Mylenium

Well, not meaning to be all cynical, but how many people do you think have a 3D laser scanner at all and then on top of it one that would fulfill your precision requirements? See the problem? With the "LEGO" stamping on a stud being something like 0.007 mm or so surely you would need a pretty expensive setup to even capture all the micro curves and crevices. Perhaps there's some nerdy person out there who has access to that stuff at a university or his employer and does this occasionally for fun, but I wouldn't expect any such data to be available out there en mass and for free. Mylenium

Ah, okay. This seems to be set up differently for US people. A quick debug suggests that this is an issue with their AWS configuration. The IP tunneling seems to be invalid and access to their storage gets blocked. Perhaps they'll get it fixed soon-ish. Mylenium

What products? What browser? What system? Using a VPN? Mobile access or stationary on a computer? What provider? Could be anything. No issues here on my end. Mylenium

The algorithms don't care. They may be slow as molasses and your machine could be running out of memory and crash, but if you turn on all the bells and whistles the pixels a given render engine will spit out will look the same no matter its technical underpinnings. Guess how we rendered stuff 30 years ago?! ;-) Mylenium

Bricks get changed all the time, sometimes in an unnoticeable way by tweaking the manufacturing tolerances. Unless you are in touch with LEGO themselves there would be no way to find that out. Of course there are a few indicators like "mini tubes" on the undersides of 1 x bricks and plates having holes or not, with the older ones usually being filled. Likewise, on some elements you can tell by the injection points and their placement. It's all its own science. That said, there is of course always an antithesis to all of that which would thwart your best laid plans. Currently for instance they still use 1 x 1 tiles with injection points on one of the edges, but also the newer version where that point is on the underside. Same for a few other elements. You can even get both versions in the same color in the same set as apparently it merely depends on how everything is packaged together from different stock from different factories. Anyway, not meaning to ramble on. For your original question I stand by what I have already said. I'd consider it extremely unlikely that you'd end up with such old bricks in a random lot. Valuable elements would long have been sorted out and be sold separately, complete sets would be marked accordingly and the mundane stuff would long have gone the way of the wind if not part of someones meticulously curated private collection. Mylenium

That in itself is problematic, though, since here in Europe in most countries there is no generalized fair use clause. Not trying to shoot down your argument and I do get your point, it's just that it's even more complicated. And as recent events show with A.I. providers not even respecting robots.txt rules, one could argue there's a clear malicious intent behind it... Mylenium

Agree with @MAB. At this point it's safe to assume that any bricks that are out there and are actually usable are post 1990 or even later unless they come as a sealed legacy set. I would also argue that since they were only available in the classic mainstream colors they have long been mingled and replaced so many times that the appearance of a 1980s brick in a random lot would be like finding a gold nugget. People have used those bricks and regardless of whether they simply became unusable or people dumped them when they cleaned house there should be very few still in circulation. Mylenium

I'm not @evank, apparently, but I can give you my take: Yes, it's theft, morally and legally. Most people never agreed to have their images scanned for that purpose and just because you already have certain data doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. A lot of that is a clear violation of the GDPR and other rules here in Europe. The companies just seem to get away with it because they're to big and have all the resources in the world to fight this legally and on the other side authorities and lawmakers are working way too slowly. The more important part, though, is that those companies don't pay any of the creators or they pay scraps while at the same time making billions off other people's work. It's nothing new, however. Facebook and Google refusing to pay publishers for showing news articles just because they are supposed to pay a few pennies is another example of this. Another aspect to consider is that the financial damage is not just the immediate loss of compensation for something you already have created, but there's more prospective losses due to people just using the generative A.I. instead of coming directly back to the original creator. I think in particular if that getting paid for your work part would be handled better creators would not be as pissed... Point in case: It's a problem of the abusive practices of those controlling the A.I., not that A.I. exists per se. Mylenium

A.I. doesn't "take over" nor is it going to kill every job. It's one of those weird misconceptions people seem to have. Since @evank apparently is some sort of tech doc/ scientific writer, often dealing with the latest shiz that hasn't been written down before, how would any algorithm even know what to write? It still needs the human input a.k.a. in Newspeak a "prompt writer". The A.I. would merely be an assistant to find nice words, check grammar and spelling, format the text nicely, generate a synopsis/ abstract, do the indexing and whatnot. A large part of A.I. is going to work this way and will require some guidance. Maybe not an awful lot and maybe not all the time, but every now and then there's going to be some sort of intervention akin to how you have team meetings in a company to steer direction. Mylenium

The criteria themselves should be simple enough, but I doubt you would be able to e.g. develop a whole static structural analysis A.I. on top of your actual model building A.I.. I could see it working if "A.I. as a service" becomes a thing and Autodesk or another CAD provider offer such tools, but otherwise you could probably spend years just finishing the foundations before you even get to train your A.I., much less get any results out of it. sorry to be so pessimistic, but I see complication stacked on complication and it is not making it easier to be convinced about the benefits of an A.I. for LEGO designs. ;-) Mylenium Exactly. At this point I don't care if the OP is just spam seeding and pre-registering accounts, if it's a researcher anonymously collecting opinions or some commercial player having fun with our views on A.I. in the hopes of one day selling us something. Mylenium

Yes/ No/ Perhaps. I'm decidedly undecided on the matter. As I wrote, the unexpected results an A.I. may produce can be inspiring. At the same time I do agree that so far we do not have a genuinely "creative" A.I.. It's all based on statistical models and algorithms and there's a lot of built-in bias due to the training data already being biased an often not as comprehensive as it should be. You can learn artsy stuff at art school or uni. Color theory, image composition, design principles are all long explored and written down. If a human can be taught these things, then so can be an A.I.. It just doesn't say anything about how good of an artist you are. You can study these things for years and be a mediocre designer and at the same time you must not have studied at all and can be a great artist merely based on your intuition and experience. That is the real distinction. That said, not everything needs to be "art", especially in a commercial context. A lot of design work is just implementing basic ideas and then chewing through it. LEGO could just as well intentionally hire certain mid-tier designers that may never produce something outstanding, but are just right for this type of work. Why then should an A.I. not producing a Mona Lisa level "art" every time be a hinderance to not use it? You get too strung up on some specifics and ultimately I feel you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how even those concept artists work or for that matter a considerable part of the creative industries. You are also wrongly assuming that creatives are just dying to take every shitty job just so they can tell the world how great they are. I can think of lots of stuff I would gladly turn over to an A.I. if it freed me up to focus on my other work that's really important to me. At least I don't enjoy fixing botched wedding photos or other such nonsense. And even if you wanted to just talk about "concept artists" in the strictest meaning of the word - why should it matter? You can throw away 300 hand-drawn sketches, you can throw away 300 A.I. generated drawings and you can throw away hundreds of steps inbetween based on a hybrid approach of drawing, Photoshop work and A.I.. None of that is a statement of quality or artfulness, it just means that none of those sketches were the right ones for a given job. All the same even a human artist might not be upset if an A.I. wins because it still could mean he gets to work on the concept and refine it until it is actually ready for production. See above. Not every task is worth chasing. And it's even kinda funny to even mention Photoshop as a positive. Back in the day traditional artists also thought it would be the end of the world, but ultimately things merely have changed and the process has been democratized. Yes, there will be people on the losing side of A.I. and it will suck for them, but it's not the end of the world. It's also a wrong assumption that people who never had an interest in being creative will suddenly swarm to A.I. and steal other people's job. Likewise, those corporate boneheads raving about A.I. will soon enough realize that they still need humans. Things just will be different and people will have different jobs than they have now. Mylenium

The current ratio is something like 10% to 90% and that's IMO not feasible in the long term. Sorting out those 90% trash would consume much more resources than producing the actual result. Even ChatGPT or those image generating A.I.s are pretty bad, they just filter out a lot of stuff already. LEGO being a quantized system with tons of extra constraints would probably be even worse. Such things tend to be a lot tougher to crack from a mere math point of view. Again, I remain skeptical we'll see anything really usable soon that reaches the level of even a mediocre MOC design. Mylenium

But how many actual models are out there, including LEGO's competitors and MOCs? Arguably an infinite number, but at the same time not enough. A considerable part won't even be available digitally. And even if you assume there would be enough digital models to train an A.I., you'd have to vet them beforehand or else the old "Garbage in, garbage out." bites you in the butt. Unless someoen already has been working on this for the last three years or so I don't expect any results soon. Mylenium Not really a point with a brick design, don't you think? How real is real? Even the best models are just simplified approximations. Not too big a concern. The process would be limited to a pre-defined pool of pieces and you could even restrict the number of uses per element time. That could be part of the algorithm or a secondary process based on its own A.I.. Again, not really an issue. Engineers do it all the time already for "real" objects and machines in their CAD programs. Same as above - it could be an extra step or algorithm that communicates with the main A.I. and provides optimization data or ditches models that don't meet certain requirements. We can agree on that one. Current A.I. wastes a lot of time and resources for unusable results and for a complex system like a LEGO model that would be exorbitant. You could let an A.I. run for days and have it spewing out model after model and none of it could be anywhere close to what you expected. Mylenium

Allow me to disagree with your disagreement. Yes, there are serious legal and ethical issues, but where ideation is concerned (that's what we folks in the creative business call it), A.I. can be a source of inspiration. An A.I. doesn't care whether it's been trained in "good taste" or academic rules of whatever trade and that can be an advantage. It's like your mind going off in a dream and coming up with the wildest ideas. I've seen stuff generated by A.I. that I never would have thought of myself and as much as I may not like stealing other people's content, at least to that end A.I. can be a useful tool. I may re-create the image using my own methodology and refine it based on my artsy background, but it doesn't change the fact that it was inspired by something that I saw elsewhere. And that is kind of the point: At the end of the day, why should it matter whether I draw inspiration from a "real" photo, something I see in my own environment or a synthetically generated image? I feel you cannot dismiss A.I. in that regard. Whether in the end it's worth it to sift through thousands of generated images to find the right one or start from scratch with old-fashioned R & D, as you put it, is an entirely different question. Mylenium

Well, so you are a click worker who's telling some A.I. we haven't yet heard about how those hundreds of elements go together with each other in infinite combinations? Congratulations! You're my hero! Snarky comments aside, people just seem to completely not understand how current A.I. models work and just jump on the hype train. Yes, it's here to stay and we can argue over whether it's going to be years, decades or just a few months, but for now I'm firmly convinced that it's still a ways off. This is a whole different discipline than generating an image based on a few billion scanned other images and applying a style transfer algorithm or other such "simple" use cases. Mylenium

Minifigures to some degree perhaps yes if we're talking color combinations and prints, sets definitely no. The details would require an endlessly long explanation, but suffice it to say that all current A.I. models just aren't there yet. This is going to take years before we even come close to what an experienced designer can do. Mylenium

The ruling is preliminary and if HA are smart, they would attempt to nullify or overturn that part at least. Damages are awarded by the judges/ case handlers. It's not that LEGO can just grab the money. Chances are they would still have to prove that actual damage was done in court for everyone on those lists they demand be handed over. The damages could also turn out a lot smaller e.g. based on the actual number of pieces affected in a set, not an abstract estimate. That's how it's typically and sensibly handled in European courts. Hard to say, though. Mylenium We can agree on that. But apparently LEGO doesn't care as long as they make money hand over fist. Our little bubble world here is just too insignificant and doesn't have an impact on where the real business happens. By that I don't even mean the train community or Eurobricks specifically, but the larger AFOL community. It just doesn't matter to them. Mylenium

The legal system isn't "fair" in that sense and LEGO's own claims of "fair play" apparently don't mean much when they feel threatened. Yes, it's nice to be informed that you may get steamrollered by someone, but it's not really a procedural requirement. And even if you do it, it's pretty much arbitrary. You can claim the moon, but you only find out in court whether that is true if you actually sue. ;-) Mylenium

Sure, but c'mon... A specialized little shop that even I didn't know about half an hour ago before I picked up the news on Promobricks.de? Sounds like they are seriously overdoing it. Other options were on the table and all of the alleged issues probably could have been fixed easily in a few months and paying some punitive damages for the sins of the past. Mylenium But they might at some point, unlikely as it is. I do get their point on that part. Mylenium

That's the crux, isn't it? Mylenium

They wouldn't have to. C&Ds are always optional and their legal leverage is debatable in most cases, anyway. It's one of those grey areas where half the time the underlying conflict still ends up in court, especially when a lot of money is involved. The rest of the matter is just typical LEGO. They just love to go nuclear when other options clearly were on the table... Mylenium

Magical numbers or magical thinking in general are considered one way of coercive control and conspiratorial thinking, so I wouldn't put too much stock in it. Of course we all have those moments, but it's driven by the cultural background a lot and different numbers mean different things in different parts of the world or to different people. Given how much LEGO are trying to be a crowdpleaser and not step on anyone's toes I'd consider it unlikely that they would consciously mess with that. The company could be run by the dark lord himself, if you get my meaning, but they'd still try to play nice to the outside world. ;-) Mylenium

I once had a Dark Azure 4 x 2 L-shaped liftarm in a set that wasn't even supposed to have any Technic pieces. I'm pretty sure I also had a few other smaller surplus pieces like 1x1 and 1x2 plates that weren't meant to be left over beyond the usual extras. Other than that I had number of wrong parts that I had to replace like getting two left-handed wedges when there should be a matching left and right pair. It still happens and doesn't always make sense. Mylenium

There are industrial inkjet printers that can "spit on color from a distance", but I doubt you'd find one that can specifically handle UV printing on LEGO pieces. I'd therefore go with @Aanchir's advice and try to airbrush it. These days high precision stencils are easy enough to produce in a multitude of ways with mechanical plotters/ cutters, laser cutters or even 3D printers, including elastic materials if necessary, so it would not be that difficult beyond figuring out the actual patterns and how they may distort on uneven faces. For the colors I'm sure you could find matches in the scale modeling and warpainting world based on acrylics or enamels. Mylenium

Too many and at the same time also none. I don't place too much value on minifigs, but I like "cute" stuff, so I occasionally hunt down some Disney figure or something like the mushroom head from the latest collectible series. ;-) Otherwise I'm more obsessed with animals or accessories that come with some minifigs. Mylenium