Disney’s Loki faces backlash over reported use of generative AI / A Loki season 2 poster has been linked to a stock image on Shutterstock that seemingly breaks the platform’s licensing rules regard…::A promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy amongst professional designers following claims that it was created using generative AI.
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I don't understand the controversy really. A graphic designer at Disney used stock photography in their design of the poster, that's pretty normal and extremely common. It turns out that whoever uploaded that stock image to the service used AI to create it, but how is that Disney's fault? I don't get it.
AI taking the job of someone else by stealing art aside,
According to Shutterstock’s contributor rules, AI-generated content is not permitted to be licensed on the platform unless it’s created using Shutterstock’s own AI-image generator tool.
The picture was not flagged as AI, so it was sold as real art against their TOS.
I don't think the artists or even the studio did this maliciously, but there needs to be discussion on how stock art should be vetted when used like this
How is that Disney's fault?
It isn’t.
Can we talk about how Shutterstock only allows their own AI-generated images? Stock image sites will be the first to face the guillotine of AI generation, and this is how they protect themselves?
Good riddance. I got my video card and several Stable Diffusion models that are way better than the prices they charge.
You're not a business whose sole purpose is to sell/license images. If you read the article, it explains that their models are trained using only images from their library, which seems like a sensible approach to avoiding copyright issues.
There's no copyright issues to avoid. Stable Diffusion is not suddenly illegal based on the images it trains on. It is a 4GB database of weights and numbers, not a many petabyte database of images.
Furthermore, Shutterstock cannot copyright their own AI-generated images, no matter how much they want to try to sell it back for. That's already been decided in the courts. So, even if it's their own images its trained on, if it was fully generated with their own AI, anybody is free to yank the image from their site and use it anywhere they want.
This is a dying industry trying desperately to hold on to its profit model.
Here we get the very crucial definition between "legal" and "moral".
It is not currently illegal to build a "database of weights and numbers" by crawling arts and images without permission, attribution or compensation, for the express purpose of creating similar works to replace the work of the artists whose artworks were used to train it and which they rely on to make a living.
That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be legislated.
Really not a fan of this "dying industry" talk in light of this.
It is morally right to be able to use others' copyrighted material without permission. For analysis, criticism, research, satire, parody and artistic expression like literature, art, and music, In the US, fair use balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and the rights they do not maintain have always been to the benefit of self-expression and discussion. It would be awful for everyone if IP holders could take down any review, reverse engineering, or indexes they didn’t like. That would be the dream of every corporation, bully, troll, or wannabe autocrat. It really shouldn’t be legislated.
AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. After we've gone through and gutted all of our rights and protections like too many people want to do, we'll have handed corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for us to keep developing our own models. Mega corporations will still have all their datasets, and the money to buy more. They might just make users sign predatory ToS too, allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. People who could have had access to a corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility would instead be worse off with fewer resources and rights than they started with.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven't already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
You should also read this open letter by artists that have been using generative AI for years, some for decades. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
I have read that article and I have found it sorely insufficient at addressing the concerns of the artists who are having to deal with this new situation. The EFF is usually great but I cannot agree with them on this stance.
You speak of "IP holders" and "corporations", seemingly to give a connotation of overbearing nameless organizations to any attempt at legislation, but you don't have a single word to say about the independent artists who are being driven out of their artistic careers by this. It doesn't sound like you even considered what their side is like, just that you decided that it's "morally right" to have free access to everyone's works for AI training.
How fair is the "Fair Use" that lets artists get replaced by AI's trained on their works? Way to often AI proponents argue of current legal definitions as if this was merely a matter of some philosophical mind games rather than people's lives. The law exists to ensure people's rights and well-being. It's not sufficient for something to fit the letter of the law, if we want to judge it as just.
I did read this open letter, although I already wasn't expecting much, and I can only find it sappy, shallow and disingenuous. They may say that they don't care about using AI to replicate others' works, not only that's not sufficient to prevent it, it doesn't address all the artists' works that were still used without permission, attribution or compensation even if they use the resulting AI to produce works that don't resemble any other work in particular.
We see a unique opportunity in this moment to shape generative AI’s development responsibly. The broad concerns around human artistic labor being voiced today cannot be ignored. All too often, major corporations and other powerful entities use technology in ways that exploit artists’ labor and undermine our ability to make a living.
But this has already failed. AI has already been developed and released irresponsibly. Corporations are already using it to exploit artists labor. Many major models are themselves an exploitation of artists' labor. These are hollow words that don't even suggest a way to address the matter.
There is only one thing I want to hear from AI advocates if they intend to justify it. Not legal wording or technical details or philosophical discussions about the nature of creativity, because ultimately they don't address the material issues. Rather, how do they propose that the artists whose works they relied on ought to be supported. Because to scrape all their stuff and then to turn and say they are fated to be replaced, like many AI proponents do, is horribly callous, ungrateful and potentially more damaging to culture than any licensing requirement would be.
I don't get what your point is. Are you trying to generate images with Stable Diffusion and upload them to Shutterstock? Because that's the only situation when the thing you're complaining about applies. Nobody is stopping you from generating images and using them. What they are doing is preventing you from generating them and then trying to profit from them on the Shutterstock platform, unless you use their tools. Why is this an issue, in your opinion?
If that's correct, then it's even more understandable why they wouldn't want an avalanche of pictures anyone can use for free on their service of selling pictures.
More reason for Disney to just use AI generated art. I don't see the point of artists anymore other than being in the way of creating things. Seems like all they do now is sue everyone and help create tools to limit everyone else
Wow that name does NOT check out.
Sure it does. People tell me all the time.
Let me explain though, People create stuff. Artist create over priced same stuff but also sue you if you think about sharing it with anybody or creating your own. And the whole time they demand your attention by invading any cool space to busk. Like tipping culture, it invades everywhere.
Eventually spaces that were collaberative and imaginative and unique are sued to oblivion and threatened with DMCA take downs so that this mediocre and costly mass produced stuff can be sold for 20x its value.
If artist disappeared tomorrow, we would see a boom of content creation like never before. If we removed all the people trying to make their dollar in our spaces we would be left with actual creators not artists. We could chase the corporate social media hacks away. We could get back to a free internet when we remove all the people trying to capitalize on it.
These greedy bottom feeders only get worse the more popular they get.
Think of Justin bieber + psychosocial. Really Fun. Justin bieber or slipknot, not as fun. Try to find that mix on Spotify. You never will. And in a world of spotifies monopoly on online music we all lost the unique creative opportunity the internet provided because we all need to over pay for the artist nobody asked for. Anybody remember downloading crazy remixes on bearshare, how fun was that playing the audio file of 4 song smashed up and getting a truly awesome new song. Never again will we get that unique window of creation in our time.
The internet was a refuge for people to get away from the over produced corporate crap and instead the artist brought them all here and censored and sued and threatened and put up paywall after paywall all to funnel us to their shitty fucking ad supported websites and pateron
You have to be trolling.
There's absolutely no way anything you just said here is remotely serious.
Funny read tho, thanks for the chuckle.
All it took was a year of some dodgy plagiarism algorithms and all human creativity is moot. Wrap it up everyone, we're done.
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You can tip me at my pateron or I'll call my lawyer and take down this whole fucking site. You wouldn't steal a car.
I don't see the point of artists anymore other than being in the way of creating things.
… okay.
Because the corporation is ALWAYS at fault, duh. This is the internet, there’s only one way to look at things
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No way could this clusterfuck of IP (owning thoughts), the worry of AI "taking jobs" (e.g doing work that would otherwise be done by humans), and selling of the work on a marketplace at all be tied to the idea of capitalism.
In other economic systems, having work automated would be a good thing, not an existential threat to the functioning of our entire global economy. I'm blown away that people don't understand that.
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Any system with a "work or die" mentality is indeed not long for this world.
It is literally why stock photographs exist in the first place.
There's one that comes to mind: registration of works with the Copyright Office. When submitting a body of work you need to ensure that you've got everything in order. This includes rights for models/actors, locations, and other media you pull from. Having AI mixed in may invalidate the whole submission. It's cheaper to submit related work in bulk, a fair amount of Loki materials could be in limbo until the application is amended or resubmitted.
AI collides with Copyright. The 2 systems don't work together at all.
Because if an image is generated, who "owns" it?
- The person who wrote the prompt
- The AI that generated the image
- The researchers that developed the AI
- The artists the AI is based upon
It just doesn't work. And AI is here to stay. So the only possible solution I see is that we revise the entire copyright system.
Which is long overdue anyway. Disney has gotten away with too much already.
If we apply the current ruling of the US Copyright Office then the prompt writer cannot copyright if AI is the majority of the final product. AI itself is software and ineligible for copyright; we can debate sentience when we get there. The researchers are also out as they simply produce the tool–unless you're keen on giving companies like Canon and Adobe spontaneous ownership of the media their equipment and software has created.
As for the artists the AI output is based upon, we already have legal precedent for this situation. Sampling has been a common aspect of the music industry for decades now. Whenever an musician samples work from others they are required to get a license and pay royalties, by an agreed percentage/amount based on performance metrics. Photographers and film makers are also required to have releases (rights of a person's image, the likeness of a building) and also pay royalties. Actors are also entitled to royalties by licensing out their likeness. This has been the framework that allowed artists to continue benefiting from their contributions as companies min-maxed markets.
Hence Shutterstock's terms for copyright on AI images is both building upon legal precedent, and could be the first step in getting AI work copyright protection: obtaining the rights to legally use the dataset. The second would be determining how to pay out royalties based on how the AI called and used images from the dataset. The system isn't broken by any means, its the public's misunderstanding of the system that makes the situation confusing.
Why would they use a stock image of Loki? That already seems like its own copyright issue. Any image or likeness of a Disney character isn't exactly "stock".
Read the fucking article, man. It's not a stock image of a character, it's the spiral clock background.
It's just the spiraling clock in the background in question, not the Loki stuff.
I mean, besides the Roman numeral mistake and Shutterstock's licensing rules, which is just a side conversation, what's the backlash?
Are we supposed to be immediately outraged when some artist uses some level of AI-generation when trying to create something? Is everybody going to be outraged when somebody uses Photoshop Generative Fill, or is that suddenly okay because it's part of a commercial tool?
"Roman numeral mistake" is not a mistake. Plenty of clocks use "IIII" over "IV". Here's why.
I was talking about the V that isn't well-formed. That was the more glaring issue to me.
Idk if it’s immoral or not, but if Disney is resorting to AI to keep the content slurry flowing that’s more a sign of growing creative bankruptcy than anything.
They're using as much AI as possible now that there's open revolt from many of the world's top CGI effects studios.
So people are mad at the show creators… because an image that some designer purchased for a poster… may have been AI generated… even though it's not confirmed… and even if it's true, that makes the designer of the poster a victim of a scammer…
So, what, are we just going full rabid at the very mention of AI now?
I think people are mad because they banned technology on the platform and then clearly continued to use it.
Rules for thee, not for me.
Okay, so then why are people targeting the show instead of Shutterstock?
Even then, being mad at Shutterstock doesn't make sense because the person who started selling something AI generated on a platform that doesn't allow it obviously wouldn't disclose that fact.
And you can't just ban anything you think might be AI generated immediately, because then you just become the fuckwit mods of r/art.
I will reiterate my point. This outrage is not rooted in some deep seeded hatred towards AI, it is because Disney claimed they didn't want it used on their streaming platform and then immediately used it to market one of their flagship products.
And I will reiterate my point: The outrage still doesn't make sense to anyone with any understanding of the facts. If the image is AI generated, it was still purchased most-likely unknowingly from a service that is not supposed to host such content at all.
anything to make marvel look bad. haters are just grasping at straws now
Quick everyone! Let's rush to defend Disney based on a technicality, even though they've been creatively bankrupt for years and no one watches MCU shows.
Loki is a legitimately good show, and I say that as someone tired of MCU stuff and not the least nostalgic about American comics in the first place (I grew up on Asterix, Tintin, the like).
I'd even go so far as to say it's my favorite MCU show. I remember liking season 1 alot so I had high expectations for season 2. And I think they exceeded my expectations. Ke Huy Quan was delightful as OB and Tom Hiddleston & Owen Wilson had so much chemistry. Can't wait for the next episodes.
You can still think Disney is a shitty company while acknowledging that this is a stupid article/headline. They're not mutually exclusive.
And let's automatically assign blame with no evidence at all, based on the fact that you don't like the company.
The MCU shows (not you, Secret Invasion) have been the best thing they've put out over the past few years. I am speaking as an MCU addict… can't really call myself a fan since the films mostly suck these days but I'll still watch em… yo ho ho
It’s stupid to say they’re using AI to generate content when they purchased a stock image which was advertised as not AI from one of the shittier stock photo companies.
They’re still milking Star Wars and Marvel for every penny they can, and they’re not really naming anything creative or new, but that’s a separate issue.
This article is so dumb that their entire basis for the artwork to be an AI artwork rests on the fact that there are squiggly lines. Like humans have never edited any photo with squiggly lines.
According to @thepokeflutist who purchased the stock image, it was published to Shutterstock this year — ruling out the possibility of it being too old to be AI-generated — and contains no embedded metadata to confirm how the image was created.
The image uploaded to Shutterstock was 2500 x 2500. Does any AI image generator even produce those resolutions? Sure, you can use super resolution, but that seems like too much work for AI generated artwork.
Also there were Twitter users pointing out how "4" on the clock is represented as "IIII" and not "IV". Have they ever not seen clocks with Roman numerals?
IV is the Roman numeral. IIII is like hatch marks or something, you don't usually see that on a clock.
Do an image search. IIII is often used on clock faces because visual symmetry.
Wow I'd never seen that before. Also just curious on the reasoning, why would they use IIII for symmetry but not do anything about VI, VII and so on? Is it more to do with the width of the number when written down maybe?
I was taught that dividing the numbers naturally into thirds:
I II III IIII (all I) V VI VII VIII (all start with V) IX X XI XII (all contain X)Visually looks more "balanced" than having an extra V
VI would be IIIIII which is severely over-wide. The balance is really against VIII and XII, you don't want one leg of that triangle to have a limp and IIII makes IV just a bid wider and chunkier to provide that balance. "Symmetry" was probably a poor choice of word this isn't a mathematical thing but perceptual, those three points being equal visual weight evoke an equilateral triangle standing on its side which says "yep this won't tip over, ever", because, well, things shaped such don't and the back of our head instinctively knows. Thus you get a sense of stability, and I guess this is a good example of why artists often sound like mystics or plain nuts ("this song tastes of strawberries").
The IVPPITER explanation definitely also makes sense but it doesn't explain why people continued to do it after standardisation on IV in arithmetic and the fall of Roman paganism.
When Roman numerals were in use by the Roman Empire, the name of the Romans' supreme deity, Jupiter, was spelled as IVPPITER in Latin. There was a feeling that using the start of Jupiter’s name on a clock dial, and it being upside down where it fell, would be disrespectful to the deity, so IIII was introduced instead.
I would have thought it had to do with aesthetics. I would have never guess it had to do with roman religion.
That's really cool info
YOU don't see that on a clock. Your experience isn't universal. IIII was often used for 4. There were no reduction rules when Roman numerals were in use. The idea of IV being THE way to write 4 is a reflection of modern education.
Also, the idea the human clocks have IV whereas a computer trained on human images might write it as IIII when no training images are like that is weird.
I've already conceded, jeez.
Just ranting at the void. The fact that it hit a topic related the one I replied to is purely coincidental.
Come to think of it, it's pretty vain of you to think just because I started a post replying to your post with a big capital 'YOU' that I was talking about you. Get over yourself.
I kid, it was nothing personal.
I just wanted to point out that this is an example of anomaly hunting where one spots something is off and tries to work out how it is evidence of something. in a lot of cases, the anomaly is not in fact anomalous. In other cases, it is an anomaly, but doesn't lead to the conclusion jumped to. This was both.
IV is used exclusively as 4 (except for clocks as someone else already commented) since the 15th century. Ancient Romans used both writing, IIII and IV.
Interesting, are there instances of other numerals having variants or was 4 a unique situation?
conversation about Loki
other numerals having variants
Well played.
I thought the exact thing when I typed it haha
I have even seen, although incredibly rarely, IIV to mean 3. It's the same number of characters as III so there's no reason not really to do it.
I think it might have been done because it was more consistent with IV equalling 4.
Oh look, a clever advertisement for a TV show…
The image shows perfect spiral symmetry, which suggests it's not a fully AI generated image. It could be a base AI image that was edited by hand to form the spiral though.
The same base was likely used for https://www.shutterstock.com/pt/image-photo/surreal-infinity-time-spiral-space-antique-2262957649 as well. Same 'squiggles' it seems.
Online 'AI art detectors' are terrible and rarely accurate, so I wouldn't consider that as proof of anything.
This person has made more images in this style, I wonder how old the oldest one is (since this is one of the most recent ones). If the oldest similarly-styled one is too old, then it would be evidence that the image is likely not AI generated.
I think you’re giving Disney too much credit here. Siphoning from shutter stock or ‘free work’ while suing everyone over anything and pretending they are the victims is their brand. They are known for stealing even from artists they wont even hire. Olaf cough
Not to forget the actors are on strike for stuff exactly this. Their likeness being used by AI without being paid.
“It’s a small small world after all…”
Why care about reality when you can just instead confirm your own biases? Reality is overrated anyway.
Yeah but we don't know it was AI generated so it's all just made up bullshit unless you can provide some evidence.
As far as I can tell all of the evidence provided is extremely dubious, and that's giving it the most positive interpretation. If I was being fair I'd say it's basically non-existent.
There's an AI technique called controlnet which can be used to achieve the perfect symmetry.
It can also be done with Photoshop. For the record, I'm not claiming it wasn't AI-generated or at least AI-assisted, I'm just saying there's no real proof either way.
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There is no proof that that image was AI-generated. Various elements seem like regular old Photoshop techniques. That image could still be AI-generated or AI-assisted, but there's no real proof either way.
Yeah, I didn't read your comment closely enough before posting the reply. It does looks extremely AI-generated, but it's always possible the artist just isn't very good.
There's a chance this is manufactured outrage to help promote the show
Well it definitely needs better advertising. I only found out that season 2 was out because I happened to go on the Disney plus website and saw a link. I wasn't looking for it, I was actually going to watch Inside Out for the 923rd time.
I didn't even know they were filming.
TBF the actors couldn’t do any press till the strikes were over. But yeah, I had no idea about it, it just popped up when I finished Ashoka
This whole post is a beautiful representation of the fact that pretty much no one reads anything more than the title.
Reasonable people do in fact read the full article, but they're not the same degenerates that feel to post an emotional and juvenile comment under the forum post.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy amongst professional designers following claims that it was at least partially created using generative AI.
Companies like Adobe and Getty are also promoting ways for AI-generated content to be commercially viable, but it’s unclear if these platforms are any better than Shutterstock at moderating submissions that don’t abide by their contributor rules.
Some X users have speculated that it may have been used on sections of the image like the miniaturized characters surrounding Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, noting their awkward positioning.
Disney has ignored our request to clarify if AI was used in the Loki promotional art, and to confirm if the company had licensed the aforementioned Shutterstock image.
These tools aim to make things easier for folks with limited design experience, and are typically promoted to organizations who want to produce cheap art at scale.
Stock images are often used by companies because they’re fast, affordable, and accessible, reducing the need to hire experienced designers to make content from scratch.
The original article contains 655 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
they're not even bothering to hire artists, why would anyone watch this?
at least they still hire actors (for now (unfortunately for disney) )
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If you’d read the article, it appears that this image was posted on shutterstock without being marked as being AI-generated, so this is less Disney not being able to help themselves, and more a person working for Disney inadvertently selecting an AI generated image because whoever uploaded it to shutterstock lied about its source.
They didn't lie about the source, you can upload AI images to Shutterstock as long as it's made using the shutter stock AI trained on shutter stock uploads with all profits going to Shutterstock.
Edit: I was mistaken, the image was marked as not using AI by it's uploader
This is who's trying to regulate this btw, companies like Shutterstock, Getty and adobe.
AI is a-okay, as long as you don't make it for free with an open source program.
It seems you missed the sentence where they say the image in question was not created by Shutterstock AI.
The article also states that it is against shutterstock TOS to upload AI-generated images that are not created by the shutterstock AI, which is what happened here. So to reiterate, the user that uploaded this photo misrepresented it as a non-AI-generated image. So in other words, they DID lie.
Ah very true, I misread and thought it said Shutterstock wasn't labeling which images are made with AI.
Hilarious considering how litigious they are with their own works.
It’s always one big clown show of hypocrisy with giant corporations. And then the government and their buddies give them claps on the back for a job well done and reaffirm their shitty behavior. 🤡
The anti cheese prequel edits being taken down from YouTube was one of the shittiest parts of Disney taking over Star Wars for me.
Not to suggest that Disney is innocent or couldn't have done more to avoid this, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the marketing art materials were outsourced to a dedicated studio who decided to use AI (possibly even without telling Disney).
Lots of outsource-focused art studios overpromise and overstretch to win their contracts, and then the artists end up having to cut corners to meet the crazy deadlines they've been given.
You almost hit the nail on the head. Disney is not to blame in this situation at all. One of their designers went to shutterstock (totally normal) to buy and use some art (again, normal, industry standard), shutterstock sold the art that had been uploaded by an independent artist (that's how this all works).
HOWEVER, the artist used AI to create his image and neglected to add the "Created using AI" tag to his art which is required by the terms and conditions of shutterstock.
In this instance both Shutterstock and Disney got taken for a ride and are getting the negative press because of an individuals decision.
You could technically blame shutterstock a little bit for not vetting what they host but as far as I am aware there are no reliable tools for determining if an image is AI with 100% certainty.
A lot of the same sentiments were had when any new technology comes out.
It’s just another tool that artists can use in their repertoire.
Like lawyers and DMCA
More AI outrage. Who fucking cares? Edit: I don’t give a shit what you say in reply and won’t read it. Fucking sick of all this manufactured outrage about stupid shit when there are actual problems we should be focusing on.
I don't think it's fair to push out incorrect images when you have so much money you could buy a 1st world country.
You cared enough to reply. You seem really upset about this topic. Everything ok?
Anybody who has a skill they’re paid for?
Anybody who respects IP?
Anybody who can empathize?
go focus on real problems then…
just tell me how much of that real problem can you personally solve?
coz i know for me it's zero.Cry harder
