Why Warner Bros Is Suing Midjourney (And Why It Matters for Everyone)

0:00 I try and stay away from the topic of AI because this particular topic gets people super annoying. Not annoyed, annoying. But I did think that there was a couple of stories this week, one that I found, one that Jay found that were a little interesting. on the AI side of the house, so we're going to talk about that. Mid Journey, one of the big AI companies out there, is being sued by Warner Brothers, as they're by other companies, but Warner Brothers, because Mid Journey, quote, brazenly dispenses its intellectual property as if it were its own. What are they talking about? They use some examples where just by typing in the prompt classic comic superhero battle, right, it spits out Superman, Batman, and Flash.

0:51 Right? Not generic superheroes, but those particular superheroes. They're facing similar lawsuits from Disney and Universal, which called the company's AI image generator a virtual vending machine that generates endless unauthorized copies of their work. So I guess this is where, where again, People get super annoying about this and there's some that I agree with and some that I don't But we're gonna try and talk about both our AI topics tonight with it with just a teeny bit of nuance Okay nuance. It's a thing. Um, so Right off the bat. What is your first immediate gut reaction there Jay? AI can be a tool for good.

1:47 But we are going to fuck it up. Like every single other thing that we have ever created. That's my initial. Yeah, that's my initial go to that. And also kind of like what you were saying about just trying to stay away from AI topics. Like I kind of feel like I just want to Marshawn Lynch here and be like, y 'all know why I'm here. And that's all I say for the next hour and a half. Remember, the next day, I thought it was your idea. Oh, just pointing that out. That one was your idea. We had to tweak that a little bit just to make sure that the YouTube algorithm got to kill us. But that next one was your idea.

2:28 And I think it's an important topic, too. Here's here's where I come down again. Let's let's toss a nuance in here. I used it with my last store because when we were writing like ad copy for social media posts and stuff like that where sometimes generating that stuff is hard, right, especially in a way that's going to be engaging and really do what you need to do. There was one site called copy .ai that did ad copy and you can make tweaks to it and say, hey, I want it to be more playful. I want it to be more serious, more this, more that. And it was useful for generating kind of ad copy. Okay. And there's stuff where I think LLMs can be useful or AI can be useful.

3:13 Conversely, I'm getting to it people who are about to yell at me in the comments section. Conversely, I do think that there are massive copyright issues with AI that quite frankly, our chicken shit of a government don't know how to handle and refuse to confront head on. right? And I, and I think that that's a, that's a massive issue. Um, and I don't see that status quo changing under the current administration. You know, and so, so what do you, what do you think about all that? Jay? I mean, what's your, your. Yeah, I, I agree. I don't think our administration is going to try to take this on or. I don't know, at least like be decisive one way or another.

4:07 They'll probably just talk about it like, oh, we need to do something about it. It's so bad. It's like the worst. It's like the crime in DC. I don't know. But yeah, I agree. I don't think I don't think they're going to touch it. And if you kind of think about it, like why, right? AI right now is a It's it's a huge I don't know how big it is, but it is a huge industry, right? There's a lot of giant tech corporations that are Funding AI it's the reason Nvidia and AMD have gotten as big as they are too because the chips they're designing specifically for AI It's not about graphics cards and you know gaming computer chips anymore. These are chips and stuff that they are designing specifically for LLM for AI generation purposes right because you need massive amounts of computing power Generally speaking and we talked with this a few years ago where the Chinese are saying they've got one that doesn't require it But go check that video out if you want to know more You know It's a huge thing. Now, conversely, you're right.

5:17 It's turning into a huge industry, but Salesforce just laid off 4 ,000 people with their CEO saying, AI means I need less people. And that's the other thing that I think is killing us here. And we can, God, man, I can go down the rabbit hole on what I think we should do about this, but. I mean, what I saw you make a face there. What's your your thought process? I hear this all the time, like, oh, like, I was going to take my job. Oh, you know, is. You know, I'm going to get fired because I can do my job. And this is actually I don't believe this is true. I know we just said. Whatever laid off a lot of people.

6:03 Yeah. But you still so I was talking to an engineer today about this same topic And just to be clear for our audience who may or may not have watched this video before Jay is an engineer That's what Jay does for a living in the real world Okay in the world until we make enough money to do this podcast full -time Right and come to you every day of the week. This is what Jay does Jay is an engineer So Jay knows what they are talking about Yeah. I saw a fresh out of college engineer. I was talking to her about this and she was like, I just have a I write my write my code. Like I will say, hey, write this. I'm trying to do XYZ. Write it, blah, blah, blah.

7:01 I was like, okay. You still have to have someone that can present. that like you still have to so like let's step outside of like engineering typically there's a lot of other there's a lot of cross functionality between other departments so like you have to be able to explain what is going on for someone like a project manager to understand who may or may not be an engineer right I feel like sometimes they do have an engineering background sometimes they don't and You're going to have to explain it to the project manager so that they can explain it to their, you know, to the company's L one leadership team or C suite.

7:41 And if you don't know what's going on. And if you can't explain what is happening. You're like, it's not going to work like there's still documentation of. So like, for instance, like where I work, we have documentation on like theory of operations is what we call them. Here's what's going on. Here's how it's happening so that future engineers can review it, understand exactly like our approach for whatever XYZ. You still have to have a human interaction. to explain what's going on to non engineering type people. But then also you have to understand, you have to be able to catch the mistakes that will happen, or at least be able to understand the code enough to tweak it to do what you want it to do. You can't just, I'm going to fire everyone and I'm going to have a project manager just go in and just start writing AI, you know. like, Hey, AI creative program for X, Y, Z. You still have to have that engineering interaction. Well, and you still have some notes.

8:52 Cause again, to me, my first thought would be, let's say I Alex go, Hey, I want you to do chat GBT, write me this code in this language to do X, Y, and Z. If it's spit it out, my first thought would be, well, I guess this will work. And I would put it into my, my code thingy and I would, I would execute it, but If there was a bug or something that I had to interact with that I don't know, I don't know how to read that code and see where what's going wrong is going wrong. Right. So you still have to know something. You still have to be able to write code. You still have to be able to. To debug code, right. In order for that to work. Right. And so again, this is where I come back to, to what you said.

9:37 It's. It's a tool and I wish people, so I'll give you an example for the audience. We use a tool inside of one of our systems that we use here for our stream. And what it does is at the end of our stream, you notice we're in a side by side formats, right? So I'm here, Jay is right there, right? But we want to edit videos for multiple formats. So what we do is we take the stream every week and we kick it over to this AI tool. And what it does is it analyzes our stream. And then what it does is it auto edits the video to put us in a top -down format, right? Up -down format that's modified for like TikTok or YouTube shorts. And it spits that out for us. And then it does that, what I call boring grindy editing where it sets that all up for us. And then I go back in and I tweak it and I make some cuts and maybe I cut out some dead air or we extend the clip out. which Jay sees me do this every week. I'm like, Oh, what if we push this clip another four seconds? Cause the AI didn't catch the end of this statement.

10:39 Right. And it's not perfect. Cause we get, you know, eight or nine clips generated a week and we may be go with two or three where we're like, okay, those are good. You know, um, so again, and to me, that's a tool. We're a tiny little YouTube channel, tiny, tiny YouTube channel. scheme of YouTube. And so for us, we can't afford a professional video editor, and I don't have the time, now that it's Jay, to go in and do this manually every stinking week, right? And so I see it as a tool, but again, I would never use it to be like, and I'll give the other example.

11:22 I've written RPG books. I would never use generative AI to write a book for me, if that makes sense. because that's just cheating and this is again where I say people get super annoying because I see these pro AI people and speaking of people firing people I know of a large security company that is in the process of cutting its operations staff by 40 percent because they have convinced themselves that they can cut their operations staff by 40 percent because they can let AI do a lot of those functions now Anybody in the industry with half a fucking brain is well aware that this is going to fall flat on its face. We're all kind of looking forward to it, right? Because we're like, Oh company, you have no idea because you're still dealing with P and the computer does not understand people. Okay. You're going to screw yourselves and we're kind of all looking forward to it. And I think they deserve it. Right.

12:19 But what annoys me is that people are like, Hey, I can fix all your problems. I see them on TikTok. you know AI generation is a new skill no it's not no it's not no it's not writing AI prompts is not a new career path okay uh that's why I say people get super annoying with this because again you have the people who are on once like the very Luddite side where they're like AI must die Right and the other side who are like AI is everything and quite frankly And I think this is the other problem is we've lost the ability to talk about this with nuance We have no ability to vote or hold our elected officials to account with Nuance where we can get to the point where they're gonna put in the fucking regulations that we need Not right out go Katie Yeah It's a tool. It's meant to help aid you. It's meant to help accelerate things for me personally, like it helps me get a little bit closer to doing everything I'm supposed to do every day because my job legit today came in very first thing.

13:34 Another engineer was like, oh, we have another problem. XYZ happened. It's not in the budget. It's not on the timeline. Oh, awesome. And it typically on like a good day. I do about I can get through like half of what I'm supposed to actually do every single day. Now I can spit like speed that up and help me get closer to 100 % or maybe take on other projects, more things. But you still have to have this actual human being interacting with AI and understanding what is it doing? and how to modify it because if anyone if any one of you have ever wrote code you cannot write code and it work perfectly the very first time like you can go and watch YouTube videos of these super high level people showing you how to code stuff and I guarantee guarantee you every single video they're gonna run into an error and they're gonna go huh What did I do wrong? Hang on one second. Oh yeah, there it is. Okay. Let me fix that. Like everyone has this issue where you fuck up and like you have to try to find and debug your your scripts. It happens. Yep. You can't just take what AI is shitting out and go sell it. Right. Well, and again, obviously, when something goes wrong with

15:04 your product that you coded with AI, you have to be able to look at the code and know what happened. Yeah. Straight up. So anyway. That will do it for this topic today. Let us know what you think down in the comments below. Is AI evil? Is it good? Or can we actually start to have nuanced conversations? And when do we think we can start having nuanced conversations about the practical application of AI in all of our lives?