An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

Not sure if anyone is interested in this story, but I remember at the height of the PokemonGo craze I noticed there were no shirts for the different factions in the game, cant rememebr what they were called but something like Teamread or something. I setup an online shop to just to sell a red shirt with the word on it. The next day my whole shop was taken offline for potential copyright infringement.

What I found surprising is I didnt even have one sale. Somehow someone had notified Nintendo AND my shop had been taken down, to sell merch that didn't even exist for the market and if I remember correctly - also it didnt even have any imagery on it or anything trademarkable - even if it was clearly meant for pokmeonGo fans.

Im not bitter I just found it interesting how quick and ruthless they were. Like bros I didn't even get a chance to make a sale. ( yes and also I dont think I infringed anything).

I asked Sora to turn a random image of my friend and myself into Italian plumbers. Nothing more, just the two words "Italian plumbers". The created picture was not shown to me because it was in violation of OpenAI's content policy. I asked then just to turn the guys on the picture into plumbers, but I asked this in the Italian language. Without me asking for it, Sora put me in an overall and gave me a baseball cap, and my friend another baseball cap. If I asked Sora to put mustache on us, one of us received a red shirt as well, without being asked to. Starting with the same pic, if I asked to put one letter on the baseball caps each - guess, the letters chosen were M and L. These extra guardrails are not really useful with such a strong, built-in bias towards copyright infringement of these image creation tools. Should it mean that with time, Dutch pictures will have to include tulips, Italian plumbers will have to have a uniform with baseball caps with L and M, etc. just not to confuse AI tools?

You (and the article, etc) show what a lot of the "work" in AI is going into at the moment - creating guardrails against creating something that might get them in trouble, and / or customizing weights and prompts under water to generate stuff that isn't the obvious. I'm reminded of when Google's image generator came up and this customization bit them in the ass when they generated a black pope or asian vikings. AI tools don't do what you wish they did, they do what you tell them and what they are taught, and if 99% of their learning set associates Mario with prompts for Italian plumbers, that's what you'll get.

A possible (probably already exists) business is setting up truly balanced learning sets, that is, thousands of unique images that match the idea of an italian plumber, with maybe 1% of Mario. But that won't be nearly as big a learning set as the whole internet is, nor will it be cheap to build it compared to just scraping the internet.