By Dennis D. McDonald

There is a scene in Jean Cocteau's classic 1946 fairy tale film BEAUTY AND THE BEAST where Beauty, filling her hands with water, lets the Beast drink from her hands. It's a lovely and sensitive scene. The entire film is enchanting but this scene in particular I have always been touched by.

Since I frequently use ChatGPT's "Coloring Book Hero" bot to create coloring book pages for my grandkids, I wanted to create a scene like that for my 6 year old granddaughter.

No matter how hard I tried or revised the prompt, I could not get around ChatGPT's imposed content restrictions. Either the scene was considered too "adult" for a child (who might be “frightened”), or the software stated it was accessing a copyrighted property of some sort. This was despite my never specifically referencing Cocteau’s film in the bot.

I'm not qualified to assess how Coloring Book Hero is programmed, but I would be very interested in how such controls concerning copyrighted source materials are implemented, given continued controversies surrounding how artistic works are used in training LLM systems.

Text copyright 2024 by Dennis D. McDonald. The image at the top is a screenshot from the film’s trailer as shown on the Max streaming service.