u/sgtbb4

Genuine question:

If I give an AI image generator a photo of me and my dog and say, “Frame it like a Wes Anderson movie,” who is stealing — me, or the AI?

If I make a film and tell my cinematographer, “I want to frame this like the gunfight in The Life Aquatic, with the camera dollying back and forth,” am I stealing then?

I went to film school in the 2000s, and at least a third of the directors there were trying to emulate Wes Anderson’s quirky style. Where was the uproar then about stealing someone’s work?

That’s my point. AI can frame, light, and compose in the style of other artists because it can follow the same kinds of directions we already give to human collaborators. But it can also make something totally original, if the prompter asks it for what it wants in specific terms.

For my money, if I ask AI to frame a picture of me and my dog like Wes Anderson, I’m the one giving the creative direction. So why are people mad at AI for fulfilling that request, but not mad at the film student, the photographer, or the cinematographer doing the same thing?

Hey, never posted here. My dark coming-of-age horror story is free and I wanted to share it with the community.

Grab it here: https://a.co/d/0cuFesTb

Free June 5th to June 8th.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain. The story goes that the original copyright holder failed to include a proper copyright notice before releasing it.

But the more I think about it, the more that explanation feels off by today’s standards. That rule doesn’t even exist anymore. Copyright is now inherent; it belongs to the creator the moment the work is made. You don’t need a symbol to prove ownership. Having gone through a copyright dispute myself, I’ve learned that while registration helps, it isn’t what fundamentally grants you rights.

By the 70s everyone knew George Romero made the film. So why couldn’t that be recognized retroactively? Is the rule really that forgetting to include a © symbol means you lose your rights forever?

So that leads to my bigger question: Was what happened to Night of the Living Dead just a legal technicality, or something more deliberate? Romero was a young filmmaker who made a massive indie hit outside the studio system. Is it possible the way his film was handled served as a kind of warning shot?

In other words, was this less about a missing copyright notice and more about reinforcing the idea that if you succeed outside the system, you will be punished.

I’m not saying that’s definitively what happened, but it’s hard not to see a correlation between what Romero achieved, how the film was received, and the unprecedented consequences that followed.