Larry Ahern

Creative director, writer, designer, artist (Imagineering/LucasArts) - Rise of the Resistance, Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, Curse of Monkey Island, DOTT.

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@SenAdamSchiff Your job isn’t to report the news, it’s to lead. Tell me what you’re doing to stop them and how we can help (and stop emailing us asking for money).

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

Wow, this even caught me off guard for a minute! Publisher referrals and outreach appreciated.

[Jonathan Ackley @ackley_jonathan]

A surprise post today! My design partner of "The Curse of Monkey Island" Larry Ahern and I have been developing a new comedy narrative adventure.
Our development team is ready to roll, and we'd love to meet with potential publishing partners. Hit me up if you'd like to talk!

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@damgentemp Crazy!

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@JimShull “Dark Universe at Universal Epic Universe”? Seems like they could have tried using a few less “universes” in the title, don’t you think? (The land looks cool though).

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@ramon_wilhelm Thanks!

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

Also, when did editing posts cost money on this crap platform? Thanks, Elon. Had to delete and repost because of a typo.

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

Holy crap, this courtroom sketch artist is insanely talented. Did Trump bring in a ringer because he didn’t like how he’s usually portrayed in court?

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@robjyeo Looks really fun, Rob!

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@austinkleon Well, I heard pixelated tattoos are back in style again, so this is actually very timely.

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@SCRTX98 I actually like Hondo as a character (his personality, though not so much his visual design). But some of us thought a character or alien species familiar to original trilogy fans might have the greatest impact here.

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@Figment_Jedi @JimShull Which just means we didn’t have the clout Filoni has.

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@nixice @JimShull Yeah, it lengthened the time but we kept the Hutt lines short and guests came in mid scene. It worked and the guy getting frozen was more of a comical screwup to lighten it up a little. But you were working for a bad guy. Otoh, Hondo is questionable himself.

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@JimShull The Hutt (via droid translator) berated another pilot for failing him, then froze him in carbonite to show guests what’s in store for them if they screw up. Lucasfilm nixed it because carbonite freezing was an improvised approach unique to Cloud City (and they’re no fun).

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@JimShull Our first version of the preshow featured a Hutt instead. It technically wasn’t Jabba, but it would have felt familiar and I think people would have liked it better (plus it probably would have been cheaper).

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.

First off, I want to say that there are lots of people at Stability who are deeply thoughtful about these issues. I’m proud that we were able to launch a state-of-the-art AI music generation product trained on licensed training data, sharing the revenue from the model with rights-holders. I’m grateful to my many colleagues who worked on this with me and who supported our team, and particularly to Emad for giving us the opportunity to build and ship it. I’m thankful for my time at Stability, and in many ways I think they take a more nuanced view on this topic than some of their competitors.

But, despite this, I wasn’t able to change the prevailing opinion on fair use at the company.

This was made clear when the US Copyright Office recently invited public comments on generative AI and copyright, and Stability was one of many AI companies to respond. Stability’s 23-page submission included this on its opening page:

“We believe that Al development is an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”.

For those unfamiliar with ‘fair use’, this claims that training an AI model on copyrighted works doesn’t infringe the copyright in those works, so it can be done without permission, and without payment. This is a position that is fairly standard across many of the large generative AI companies, and other big tech companies building these models — it’s far from a view that is unique to Stability. But it’s a position I disagree with.

I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use.

But setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since ‘fair use’ wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright.

To be clear, I’m a supporter of generative AI. It will have many benefits — that’s why I’ve worked on it for 13 years. But I can only support generative AI that doesn’t exploit creators by training models — which may replace them — on their work without permission.

I’m sure I’m not the only person inside these generative AI companies who doesn’t think the claim of ‘fair use’ is fair to creators. I hope others will speak up, either internally or in public, so that companies realise that exploiting creators can’t be the long-term solution in generative AI.

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@darcyauthor I see a new marketing idea brewing: write a book about the Cross-stitch Killer, then bundle it with a cross-stitch pattern book of all the victims!

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@bobservo @TimOfLegend I want one of those tentacle guns!

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@DanPovenmire Awesome!

[Larry Ahern @larry_ahern]

@ImaJunation @TimOfLegend @phrenopolis These are great!