability to construct an argument like an adult and not descend to insult, tho at the tenor of the conversation, people on both sides are bound to feel insulted even from reasonable discussion, which is why I’m not responding for long.
Like, I’ll lock the comments and delete anything that displeases me sufficiently past a certain point, on the off chance I revisit the article in the future – and you’d accept that, right? It’s my house; if you have respect for your own house you’d treat it the same. Which is why I also expect that having read the post at the link, you’d agree your side is capable of gamergatesque harassment, which is what they did in the case described there. I’m not on most social media for a number of reasons; avoiding that is one of them.
A single reasoned impassioned argument from someone who agrees with my values isn’t harassment. If I even had comments from two of you in here tho? Or if you made three comments? It’d start to edge in that direction, and I’d shut it down for the sake of our ability to have cordial interactions in the future.
I’ll respond to the substance of what you said a bit later, but after that I’ll lock comments. It’ll be good. People can see both sides, the host gets the last word because that is correct in their house, and readers can decide how they feel after that, right?
I’ll see you around.
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companies admitting they violated copyright – not relevant to my position, which i may elaborate on later.
attribution – i’ll concede i know little enough about LLMs that it can be an issue there, on AI art i know enough about how it works to categorically disagree. shit, the link there spelled it out very well, and if you had experience of using them, you’d know what it says on that subject is true. AI art was originally trained on data where, if you are practicing the most perfect ethics possible, you should have given people an option out. however, you know that hypothetical argument i made before about how an AI for art could be trained on public domain art only? it’s happening. somebody did it. not sure how broadly available that one is, but it throws this side of the argument in the trash.
and on the subject of writing, there are only so many words that can be used in only so many ways, and so outrageously many words have been used in english at this moment that i’d be seriously surprised to see an unprecedented construction.
ditto and even moreso on ideas. you know how many magic systems exist in writing at this point? what’s the odds you nailed a perfectly unique one? if you even did, who’s to say that’s even a good thing? if i came up with a system about doodoomancers that perform different spells from taking different kinds of shits, it would be more likely original than what chatGPT made above, but it would be worse. the quality of the product is more important than the originality of it. originality is *a* quality and you have the option of valuing it above others, but very clearly 99% of people do not. if they claim to, but watch marvel movies or read mainstream genre fiction, they’re fooling themselves.
FtB has a good case to examine for this. Avicenna was caught lifting passages from famous writers without attribution. I’d say that makes him look bad, makes us look bad, and booting him was right. The “t” in FtB denotes a human at the wheel; arguably it’s part of our brand to not be writing our posts by AI or by plagiarism.
But if somebody was a junkie for romantasies about elf boys with big donks, and they have a machine that can spit one out for less power than it takes to watch a netflix movie (end use is much less power consuming than training), it does that person a disservice to tell them they are only allowed to consume the elf dicks that humans make at whatever price and pace the humans require.
would that cost humans jobs? yes, but past a point utility always crushes that concern. if you have 500 people that need to cross a hundred miles a day on horseback, then somebody invented the bicycle, people will convert to the bicycle, and the horse industry gets fucked. whether or not you see a given industry in that light always seems to come back to whether or not it’s *your* industry.
this one is catching people in some feels because art is the special magical industry, but i personally find that to be bullshit because there is very clearly a product involved. and it usually is not all that special. whatever is magical in it comes like lightning and has fuckall to do with the commerce involved. arguably the amazing thing about art isn’t the artist, it’s what happens in the mind of an art consumer – and if they can get misty-eyed on AI product, i’m not the dick to tell them no.
if trvnk-mvsk speedrun this cyberpunk dystopia into a post-apocalypse, will you take time out from scavenging edible bacterial mats from the wastelands to tell a tale, to make a mark on a rock with no thought to recompense? then u can make an artwork happen outside of a market. all the robo-replacement does is force you to go outside the market sooner than you’d prefer.
i have long been aware that i, as an artist, will never make a living from art, and am more accepting of that than the anti-AI crew. sorry yer goin’ thru some shit out there, but i don’t imagine this is one you can win.
re: consent, about any and all output you’ve made being used against your interests in this way, i again point to the public domain AI project as a demonstration that if you were granted the ability to extract all your words now, your situation, economically, would be no better. if people could do that en masse and shut down chatGPT, now that the tech has been developed, they can train a new bot from go without your words as input – and the training is the power intensive part you most oppose.
re: violation, if that’s a big problem for enough of you, im fine with you getting some populist politicians in your corner and shutting down all gens of AI that use that content, shutting down future scraping. in fact, i’d love it, because it would shut down this part of the conversation. but if you think it would be impossible to train new bots without that? you’re wrong, and are in for a world of disappointment even if you make your agenda law. and you’re making the environmental impact worse while they train the “clean” gen. still worth it, i think, to overcome this part of the public’s issue with AI. i don’t disagree that it’s something you should have a say in. i just think the say will help nothing more than your feelings – which is not nothing, feelings matter. but it won’t stop AI.
re: celebrity porn, the violation is an issue, not the tool used to make it. wanna legislate the by now century old celebrity skin industry out of existence? go for it, dogg.
on the environmental cost of it, i think the left orthodoxy on AI has blinded you all to how useful this tech can be – how useful it already is. i have personal reasons to champion the new chatbots, but i can’t really get into that right now. will do so in the future. suffice it to say, i think it’s so useful that it will have a massive impact on society we’ve barely scratched the surface of – and that will largely be a net good, worth some carbon cost.
but i’m no absolutist on that either. fundamentally, for me, the problem is capitalism. if the AI was developed centrally by colleges sharing resources, instead of parallel commercial production by competing corps? the cost would be much less. i do hate that shit.
but i also hate the environmental impact of streaming video, and still use youtube all the time. it’s doing an important service for me, like AI, and i’m amenable to that service being sensibly constrained by law – if that was the world we live in. good luck making that happen, really, but i’m not going to fight against AI in total. i’d vote in favor of legislation that helps mitigate it’s carbon imprint – as if i’ll ever get a choice.
the point where it becomes a mob is when the mob arrives, and for the artist at that link, the mob had. the reasonable concern about the theft of your work can be addressed by laws to address those issues, by retraining new data sets, but that does have a cost of its own. and in the meantime, what these bots do is not what 99% of the leftosphere thinks they do, so i’m not convinced about it.
if i took the exercise above to completion, never doing writing for myself, only jockeying the bot until an entire novel emerged, as Marcus sez, that would be a mediocre product (for now, the tech improves). i do have an artistic voice of my own and am not interested in doing that.
but if i was just tossing it to kindle direct to make a few centavos, i wouldn’t care if some random phrases were identical to somebody else’s because that would inevitably happen as a matter of there being millions of books out there. if, even with my jockeying and all the particulars being guided, it still ended up thieving your magic system, what are the odds you’d ever find out, in the sea of shit out there? if my roboglurge somehow made a million bucks and you found out and came for a piece, fuckin congrats bro, you got a slice of a mil for your efforts.
but if i was disney and i literally copypasted your book without even using AI, well, the law is bought. you make some lawyers money and ruin yourself for pride. expanding copyright laws as an effort to fight AI will do nothing but harm artists.
this is a really good time for all of us to consider why we make art, how we can go about doing so when technology renders that economically untenable, and what we can do to build a new space for arts outside of the capitalist system.
i’d love to see the conversation elevated, instead of consistently devolving into artists squabbling over pennies, selling out their own rights to corporations in a fundamentally misguided effort to protect their intellectual property.
like, should IP even be a thing? why was what Avi did wrong? i agree it was, but my reasons and those of the big five publishers’ legal teams might differ.
that’s as much as i can do this for now. post a response on your blog if you like, i may or may not respond, and that should not bother a sensible guy like you. later bud.
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