An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit(katedowninglaw.com)
katedowninglaw.com
An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit
https://katedowninglaw.com/2023/01/26/an-ip-attorneys-reading-of-the-stable-diffusion-class-action-lawsuit/
323 comments
The LAION-5B dataset is metadata and URI pairs; all the images are publicly accessible on the Internet.
Stable Diffusion's U-Net is trained to remove noise from images in latent space, which the variational autoencoder (VAE) converts to and from pixel space. CLIP embeddings are used to improve the denoising step of the U-Net by using the correlations between human language descriptions of the pixel image to reduce latent noise. Neither the U-Net nor the VAR are trained to interpolate or reproduce images from the training set; if that happened the model would be overfitted and loss would be terrible on the validation set. The VAE is trained to produce a latent space that can accurately encode and decode any pixel image, and the U-Net is trained to remove gaussian noise from the latent space.
Stable Diffusion v2 16-bit is ~3GB of data. It was trained on hundreds of millions of images (minimum of 170M in the 512x512 step alone). That leaves a maximum of ~20 bytes per image that could conceivably be a copy, which is certainly not enough to directly reproduce either the style or contents of any individual image.
There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion. There is a semantic representation of how images are composed of varied subjects represented in the latent space and what pixel probabilities over those subjects relate to human language phrases during decoding, and finally a method to remove noise from the semantic representation, e.g. starting with a blank or random canvas and interpreting what may be there, iteratively guided by CLIP embeddings. If you give Stable Diffusion an empty CLIP embedding you get a random human-interpretable image obeying the distribution of the learned latent space.
Stable Diffusion's U-Net is trained to remove noise from images in latent space, which the variational autoencoder (VAE) converts to and from pixel space. CLIP embeddings are used to improve the denoising step of the U-Net by using the correlations between human language descriptions of the pixel image to reduce latent noise. Neither the U-Net nor the VAR are trained to interpolate or reproduce images from the training set; if that happened the model would be overfitted and loss would be terrible on the validation set. The VAE is trained to produce a latent space that can accurately encode and decode any pixel image, and the U-Net is trained to remove gaussian noise from the latent space.
Stable Diffusion v2 16-bit is ~3GB of data. It was trained on hundreds of millions of images (minimum of 170M in the 512x512 step alone). That leaves a maximum of ~20 bytes per image that could conceivably be a copy, which is certainly not enough to directly reproduce either the style or contents of any individual image.
There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion. There is a semantic representation of how images are composed of varied subjects represented in the latent space and what pixel probabilities over those subjects relate to human language phrases during decoding, and finally a method to remove noise from the semantic representation, e.g. starting with a blank or random canvas and interpreting what may be there, iteratively guided by CLIP embeddings. If you give Stable Diffusion an empty CLIP embedding you get a random human-interpretable image obeying the distribution of the learned latent space.
Afaik theoretically you could reproduce any image in the training set using the full weights (not a fraction of them) and the correct prompt. In practice since this is an extremely lossy process, some or most of them aren't reproducible. For this specific case, I suspect it'll come down to whether somebody in the class can pass a test like this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860
> There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion.
You might as well say that there's no artwork included in a .jpg, just data that can be used to recreate a piece of artwork using a carefully crafted interpreter.
You might as well say that there's no artwork included in a .jpg, just data that can be used to recreate a piece of artwork using a carefully crafted interpreter.
There's no artwork in the 1s and 0s. There's an artwork when you render it to a screen.
It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG, convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s and not the image and not ascii art of the image, just like a printing press made up of just [1] and [0] character blocks, and sell that. Yes, the 1s and 0s are mathematically derived from the image but the image of 1s and 0s is not a visual derivative of the Disney image. That is, no one is going to buy a t-shirt of 1s and 0s instead of a Mickey t-shirt. Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.
Again, anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s, so this is not at all about access. This is about putting things on t-shirts and selling them.
It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG, convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s and not the image and not ascii art of the image, just like a printing press made up of just [1] and [0] character blocks, and sell that. Yes, the 1s and 0s are mathematically derived from the image but the image of 1s and 0s is not a visual derivative of the Disney image. That is, no one is going to buy a t-shirt of 1s and 0s instead of a Mickey t-shirt. Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.
Again, anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s, so this is not at all about access. This is about putting things on t-shirts and selling them.
> It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG,
Only because of applied license.
> convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s
Yes, there is, barring context that maked it fair use (which is an exception that applies to things that would otherwise be violations), this is a fixed exact copy in an alternative form jist as much as a .zip or a lossless .png converted from the .jpg would be, and violates exclusive rights in copyright.
> Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.
That’s an argument against damages, not against it being unauthorized copying.
Only because of applied license.
> convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s
Yes, there is, barring context that maked it fair use (which is an exception that applies to things that would otherwise be violations), this is a fixed exact copy in an alternative form jist as much as a .zip or a lossless .png converted from the .jpg would be, and violates exclusive rights in copyright.
> Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.
That’s an argument against damages, not against it being unauthorized copying.
Well luckily our courts follow de minimis non curat lex and Disney's lawyers know that and are otherwise uninterested in trying cases of free speech and artistic expression.
> Only because of applied license.
Aaargh. Implied.
Aaargh. Implied.
Is there artwork included in libjpeg?
It’s deeply disingenuous to say the U-Net is not trained on the images because it’s trained on the latent representations.
Latents are a compressed representation of the source images that are fully recoverable.
If you train a model on a compressed jpg of an image, or on any deterministic transformation of it, you’re still training it on that image.
Any suggestion otherwise is only because someone is trying to put some spin on things.
> Stable Diffusion v2 16-bit is ~3GB of data. It was trained on hundreds of millions of images…
And yet! Remarkably! It can generate pictures of the Mona Lisa!
Here’s a question for you: if you encode the process of drawing an exact copy of an image, does the pure code that implements that mean you have a copy of the image in it?
Have you encoded pixels as code?
Does that mean there’s no copy of the image?
How about a zip file full of images? It’s just a high entropy binary blob right? Yet… remarkably!!! It can be transformed into images by applying an algorithm.
I don’t know the answer, but this handwavy “it couldn’t possibly encode them it’s too small” is…
Pure. Nonsense.
Of course some part of some images is embedded in the model in some form.
Stop trivialising the issue.
The issue here is: Does an algorithm that generates content infringe copyright?
Does a black box that takes the input “a picture of xxx” and a seed and outputs a copyrighted image infringe?
You know that’s possible. Don’t dodge. Technical details about oh “it couldn’t possibly have…” are pure rubbish.
Sure it could. It could have a full resolution copy of a photo of the image in that black box.
Of all the training data? Probably not. But of some of it? In compressed latent form? Most definitely.
Latents are a compressed representation of the source images that are fully recoverable.
If you train a model on a compressed jpg of an image, or on any deterministic transformation of it, you’re still training it on that image.
Any suggestion otherwise is only because someone is trying to put some spin on things.
> Stable Diffusion v2 16-bit is ~3GB of data. It was trained on hundreds of millions of images…
And yet! Remarkably! It can generate pictures of the Mona Lisa!
Here’s a question for you: if you encode the process of drawing an exact copy of an image, does the pure code that implements that mean you have a copy of the image in it?
Have you encoded pixels as code?
Does that mean there’s no copy of the image?
How about a zip file full of images? It’s just a high entropy binary blob right? Yet… remarkably!!! It can be transformed into images by applying an algorithm.
I don’t know the answer, but this handwavy “it couldn’t possibly encode them it’s too small” is…
Pure. Nonsense.
Of course some part of some images is embedded in the model in some form.
Stop trivialising the issue.
The issue here is: Does an algorithm that generates content infringe copyright?
Does a black box that takes the input “a picture of xxx” and a seed and outputs a copyrighted image infringe?
You know that’s possible. Don’t dodge. Technical details about oh “it couldn’t possibly have…” are pure rubbish.
Sure it could. It could have a full resolution copy of a photo of the image in that black box.
Of all the training data? Probably not. But of some of it? In compressed latent form? Most definitely.
bullshit. There is never exact copy of Mona Lisa. All reproductions with any similarities are the same as if human artist learned to paint and do a reproduction of Mona Lisa. No copyright infringement.
Sometimes, you're just wrong.
"Image diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion have attracted significant attention due to their ability to generate high-quality synthetic images. In this work, we show that diffusion models memorize individual images from their training data and emit them at generation time. With a generate-and-filter pipeline, we extract over a thousand training examples from state-of-the-art models, ranging from photographs of individual people to trademarked company logos. We also train hundreds of diffusion models in various settings to analyze how different modeling and data decisions affect privacy. Overall, our results show that diffusion models are much less private than prior generative models such as GANs, and that mitigating these vulnerabilities may require new advances in privacy-preserving training. "
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188
"Image diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion have attracted significant attention due to their ability to generate high-quality synthetic images. In this work, we show that diffusion models memorize individual images from their training data and emit them at generation time. With a generate-and-filter pipeline, we extract over a thousand training examples from state-of-the-art models, ranging from photographs of individual people to trademarked company logos. We also train hundreds of diffusion models in various settings to analyze how different modeling and data decisions affect privacy. Overall, our results show that diffusion models are much less private than prior generative models such as GANs, and that mitigating these vulnerabilities may require new advances in privacy-preserving training. "
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188
Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties.
These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work.
If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing.
They either don’t understand how it works or they are just upset that a computer can make art as good as (or better than) they can in a fraction of the time.
All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck, but it would be great if we all could try to understand reality first.
These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work.
If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing.
They either don’t understand how it works or they are just upset that a computer can make art as good as (or better than) they can in a fraction of the time.
All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck, but it would be great if we all could try to understand reality first.
> Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data?
More pointedly, how do I keep my GPL'd code from spewing, license free, out of CodePilot?
More pointedly, how do I keep my GPL'd code from spewing, license free, out of CodePilot?
I think that's the point of this blog post: it doesn't matter if the inputs are copyrighted, it matters if the output is infringing. It appears to be almost impossible to directly recreate a source image with SD, but it seems Copilot tends to produce a single input as its output, verbatim. Copilot isn't doing "synthesis" as does SD, it's acting more like a search engine.
Look at these images:
> https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion/d...
They were prompted with the text "Mona Lisa Smile". Would you not say that they are an extremely close reproduction of the Mona Lisa, with barely any kind of synthesis?
> https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion/d...
They were prompted with the text "Mona Lisa Smile". Would you not say that they are an extremely close reproduction of the Mona Lisa, with barely any kind of synthesis?
Look at the actual Mona Lisa. None of those other images are close to being a reproduction.
I can hand paint a Mona Lisa like image that are this removed and be fine.
I can hand paint a Mona Lisa like image that are this removed and be fine.
I can virtually promise you that, if the Mona Lisa were still copyrighted, and you were to try to sell art that you painted that looked like this, the Da Vinci estate would quickly shut you down.
Plenty of cases make this not so certain: Warhol's Prince photo transofrmation (court ruled making a photographers image into clearly Warhol style was transformative enough), Blanch v Koons, Cariou vs Prince (copied photos, minor changes). If you dig through copyright cases on art, these many well be transformative enough. Plenty of other quite similar art has been ruled not infriging.
And one could also try a parody angle - make enough of these of famous art and find some angle about mocking or parodying that art, and again it may well pass copyright muster.
A court could simply rule that these images are clearly not the Mona Lisa, and, if taken as a style, could be ruled transformative, just like the above cases.
The fact is these are transformative, with a different style than the original.
And one could also try a parody angle - make enough of these of famous art and find some angle about mocking or parodying that art, and again it may well pass copyright muster.
A court could simply rule that these images are clearly not the Mona Lisa, and, if taken as a style, could be ruled transformative, just like the above cases.
The fact is these are transformative, with a different style than the original.
> If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing.
Try making a comic book with a character that looks like Mickey Mouse and see how well that goes.
Try making a comic book with a character that looks like Mickey Mouse and see how well that goes.
Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright?
> All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck
This is not a given. It's up to us and the copyright law. Real original work should be compensated appropriately unless you're proposing that we accelerate deployment of universal basic income and completely abolish copyright law.
I have a feeling you might not like the violent outcome if you effectively strip original creators of their copyright, give corporations the right to effectively generate infinite profit off the backs of their work and tell the creators (and other people whose jobs will be automated away) to pound sand when they ask how they're supposed to pay rent from now on.
> All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck
This is not a given. It's up to us and the copyright law. Real original work should be compensated appropriately unless you're proposing that we accelerate deployment of universal basic income and completely abolish copyright law.
I have a feeling you might not like the violent outcome if you effectively strip original creators of their copyright, give corporations the right to effectively generate infinite profit off the backs of their work and tell the creators (and other people whose jobs will be automated away) to pound sand when they ask how they're supposed to pay rent from now on.
Do you want to live in a future where anything 'original' an artist creates has now blocked anyone else on the planet for the next 99 years and you must pay them royalties? Because we already have Disney now and they suck quite a bit.
I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt to achieve that than with the status quo we've been following so far.
I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt to achieve that than with the status quo we've been following so far.
> Do you want to live in a future where anything 'original' an artist creates has now blocked anyone else on the planet for the next 99 years and you must pay them royalties?
No I don't want that but there's a very clear distinction between people who are truly inspired by each others' work and produce an average human output that maybe covers their bills and AI that can pump out billions of replicates per day to drown out all original work, with entirety of that value captured by some corporation.
> I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt to achieve that than with the status quo we've been following so far.
Hey, me too. But those human issues should be addressed first, not after automation is allowed to wipe out people's livelihoods. I'm not anti-AI, I'm anti-big tech that seeks to exploit billions of people's original work for their own benefit.
No I don't want that but there's a very clear distinction between people who are truly inspired by each others' work and produce an average human output that maybe covers their bills and AI that can pump out billions of replicates per day to drown out all original work, with entirety of that value captured by some corporation.
> I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt to achieve that than with the status quo we've been following so far.
Hey, me too. But those human issues should be addressed first, not after automation is allowed to wipe out people's livelihoods. I'm not anti-AI, I'm anti-big tech that seeks to exploit billions of people's original work for their own benefit.
SD is not big tech since you can run on 4gb gfxcard and opensource
> a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style
This argument is assuming its own conclusion, that such a situation must be bad. But I don't think that's necessarily true.
If somebody can make 1000 different derivatives that the public likes as much as the originals, then it must be that in whatever criteria the public is interested in, these works are just as good. If they were inferior, the public wouldn't accept them as substitutes. The fact that they are (hypothetically) accepted indicates that the public is OK with them.
For my own personal aesthetics, I would like to think that today's popular music, which is written by some combination of algorithm and committee, and produced through tools that correct the performance via autotune, quantization, etc., is inferior to the music that I enjoy. But given that the public seems to like this music (and indeed, they like music generated this way even though it's not even cheaper for them to consume) seems to say that we as a society are getting what they want, and who am I to put a normative judgment on that?
This argument is assuming its own conclusion, that such a situation must be bad. But I don't think that's necessarily true.
If somebody can make 1000 different derivatives that the public likes as much as the originals, then it must be that in whatever criteria the public is interested in, these works are just as good. If they were inferior, the public wouldn't accept them as substitutes. The fact that they are (hypothetically) accepted indicates that the public is OK with them.
For my own personal aesthetics, I would like to think that today's popular music, which is written by some combination of algorithm and committee, and produced through tools that correct the performance via autotune, quantization, etc., is inferior to the music that I enjoy. But given that the public seems to like this music (and indeed, they like music generated this way even though it's not even cheaper for them to consume) seems to say that we as a society are getting what they want, and who am I to put a normative judgment on that?
This reduces the motivation to create art to a monetary one, and the value people derive from art to a purely aesthetic one.
In our future AI-infested world, I'll personally seek out "certified non-AI" creators because part of what inspires me is not just the content, but the creation of it.
Art is not just a destination.
In our future AI-infested world, I'll personally seek out "certified non-AI" creators because part of what inspires me is not just the content, but the creation of it.
Art is not just a destination.
I think when most people consume art, they're really treating it as entertainment regardless of its artistic merit.
And as I mentioned above, I think the current music industry is already there: the vast majority (by sales) of music entertainment, produced by algorithm and by a committee in order to drive sales. Despite this, in the genres I care about, at least, the volume of high-artistic-merit music (by variety) that is probably at its highest point in decades, if not ever. To be sure, this has meant that fewer artists are able to make a living purely off their music. But this is a return to the norm: the rise of the "star" in the late 20th century has been an aberration.
On the other side of the coin, AI assistance will be (I expect) a huge democratizing force. Recently we've seen computational photography enabling people to take photos of astounding quality with just their phones. And the results of machine learning is allowing artists to make huge improvements in post production as well.
I imagine that the stuff we've been seeing over the past year, with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and such technologies, will be purposed towards (among other things) tools that enable greater productivity for the serious artist, and putting the means in the hands of those who would be otherwise unable to get to table stakes. I've started working on a short story myself, using ChatGPT to help me work through some plot points.
So yeah, we'll get a lot of meritless dreck suitable only for base entertainment. But we'll also see a proliferation of art and of artists, as productivity increases and new entrants are enabled.
And as I mentioned above, I think the current music industry is already there: the vast majority (by sales) of music entertainment, produced by algorithm and by a committee in order to drive sales. Despite this, in the genres I care about, at least, the volume of high-artistic-merit music (by variety) that is probably at its highest point in decades, if not ever. To be sure, this has meant that fewer artists are able to make a living purely off their music. But this is a return to the norm: the rise of the "star" in the late 20th century has been an aberration.
On the other side of the coin, AI assistance will be (I expect) a huge democratizing force. Recently we've seen computational photography enabling people to take photos of astounding quality with just their phones. And the results of machine learning is allowing artists to make huge improvements in post production as well.
I imagine that the stuff we've been seeing over the past year, with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and such technologies, will be purposed towards (among other things) tools that enable greater productivity for the serious artist, and putting the means in the hands of those who would be otherwise unable to get to table stakes. I've started working on a short story myself, using ChatGPT to help me work through some plot points.
So yeah, we'll get a lot of meritless dreck suitable only for base entertainment. But we'll also see a proliferation of art and of artists, as productivity increases and new entrants are enabled.
The technology is coming one way or another. You can stop Stability AI but you can't stop OpenAI (Microsoft) or Google, who can afford to license training data from companies like Shutterstock. A restrictive interpretation of copyright law will just keep it in the hands of the biggest corporations.
You mean the artists who use similar brushes in photoshop and don’t know how to paint and musicians who use logic, auto tune, loop samples and don’t know how to play an instrument?
Copyright what? Someone’s brain? You can copyright a specific work or a character, but you actually want to live in a world where someone can copyright the color red with a dark black line, or the G# chord?
Real artists are going to art, and musicians are going to make music. People who do creative work do it to express themselves, their point of view or to say something.
Corporate art exist to sell you soda - I am not sure your argument lands quite like you want it to.
I am glad this is going to court, because, with my understand of how neural nets work, I fail to see how any copyright is being infringed.
Copyright what? Someone’s brain? You can copyright a specific work or a character, but you actually want to live in a world where someone can copyright the color red with a dark black line, or the G# chord?
Real artists are going to art, and musicians are going to make music. People who do creative work do it to express themselves, their point of view or to say something.
Corporate art exist to sell you soda - I am not sure your argument lands quite like you want it to.
I am glad this is going to court, because, with my understand of how neural nets work, I fail to see how any copyright is being infringed.
This is the same stupid argument that Mp3 will destroy music instead of embracing the new marketing opportunities it represents.
IMO an artist that wants their name out of the dataset is a moron. In the end , people copying an artist style over and over will just send the price of originals through the roof. This is completely obvious.
IMO an artist that wants their name out of the dataset is a moron. In the end , people copying an artist style over and over will just send the price of originals through the roof. This is completely obvious.
Just like when Napster resulted in musicians becoming super rich by selling their originals to people who found their music for free? Those things don't happen in real life.
The music industry is the biggest its ever been... so yes?
> Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright?
Yes, much in the same way that I am glad I live in a future where scribes aren't required to put text on paper: There is a massive amount of efficiency to be gained and enjoyment to reap for everyone who doesn't happen to be employed as an artist.
Yes, much in the same way that I am glad I live in a future where scribes aren't required to put text on paper: There is a massive amount of efficiency to be gained and enjoyment to reap for everyone who doesn't happen to be employed as an artist.
I'm not against efficiency improvements, but the value created by these improvements has to flow back towards the society at large in one way or another. I'm not anti-AI, I'm just arguing that artists and other creative professionals should be compensated for their work before their work is included in a for-profit ML model. That's hardly radical.
Current proposals don't have any intention of addressing that, they just silently kick the can down the road. What happens when nearly everything is automated there are no new profitable jobs that people can take on?
Current proposals don't have any intention of addressing that, they just silently kick the can down the road. What happens when nearly everything is automated there are no new profitable jobs that people can take on?
The comparison to scribes is a perfect analogy. The 'scribing' of translating the idea of painting to an actual painting is being made more efficient. The actual creativity is what the original idea is, not the skill to put it on paper.
The claim that the real value in art is in the idea rather than the execution seems to be as true as the claim that the real value in a startup is in the idea. Artists are constantly in dialogue with their tools to produce and define their idea, and to discover new ideas and capabilities along the way, in the same way the Intel head Andy Grove advised technologists to be involved in the engineering & production processes.
None of that addresses anything I've said.
It does though:
The value will flow to society via the cheap books (art). Value will also flow to authors (artists)[0] due to the facilitation of creation/distribution/replication. Where that value will come from is from the scribes (painters, sculptors, etc.)[1] whose contribution is rote.
[0]The intentional distinction here is that the value is in the conception of art, not in the execution of it in media.
[1]Imagine how much more productive Mozart or Beethoven could have been had an AI-powered orchestra existed in their time.
The value will flow to society via the cheap books (art). Value will also flow to authors (artists)[0] due to the facilitation of creation/distribution/replication. Where that value will come from is from the scribes (painters, sculptors, etc.)[1] whose contribution is rote.
[0]The intentional distinction here is that the value is in the conception of art, not in the execution of it in media.
[1]Imagine how much more productive Mozart or Beethoven could have been had an AI-powered orchestra existed in their time.
> Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright?
My creative output per minute has probably increased threefold in the last few months from incorporating these tools into my workflow. What I've been making doesn't look or sound like anything that anyone else is making.
You're going to have a really hard time using Stable Diffusion to make quirky cartoon daily desk calendars in the style of plaintiff Sarah Anderson. You're going to have a much better time if you think more like a Creative Director and have less of an idea ahead of time of what the tool is going to give you... so you can iterate, much like a painter iterates while working.
These tools require the creative agency from the artist who is using them in order to produce things that people find interesting, entertaining, valuable or otherwise meaningful so I really don't see a "corporation goes brrrrrr" doing anything other than flooding the lowest-common denominator content feed pipes on the internet contrasted with the highest quality art using these tools in incredibly transformative ways.
My creative output per minute has probably increased threefold in the last few months from incorporating these tools into my workflow. What I've been making doesn't look or sound like anything that anyone else is making.
You're going to have a really hard time using Stable Diffusion to make quirky cartoon daily desk calendars in the style of plaintiff Sarah Anderson. You're going to have a much better time if you think more like a Creative Director and have less of an idea ahead of time of what the tool is going to give you... so you can iterate, much like a painter iterates while working.
These tools require the creative agency from the artist who is using them in order to produce things that people find interesting, entertaining, valuable or otherwise meaningful so I really don't see a "corporation goes brrrrrr" doing anything other than flooding the lowest-common denominator content feed pipes on the internet contrasted with the highest quality art using these tools in incredibly transformative ways.
Just an FYI, many artists create with no financial incentive.
most artists don’t make a living off their work. Only a tiny percent do.
Sounds like an opt-out dark pattern. US law is unbelievably aggressive when it comes to issues of copyright, and makes copyright itself opt-out, i.e. everything you produce is copyrighted, and you have to license it in order to remove that automatic copyright. But when it comes to building these models to reproduce imitations of other people's work, suddenly copyright gets loosey-goosey.
Notice that it's a legal posture that implicitly condemns Copilot, which ignores explicitly formulated opt-outs in the form of licensing.
Notice that it's a legal posture that implicitly condemns Copilot, which ignores explicitly formulated opt-outs in the form of licensing.
This is not just the US, this also applies to many, many other countries.
The models are already released. They can't retroactively censor released models.
> This reads like damage control to me in an effort to temporarily silence the loudest critics.
I think it is to avoid any common law wrongs related to the publicity rights of the defendants. It seems like something that a legal team would flag as an unnecessary risk for the product. Removing their names and images from the training data doesn't impact the usefulness of the model while at the same time creating a much smaller surface area for collecting subpoenas.
I think it is to avoid any common law wrongs related to the publicity rights of the defendants. It seems like something that a legal team would flag as an unnecessary risk for the product. Removing their names and images from the training data doesn't impact the usefulness of the model while at the same time creating a much smaller surface area for collecting subpoenas.
They don't have to remove images from the training set, they're saying they're opting to do so, and using that as an argument as to why if there supposedly could be copyright infringement, they're not liable, because they allow it to be removed.
They could just as well not do anything and continue on - it's likely this case will be in defendents favor. Same as how Google can crawl the net, cache data, transform it, etc.
They could just as well not do anything and continue on - it's likely this case will be in defendents favor. Same as how Google can crawl the net, cache data, transform it, etc.
It seems highly foolish from a marketing perspective for the artist too.
I don't see how more people copying the artist style would not increase the value of originals.
A smart artist here should promote that their style is staying in the dataset. It is as good free publicity as they will ever get.
I don't see how more people copying the artist style would not increase the value of originals.
A smart artist here should promote that their style is staying in the dataset. It is as good free publicity as they will ever get.
It depends on whether or not the “style” is associated with the original artist or if the derivatives usurp the original.
e.g. Ask 10 random people who wrote the song “Hurt” and 9 out of 10 will probably say Johnny Cash.
e.g. Ask 10 random people who wrote the song “Hurt” and 9 out of 10 will probably say Johnny Cash.
It's not foolish at all. There's no value prop for an artist to advertise their work in the model as 1 of 400+ million. SD doesn't tell you anything about the art that inspired the output, no one will ever know the artists work was ever used, so this 'exposure' is as good as $0.
this isn’t quite true. i was playing around with sd, and whilst browsing styles on a site where different artists’ names were compared using the same prompt (“[artist name] painting of flowers”, for example), a particular artist’s style stood out to me. i ended up buying a print from them.
sd might not directly include this info in its outputs, but it really is free marketing for some (in fact, i suspect a lot of artists are probably flattered for being included by name in the dataset, but some are riding the waxing wave of outrage for the free media exposure)
sd might not directly include this info in its outputs, but it really is free marketing for some (in fact, i suspect a lot of artists are probably flattered for being included by name in the dataset, but some are riding the waxing wave of outrage for the free media exposure)
>"The output represents the model’s understanding of what is useful, aesthetic, pleasing, etc. and that, together with data filtering and cleaning that general image generating AI companies do,2 is what the companies consider most valuable, not the training data.3"
This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models?
No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.
This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models?
No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.
> Machines aren't people.
There's no reason why that is the significant detail. Why does it matter? If you can look at millions of images over your lifetime and faithfully reproduce famous works of art by hand, aren't you just as wrong?
There's no reason why that is the significant detail. Why does it matter? If you can look at millions of images over your lifetime and faithfully reproduce famous works of art by hand, aren't you just as wrong?
Machines can't create copyrighted works.
Setting aside the question of "is the model a derivative work", running the program cannot create a work that is copyrighted. Only humans (and not monkeys) can hold a copyright.
And thus, the questions are: "is generating a model based on the data set a derivate work" and the unasked question "is asking the model to generate a work in the style of {artist} a derivative work by the person asking the model?"
Setting aside the question of "is the model a derivative work", running the program cannot create a work that is copyrighted. Only humans (and not monkeys) can hold a copyright.
And thus, the questions are: "is generating a model based on the data set a derivate work" and the unasked question "is asking the model to generate a work in the style of {artist} a derivative work by the person asking the model?"
> Running the program cannot create a work that is copyrighted
If think you're going to need more clarity on what you mean by that. Programs are used to create copyrighted works all the time. And machines can and do create copies of other people's copyrighted works.
> And thus, the questions are: "is generating a model based on the data set a derivate work" and the unasked question "is asking the model to generate a work in the style of {artist} a derivative work by the person asking the model?"
My point is you can take the machine or model out of the question entirely. If you learn stuff and then produce something new with what you learned, is that a derivative work? That's already a complex question but it has nothing to do with how you learned it. It depends entirely on the output and has little to do with the input.
If think you're going to need more clarity on what you mean by that. Programs are used to create copyrighted works all the time. And machines can and do create copies of other people's copyrighted works.
> And thus, the questions are: "is generating a model based on the data set a derivate work" and the unasked question "is asking the model to generate a work in the style of {artist} a derivative work by the person asking the model?"
My point is you can take the machine or model out of the question entirely. If you learn stuff and then produce something new with what you learned, is that a derivative work? That's already a complex question but it has nothing to do with how you learned it. It depends entirely on the output and has little to do with the input.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off...
> The US Copyright Office has rejected a request to let an AI copyright a work of art. Last week, a three-person board reviewed a 2019 ruling against Steven Thaler, who tried to copyright a picture on behalf of an algorithm he dubbed Creativity Machine. The board found that Thaler’s AI-created image didn’t include an element of “human authorship” — a necessary standard, it said, for protection.
https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2017/05/article_0003.h...
> Creating works using artificial intelligence could have very important implications for copyright law. Traditionally, the ownership of copyright in computer-generated works was not in question because the program was merely a tool that supported the creative process, very much like a pen and paper. Creative works qualify for copyright protection if they are original, with most definitions of originality requiring a human author. Most jurisdictions, including Spain and Germany, state that only works created by a human can be protected by copyright.
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...
> 306 The Human Authorship Requirement
> The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.
> The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.
> 313.3 Works That Lack Human Authorship
> As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.
> The U.S. Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy(ies) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit.
> ...
> Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”
----
A machine cannot create a copyrighted work. The human who uses it can - and it is the human who uses the ML model to create a derivative work - not the ML model itself.
Thus any derivative work infringement from using Stable Diffusion is from the human creating the prompt doing it. This doesn't attempt to answer the "is the model itself a derivative work".
> The US Copyright Office has rejected a request to let an AI copyright a work of art. Last week, a three-person board reviewed a 2019 ruling against Steven Thaler, who tried to copyright a picture on behalf of an algorithm he dubbed Creativity Machine. The board found that Thaler’s AI-created image didn’t include an element of “human authorship” — a necessary standard, it said, for protection.
https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2017/05/article_0003.h...
> Creating works using artificial intelligence could have very important implications for copyright law. Traditionally, the ownership of copyright in computer-generated works was not in question because the program was merely a tool that supported the creative process, very much like a pen and paper. Creative works qualify for copyright protection if they are original, with most definitions of originality requiring a human author. Most jurisdictions, including Spain and Germany, state that only works created by a human can be protected by copyright.
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...
> 306 The Human Authorship Requirement
> The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.
> The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.
> 313.3 Works That Lack Human Authorship
> As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.
> The U.S. Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy(ies) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit.
> ...
> Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”
----
A machine cannot create a copyrighted work. The human who uses it can - and it is the human who uses the ML model to create a derivative work - not the ML model itself.
Thus any derivative work infringement from using Stable Diffusion is from the human creating the prompt doing it. This doesn't attempt to answer the "is the model itself a derivative work".
I guess your point was so obvious that I missed it (and that's not to belittle it -- it's a good point). Machines are both created and operated by humans for human purposes. Humans are using a machine, created by humans, to create art for human consumption.
Unoperated machines are not spontaneously creating art of their own motivation.
Unoperated machines are not spontaneously creating art of their own motivation.
And thus my take on this...
The model behind Stable Diffusion (or Dall-E) is not infringing itself. It has the latent images it, but there is nothing that you can point to that says "that number there is infringing."
It takes a human action to pull together the parts of the model and select what is right and craft the prompt. Asking for "a picture of Mickey Mouse in the style of Pixar" is all sorts of infringing - by the person asking for that.
By itself, that image isn't a problem any more than the doodle in my notebook is. The question is what the human does with the image. If they publish it or try to sell it - yes, that's a problem. If they hang it in their kids room, yes, its infringing but unless you invite a Disney lawyer over for a play date no one is going to care (this also applies to if you drew it yourself rather than instructing a program to generate it).
My (I am not a lawyer) take is that the model isn't infringing. Use of the model may be infringing, and issues of infringements should be taken up with the human who created and published it them just as if it was done by a painter drawing heavy inspiration from a style or a photographer with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night.
The model behind Stable Diffusion (or Dall-E) is not infringing itself. It has the latent images it, but there is nothing that you can point to that says "that number there is infringing."
It takes a human action to pull together the parts of the model and select what is right and craft the prompt. Asking for "a picture of Mickey Mouse in the style of Pixar" is all sorts of infringing - by the person asking for that.
By itself, that image isn't a problem any more than the doodle in my notebook is. The question is what the human does with the image. If they publish it or try to sell it - yes, that's a problem. If they hang it in their kids room, yes, its infringing but unless you invite a Disney lawyer over for a play date no one is going to care (this also applies to if you drew it yourself rather than instructing a program to generate it).
My (I am not a lawyer) take is that the model isn't infringing. Use of the model may be infringing, and issues of infringements should be taken up with the human who created and published it them just as if it was done by a painter drawing heavy inspiration from a style or a photographer with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night.
I completely agree -- that's my take as well.
They are never going to compensate the artists. It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for
I think you underestimate the scale of data these models are trained on by many orders of magnitude.
I suspect you might be able to get pretty good results by training the system on video/CGI/other images that can be easily mass produced, then fine-tuning on a much smaller number of drawings and other stylized images.
uhm. What you are proposing is compensating the artists. Those 1000 designers are the artist in question then.
> It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for
I bet that you are massively underestimating the cost of that.
> It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for
I bet that you are massively underestimating the cost of that.
I compare it to reading a big stack of comic books and then trying to create your own, painstakingly reproducing the layout, color palettes and character styles. Or listening to (eg) Pink Floyd and then making a song that really matches their music. YouTube is full of those, it's really similar to SD images. But still not the same as sampling as that requires actually duplicating parts of the original.
The reason we have copyright for a limited time is to promote the arts, not to give people a monopoly on a specific style so they can milk it. (although that is what seems to be happening)
The reason we have copyright for a limited time is to promote the arts, not to give people a monopoly on a specific style so they can milk it. (although that is what seems to be happening)
> No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.
What about a company where you submit images and it tells you which faces are in them?
What about a company where you submit images and it tells you which faces are in them?
I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement.
If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights?
It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.
If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights?
It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.
> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights?
The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that.
This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and impact of AI software. In the case of "seeing" an image, the two processes could not be any more unlike each other, both in content and context.
The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that.
This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and impact of AI software. In the case of "seeing" an image, the two processes could not be any more unlike each other, both in content and context.
The processes seem pretty alike to me (as a neuroscientist and AI researcher). Things will only move on from here, the next generation of these tools won't use a training set of 5B images and complicated month long training procedures, they will allow the "ingestion" of a style by you showing it a single instance once of a target image and it will immediately know the style (just like a human artist would).
I'm not putting any weight here on what is good or bad for society, but relying on that humans somehow work in a completely different way from where AI is and is going is not going to help.
I do think it will take longer for the AIs to know all about human contexts though, so the pairing of human AD + bulk-gen AI seems to me to be an obvious near-term tag team that's hard to beat.
I'm not putting any weight here on what is good or bad for society, but relying on that humans somehow work in a completely different way from where AI is and is going is not going to help.
I do think it will take longer for the AIs to know all about human contexts though, so the pairing of human AD + bulk-gen AI seems to me to be an obvious near-term tag team that's hard to beat.
What I meant by the content/context of processes was that one is a biological process that includes all of the context and constraints of evolution, while the other is still ultimately a man-made machine, operating with an entirely different set of constraints, ultimately at the direction of other humans.
If we could develop literal eyeballs that could look at these images and translate the information the way humans do, the resulting capability is still no more human-like (in the sense that it should be afforded some human-like status) than any other program IMO.
If we achieved AGI tomorrow, we'd still need to have a conversation about what it is allowed to "see", because our current notions about humans seeing things are all based on the constraints of human capability. Most people understand that a surveillance camera seeing something and a human seeing something have very different implications.
In the short term, it's a conflation that I'd argue makes us see less clearly about what these systems are/are not, and leads to some questionable conclusions.
In the long term, it's a whole other ball of wax that will still require either new regulations or new ways of thinking.
If we could develop literal eyeballs that could look at these images and translate the information the way humans do, the resulting capability is still no more human-like (in the sense that it should be afforded some human-like status) than any other program IMO.
If we achieved AGI tomorrow, we'd still need to have a conversation about what it is allowed to "see", because our current notions about humans seeing things are all based on the constraints of human capability. Most people understand that a surveillance camera seeing something and a human seeing something have very different implications.
In the short term, it's a conflation that I'd argue makes us see less clearly about what these systems are/are not, and leads to some questionable conclusions.
In the long term, it's a whole other ball of wax that will still require either new regulations or new ways of thinking.
I’ll be honest, this sounds like you have made a decision on your stance and now you’re building false distinctions to reinforce your own bias.
You said a lot of words, but I believe your argument comes down to “computers are super powered compared to humans doing the same thing”? Is that accurate? Because magnitude of ability, to me, makes no difference at all. It’s perfectly acceptable for a human to study the artwork of a specific person and then create their own works based on that style. Why wouldn’t it be the same for an automated process?
You said a lot of words, but I believe your argument comes down to “computers are super powered compared to humans doing the same thing”? Is that accurate? Because magnitude of ability, to me, makes no difference at all. It’s perfectly acceptable for a human to study the artwork of a specific person and then create their own works based on that style. Why wouldn’t it be the same for an automated process?
Tone aside, thanks for the feedback. It doesn't excite me to hear my comment came across that way, but I'm trying to clarify what was a misinterpretation of what I was trying to say.
> I believe your argument comes down to “computers are super powered compared to humans doing the same thing”? Is that accurate?
No, that doesn't really touch it. The speed/power disparity between humans/computers at certain tasks are certainly a factor to consider, but the more fundamental point I was trying to make is much simpler: "computers and humans are fundamentally different, so let's stop building arguments on the mis-belief that they are the same".
> Because magnitude of ability, to me, makes no difference at all.
What is your position on autonomous AI weapons? Does that position change when there's a human in the loop? If such weapons were suddenly available to everyone, would that be functionally no different than allowing people to own firearms or baseball bats?
> It’s perfectly acceptable for a human to study the artwork of a specific person and then create their own works based on that style. Why wouldn’t it be the same for an automated process?
I'd turn that question around: why would it be the same for an automated process?
It is perfectly acceptable for a human to shoot an intruder entering their home in most states if they believe their life is in danger. An AI-controlled gun would be far more effective (I wouldn't even have to wake up!), but is clearly in a different category.
Is a human sitting on a neighborhood bench in view of your house the same thing as a surveillance camera on a nearby telephone pole? I think the answers to this question are useful when looking at the emerging issues of AI, at least to orient our basic instincts about what feels ok vs. what doesn't.
The AI software has only "learned" in the sense that it has operated on the input data such that it can now provide outputs that are of convincingly high quality to make it appear to "know" what it is doing.
Whatever the similarities, such learning lacks the vast majority of the context and contents of what a humans learns by viewing the same image, such that the word "learn" means something fundamentally different in each situation.
> I believe your argument comes down to “computers are super powered compared to humans doing the same thing”? Is that accurate?
No, that doesn't really touch it. The speed/power disparity between humans/computers at certain tasks are certainly a factor to consider, but the more fundamental point I was trying to make is much simpler: "computers and humans are fundamentally different, so let's stop building arguments on the mis-belief that they are the same".
> Because magnitude of ability, to me, makes no difference at all.
What is your position on autonomous AI weapons? Does that position change when there's a human in the loop? If such weapons were suddenly available to everyone, would that be functionally no different than allowing people to own firearms or baseball bats?
> It’s perfectly acceptable for a human to study the artwork of a specific person and then create their own works based on that style. Why wouldn’t it be the same for an automated process?
I'd turn that question around: why would it be the same for an automated process?
It is perfectly acceptable for a human to shoot an intruder entering their home in most states if they believe their life is in danger. An AI-controlled gun would be far more effective (I wouldn't even have to wake up!), but is clearly in a different category.
Is a human sitting on a neighborhood bench in view of your house the same thing as a surveillance camera on a nearby telephone pole? I think the answers to this question are useful when looking at the emerging issues of AI, at least to orient our basic instincts about what feels ok vs. what doesn't.
The AI software has only "learned" in the sense that it has operated on the input data such that it can now provide outputs that are of convincingly high quality to make it appear to "know" what it is doing.
Whatever the similarities, such learning lacks the vast majority of the context and contents of what a humans learns by viewing the same image, such that the word "learn" means something fundamentally different in each situation.
> why would it be the same for an automated process?
It's perfectly acceptable for a human being to drive a a car, but driving one drunk is completely unacceptable. Conversely, there is no rule against creating or consuming art while intoxicated.
So to answer your question, because it is not a matter of life and death. Take your argument and apply it to mass produced goods that were once the realm of only skilled craftsman.
> Is a human sitting on a neighborhood bench in view of your house the same thing as a surveillance camera on a nearby telephone pole?
If a person never leaves and keeps notes, yes, it is exactly the same. I'd call the police for stalking. The issue here is privacy, which is tangential to AI reproducing the styles of known individuals.
> The AI software has only "learned" in the sense that it has operated on the input data such that it can now provide outputs that are of convincingly high quality to make it appear to "know" what it is doing.
Completely disagree with you about the nature of learning here. If a person produces art in the style of an individual, they have no idea the internal machinations of the original artist, they just "appear to 'know' what they are doing".
It's perfectly acceptable for a human being to drive a a car, but driving one drunk is completely unacceptable. Conversely, there is no rule against creating or consuming art while intoxicated.
So to answer your question, because it is not a matter of life and death. Take your argument and apply it to mass produced goods that were once the realm of only skilled craftsman.
> Is a human sitting on a neighborhood bench in view of your house the same thing as a surveillance camera on a nearby telephone pole?
If a person never leaves and keeps notes, yes, it is exactly the same. I'd call the police for stalking. The issue here is privacy, which is tangential to AI reproducing the styles of known individuals.
> The AI software has only "learned" in the sense that it has operated on the input data such that it can now provide outputs that are of convincingly high quality to make it appear to "know" what it is doing.
Completely disagree with you about the nature of learning here. If a person produces art in the style of an individual, they have no idea the internal machinations of the original artist, they just "appear to 'know' what they are doing".
> It's perfectly acceptable for a human being to drive a a car, but driving one drunk is completely unacceptable. Conversely, there is no rule against creating or consuming art while intoxicated.
You've lost me here. Are you saying that the most important factor when judging whether or not something is appropriate is based on whether or not the activity is dangerous enough to be fatal?
There are plenty of laws and cultural/ethical norms that restrict behavior for many other reasons.
> If a person never leaves and keeps notes, yes, it is exactly the same. I'd call the police for stalking.
You're arguing that a person taking notes with a pen and paper is the same as a video camera recording the same scene?
> The issue here is privacy, which is tangential to AI reproducing the styles of known individuals.
The point is that two forms of "seeing", one mechanical, and one biological, have two very different implications. If you don't believe that, ask the hypothetical person with a notebook to provide you with a 4K rendering of the scene over the last 30 days.
The AI reproducing art is just a single use case. The point of concern has little to do with how innocuous it is to produce images, but whether or not it is acceptable to use arguments about humans when judging what is or is not acceptable in an AI program.
> Completely disagree with you about the nature of learning here. If a person produces art in the style of an individual, they have no idea the internal machinations of the original artist, they just "appear to 'know' what they are doing".
Frankly, this is nonsense. We may not understand all of the underlying processes involved in learning, but we certainly know a lot more than nothing. Even if we knew literally nothing at all about the human brain, there is no standing to conclude that this lack of knowledge must imply that humans use some internal denoising algorithm when imagining what they will draw next.
We know enough to know that human processing of information is subjective, contextual, cultural, emotional, and there are a myriad of factors involved.
We know enough to know that what software like Stable Diffusion is doing looks very little like the human process for achieving a similar outcome, even if there are biologically inspired components inside.
You've lost me here. Are you saying that the most important factor when judging whether or not something is appropriate is based on whether or not the activity is dangerous enough to be fatal?
There are plenty of laws and cultural/ethical norms that restrict behavior for many other reasons.
> If a person never leaves and keeps notes, yes, it is exactly the same. I'd call the police for stalking.
You're arguing that a person taking notes with a pen and paper is the same as a video camera recording the same scene?
> The issue here is privacy, which is tangential to AI reproducing the styles of known individuals.
The point is that two forms of "seeing", one mechanical, and one biological, have two very different implications. If you don't believe that, ask the hypothetical person with a notebook to provide you with a 4K rendering of the scene over the last 30 days.
The AI reproducing art is just a single use case. The point of concern has little to do with how innocuous it is to produce images, but whether or not it is acceptable to use arguments about humans when judging what is or is not acceptable in an AI program.
> Completely disagree with you about the nature of learning here. If a person produces art in the style of an individual, they have no idea the internal machinations of the original artist, they just "appear to 'know' what they are doing".
Frankly, this is nonsense. We may not understand all of the underlying processes involved in learning, but we certainly know a lot more than nothing. Even if we knew literally nothing at all about the human brain, there is no standing to conclude that this lack of knowledge must imply that humans use some internal denoising algorithm when imagining what they will draw next.
We know enough to know that human processing of information is subjective, contextual, cultural, emotional, and there are a myriad of factors involved.
We know enough to know that what software like Stable Diffusion is doing looks very little like the human process for achieving a similar outcome, even if there are biologically inspired components inside.
What are context, culture, emotion? If you want to talk about how people do things in a mechanical sense, starting from before “thought”, no, we have no idea how it happens. You can form a model of how you think someone thinks, but the reality is you have no idea how another’s brain functions, and thing like aphantasia, autism spectrum disorders and internal monologue prove this. Different people can have very different brains.
> ask the hypothetical person with a notebook to provide you with a 4K rendering of the scene over the last 30 days.
You just seemlessly transitioned from a machine learning model to literal recording. These aren’t at all the same. In the context of your example, the person on the bench could have easily been wearing a body cam or recording with their cell phone, in certainly something they are capable of doing, so why would I treat it any different? The camera you mentioned could also be a CCTV feed with no DVR, in which case it couldn’t reproduce anything. The AI/person would be what would allow instant pattern recollection, like, “the person usually leaves in a hurry, but not on the weekends with a few exceptions” or “they usually turn lights on around X in the morning, and Y minutes after sunset”
> norms that restrict behavior for other reasons
What’s a concrete example of a tool that has been banned for other reasons. ML models like SD are tools, we usually let people use tools freely unless they can cause great bodily harm, and often even if they can.
> ask the hypothetical person with a notebook to provide you with a 4K rendering of the scene over the last 30 days.
You just seemlessly transitioned from a machine learning model to literal recording. These aren’t at all the same. In the context of your example, the person on the bench could have easily been wearing a body cam or recording with their cell phone, in certainly something they are capable of doing, so why would I treat it any different? The camera you mentioned could also be a CCTV feed with no DVR, in which case it couldn’t reproduce anything. The AI/person would be what would allow instant pattern recollection, like, “the person usually leaves in a hurry, but not on the weekends with a few exceptions” or “they usually turn lights on around X in the morning, and Y minutes after sunset”
> norms that restrict behavior for other reasons
What’s a concrete example of a tool that has been banned for other reasons. ML models like SD are tools, we usually let people use tools freely unless they can cause great bodily harm, and often even if they can.
I think you're both barking up the wrong tree. A person, and even an animal, possibly even a plant or members of other kingdoms and domains, sees. A computer does not see any more than a lens sees, or to the extreme, a computer can not see any more than an empty paper towel roll can see. The computer, lens and empty paper towel roll have no "I," no ego. In order to see, there must be something, or more accurately, someone, seeing. AI is just a complex program, which is ultimately an algorithm, and to be very simplistic, a recipe. A recipe can never be conscious, can never have a sense of self nor a sense of anything. Just because a photocopier can reproduce an image doesn't remotely mean that it or anything within it could ever see anything.
I should have known my comment was doomed for downvoting. Many coders here. Many among them believe Strong AI is attainable. Everyone has self-bias, tends to believe their beliefs are correct and true. Anyone that believes Strong AI is attainable will evaluate that belief as correct, even with insurmountable evidence to the contrary. It is not a deficiency of programming that Strong AI will never be achieved, rather, it is an insurmountable problem of philosophy. No one takes philosophy seriously except philosophers. Coders, by and large a large percentage of them, because they are creators, often take themselves too seriously, and going right along with that is their beliefs, which they find near impossible to relinquish, even when it is shown beyond doubt their beliefs are not realistic. Strong AI can never be attained due to what computers are and the way computers work, and also what code is and how code works. This is not to say striving for Strong AI is a bad idea, because it isn't. Great things will come from that struggle, just not Strong AI.
No one knows why we are conscious. We have sliced the brain up a thousand ways and we will slice it up a million more and will never find consciousness because it is an emergent property of healthy brain, just like light is an emergent property of a working light bulb. No matter how you disassemble a light bulb, you will never find the light, though I grant you'll eventually figure out how light is produced, the assumption that a light bulb contains light is wrong headed. It's just a metaphor.
There is no worse slander than the truth: Strong AI can not be achieved, not with digital computers and programming and machine learning, and most likely by no other method either. Please, please grow up, and set aside your childish beliefs, because we need you now more than ever, here, in the real world.
No one knows why we are conscious. We have sliced the brain up a thousand ways and we will slice it up a million more and will never find consciousness because it is an emergent property of healthy brain, just like light is an emergent property of a working light bulb. No matter how you disassemble a light bulb, you will never find the light, though I grant you'll eventually figure out how light is produced, the assumption that a light bulb contains light is wrong headed. It's just a metaphor.
There is no worse slander than the truth: Strong AI can not be achieved, not with digital computers and programming and machine learning, and most likely by no other method either. Please, please grow up, and set aside your childish beliefs, because we need you now more than ever, here, in the real world.
I didn’t downvote you(tbh I don’t even know how to downvote). But I didn’t respond to you because I don’t understand the relevance of what you are saying. You said we’re both wrong and then went on to talk about how inanimate objects can’t see? It just doesn’t make sense to me what you’re trying to say.
The crux of it is that it is a false assumption, or more accurately a wrong headed assumption, to suggest that Stable Diffusion sees anything or to equate or compare what Stable Diffusion does do with biological sight. Only an individual, whether that be a person, animal, plant, etc., can see. A program, no matter how complex, no matter how advanced its hardware, will never be an individual, an ego, something that sees. It can only mimic and fool us into believing something there is seeing, but we should know better.
Now hold on a second. You seem very certain of "individual", what it is, and what it is not. I am not so sure that we're not actually creating an individual here or at least parts of an individual as snapshots of qualia and being able to recall or "hallucinate" them. Does no amount of mimicry bring a program closer to an individual? What if we made a really clever model that learns on the fly via constant streams of qualia and adapts as best as it can and it could do all of the things you could do, maybe not very well, or only to the same level as a service animal; is that any closer to an individual? I believe it is way more of a spectrum than the binary "will never be an individual".
Regardless of the details of how a brain is a conscious, it can be reduced to its constituent pieces or nuts and bolts, so to speak. Everything from the electrochemical potentials within neurons to the encoded chemical information in the form of DNA and RNA that spontaneously replicates and orchestrates a maddening array of complexities, we can partially explain. Even if our explanation is basically parts in a bucket, that's enough to paint a future where humanity understands enough of those processes to replicate consciousness without actually understanding why it works. Perhaps we don't need to understand the emergent properties, but merely discover them like the standard model in physics. We equally can't explain /why/ the fundamental physics constants are the way they are, but we can use them to do extraordinary things.
Regardless of the details of how a brain is a conscious, it can be reduced to its constituent pieces or nuts and bolts, so to speak. Everything from the electrochemical potentials within neurons to the encoded chemical information in the form of DNA and RNA that spontaneously replicates and orchestrates a maddening array of complexities, we can partially explain. Even if our explanation is basically parts in a bucket, that's enough to paint a future where humanity understands enough of those processes to replicate consciousness without actually understanding why it works. Perhaps we don't need to understand the emergent properties, but merely discover them like the standard model in physics. We equally can't explain /why/ the fundamental physics constants are the way they are, but we can use them to do extraordinary things.
I sure hope you're wrong, because what you're describing is terrifying and horrendously cruel.
Well said.
If you place a human and a computer in front of a painting. A human seeing the painting is a consequence of biology. A computer seeing the painting is a consequence of design.
There's always a distinction between happenstance and premeditation.
If you place a human and a computer in front of a painting. A human seeing the painting is a consequence of biology. A computer seeing the painting is a consequence of design.
There's always a distinction between happenstance and premeditation.
I find this take interesting. So would you also argue that saving an image into computer memory is the same as memorizing an image for a human? Those processes are viewed very different by the law, but if we anthropomorphize computers should we not view them the same?
Also I wonder where you get the view that future ML systems will not require large amounts of learning? I don't see any development in current systems that would allow that, or do you mean you have a network trained on large amounts of data which can then adjust to a style from a single image? If that's the case we are still at the same question, how was the original model trained.
Also I wonder where you get the view that future ML systems will not require large amounts of learning? I don't see any development in current systems that would allow that, or do you mean you have a network trained on large amounts of data which can then adjust to a style from a single image? If that's the case we are still at the same question, how was the original model trained.
> Those processes are viewed very different by the law, but if we anthropomorphize computers should we not view them the same?
Not only do I think the two processes are essentially the same, but I can't think of any laws in my jurisdiction (the UK) which actually distinguish between them.
E.g. we are allowed to make copies of digital media for personal use.
Not only do I think the two processes are essentially the same, but I can't think of any laws in my jurisdiction (the UK) which actually distinguish between them.
E.g. we are allowed to make copies of digital media for personal use.
I didn't realize it's OK to record a film in a theater in the UK
I'm actually not sure about that. It's certainly against the terms of the theatre, but assuming you are only using the recording for personal use, I'm not sure if you would be breaking any laws.
For the second question, yeah exactly, as long as you've trained the rest of the system to a certain degree you can certainly do one-shot training on top of that now already for object recognition for example and you would be able to do it for style acquisition for diffusion models as well soon I think (you can already pretty quickly do overfit training on them, at home, in a couple of minutes with 10-20 images).
Essentially this is what the brain does when you do oneshot learning of traffic signs or characters when learning a new alphabet etc. (yeah sometimes it's not that easy but still it's "theoretically" possible :). The rest of the recognition pipeline is so general that styles and objects etc are just a small icing on the cake to learn on top, you don't need to retrain all the areas of the brain when adding a roadsign to your driving skill set.
But my point was that you could train the rest of the network on more general public data and not greg rutkowski. Hooray. Then someone shows it a single greg image and you're back to square 0.
Essentially this is what the brain does when you do oneshot learning of traffic signs or characters when learning a new alphabet etc. (yeah sometimes it's not that easy but still it's "theoretically" possible :). The rest of the recognition pipeline is so general that styles and objects etc are just a small icing on the cake to learn on top, you don't need to retrain all the areas of the brain when adding a roadsign to your driving skill set.
But my point was that you could train the rest of the network on more general public data and not greg rutkowski. Hooray. Then someone shows it a single greg image and you're back to square 0.
This anthropomorphization happens all the time in the other direction: Software actors are seen reading license plates, wiretapping connections, checking speed limits and red light compliance, monitoring uploads for copyright infringement, issuing takedowns, and otherwise acting as legal entities. Government actors are constantly allowed to do things because those rights would be afforded to an individual policeman or other human agent.
I agree that this is a dangerous fallacy. Something that legislatures and culture have agreed is fine for a human to do - limited by human scaling, memory, and skill - may not be fine for a computer to do.
I agree that this is a dangerous fallacy. Something that legislatures and culture have agreed is fine for a human to do - limited by human scaling, memory, and skill - may not be fine for a computer to do.
Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.
That characterization of computational neural networks is particularly true in any meaningful way. And being able to "correctly" anthropomorphize them is absolutely not the goal.
Computational neural networks are not models of biological brains, nor are they even attempting to be.
The basic functioning of a computational "neuron" in a neural network is at most reflective of an extreme distillation of the most fundamental concept of how a biological neuron works. And it really is just their functioning - ie executing.
The most important parts of making a computational neural network actually give meaningful output - training - doesn't even rise to the level of being vaguely inspired by the deconstruction of the concepts behind biological functions.
So, no. They aren't models of biological brains any more than boids are models of actual birds.
As for the goals of reasonably anthropomorphizing them... you're talking pretty much full on artificial general intelligence there. I don't believe anybody is reasonably suggesting modern deep learning is even a particularly viable route there, never mind something that's an active goal.
Computational neural networks are not models of biological brains, nor are they even attempting to be.
The basic functioning of a computational "neuron" in a neural network is at most reflective of an extreme distillation of the most fundamental concept of how a biological neuron works. And it really is just their functioning - ie executing.
The most important parts of making a computational neural network actually give meaningful output - training - doesn't even rise to the level of being vaguely inspired by the deconstruction of the concepts behind biological functions.
So, no. They aren't models of biological brains any more than boids are models of actual birds.
As for the goals of reasonably anthropomorphizing them... you're talking pretty much full on artificial general intelligence there. I don't believe anybody is reasonably suggesting modern deep learning is even a particularly viable route there, never mind something that's an active goal.
The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics.
Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord.
And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.
Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord.
And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.
Any Fivr artist who get a $5 would gladly paint anything you ask them. The bulk of the paid "artistry" that's in the line of fire here is probably not the most ethical of the bunch.. Regardless, as with the status quo before, anybody who commissions or uses art in a commercial setting will have to consider the problems if they obviously plagiarise something even if it's not illegal, regardless of if a human or AI produces it, so nothing really changes for the "ethically sensitive" use-cases.
I think it's still an apples/oranges comparison.
Whether or not it is superficially similar, the barrier to entry and the upper ceiling for infringement have both drastically changed overnight.
AI is not an independent entity that has entered the game, it is (currently) a power to be wielded by anyone regardless of their background. It can only be used as ethically as the person sitting at the keyboard, who most likely does not have a sufficient understanding of the underlying systems to make an informed decision (I suspect that if using the AI software involved the end-user feeding images into the model as a prerequisite step, they might have better intuitions about how to understand the implications of the images they generate from the resulting model).
> so nothing really changes for the "ethically sensitive" use-cases.
I think the thing that changes is the whole playing field. When overnight, anyone with a recent iPhone can generate highly sophisticated art/images with no artistic practice/training, it seems hard to argue that nothing has changed.
Before AI, even with the constraints of human capability, the art world was full of stories of stealing and bad behavior. Some blatant, some ethically questionable but thought provoking, etc. For all of their promise, the tools at hand have the ability to grow that kind of misuse at unprecedented scale.
What it even means to exist in an "ethically sensitive" framework likely needs to change. Or at the very least, current thinking needs to be examined to determine if it still makes sense in light of these new tools.
Whether or not it is superficially similar, the barrier to entry and the upper ceiling for infringement have both drastically changed overnight.
AI is not an independent entity that has entered the game, it is (currently) a power to be wielded by anyone regardless of their background. It can only be used as ethically as the person sitting at the keyboard, who most likely does not have a sufficient understanding of the underlying systems to make an informed decision (I suspect that if using the AI software involved the end-user feeding images into the model as a prerequisite step, they might have better intuitions about how to understand the implications of the images they generate from the resulting model).
> so nothing really changes for the "ethically sensitive" use-cases.
I think the thing that changes is the whole playing field. When overnight, anyone with a recent iPhone can generate highly sophisticated art/images with no artistic practice/training, it seems hard to argue that nothing has changed.
Before AI, even with the constraints of human capability, the art world was full of stories of stealing and bad behavior. Some blatant, some ethically questionable but thought provoking, etc. For all of their promise, the tools at hand have the ability to grow that kind of misuse at unprecedented scale.
What it even means to exist in an "ethically sensitive" framework likely needs to change. Or at the very least, current thinking needs to be examined to determine if it still makes sense in light of these new tools.
Yeah, I do agree with you on these points. What to do about it though, if anything... I'm fairly liberal personally, and I guess this is where pure political subjective desires will come into play. In the US you'd trust people to wield semi-automatic weapons on the streets but you wouldn't trust them to run a program that generates anime furry images of their favorite characters? Granted that was an extreme example but still :)
I humbly suggest you are committing the fallacy of anthropomorphizing humans. What's your definition of consciousness? How do you know that a (sufficiently complex) biologically inspired computer program doesn't have it? What's special about meat?
> I humbly suggest you are committing the fallacy of anthropomorphizing humans.
Considering the definition of that word, may I ask what you're trying to say?
> What's your definition of consciousness?
I like Thomas Nagel's:
"A creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like” to be this creature; an event is consciously perceived if there is “something that it is like” to perceive it. Whatever else consciousness may or may not be in physical terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is first and foremost a matter of subjective experience. Either the lights are on, or they are not."
It is because of this subjectivity that I find it problematic to give weight to arguments that equate human consciousness with machine consciousness. Even if we achieve AGI tomorrow, and even if we know with certainty that it is conscious, it does not automatically follow that we would apply the same frameworks to a newly conscious entity on the basis of consciousness alone.
Consciousness and the implications of that consciousness can vary drastically, e.g. no one wants to be in the same room when the sleeping grizzly bear wakes up.
> How do you know that a (sufficiently complex) biologically inspired computer program doesn't have it?
I think we will eventually have to take this question seriously, but current systems do not seem to approach the levels of complexity required. But taking this seriously is not at odds with the belief that current AI programs are nowhere close to the level of complexity we associate with conscious creatures.
> What's special about meat?
I think this is the question that many scientists and researchers would love to answer.
There are some lines of thinking that consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex biological system with a sufficiently complex nexus of computation to make sense of those systems. In this line of thinking, the experiential aspect of consciousness - e.g. "what it's like to feel pain" - is just as critical to the overall experience as the raw computation capabilities in the brain.
Maybe meat isn't special at all, and consciousness springs from some other source or confluence. Even if it does, we then need to have a conversation about whether consciousness is the great equalizer, or if the "kind" of consciousness also plays a role.
Going back to that grizzly bear, no one wants to be there when it wakes up, but neither do we hold the bear to human standards of value. If the bear kills someone, we don't ascribe to it titles like "murderer".
But again, even if biology is not a key component, I still don't believe arguments about consciousness can be used as a basis for the ethics of the current generation of tools, which are far too primitive relatively speaking.
Considering the definition of that word, may I ask what you're trying to say?
> What's your definition of consciousness?
I like Thomas Nagel's:
"A creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like” to be this creature; an event is consciously perceived if there is “something that it is like” to perceive it. Whatever else consciousness may or may not be in physical terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is first and foremost a matter of subjective experience. Either the lights are on, or they are not."
It is because of this subjectivity that I find it problematic to give weight to arguments that equate human consciousness with machine consciousness. Even if we achieve AGI tomorrow, and even if we know with certainty that it is conscious, it does not automatically follow that we would apply the same frameworks to a newly conscious entity on the basis of consciousness alone.
Consciousness and the implications of that consciousness can vary drastically, e.g. no one wants to be in the same room when the sleeping grizzly bear wakes up.
> How do you know that a (sufficiently complex) biologically inspired computer program doesn't have it?
I think we will eventually have to take this question seriously, but current systems do not seem to approach the levels of complexity required. But taking this seriously is not at odds with the belief that current AI programs are nowhere close to the level of complexity we associate with conscious creatures.
> What's special about meat?
I think this is the question that many scientists and researchers would love to answer.
There are some lines of thinking that consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex biological system with a sufficiently complex nexus of computation to make sense of those systems. In this line of thinking, the experiential aspect of consciousness - e.g. "what it's like to feel pain" - is just as critical to the overall experience as the raw computation capabilities in the brain.
Maybe meat isn't special at all, and consciousness springs from some other source or confluence. Even if it does, we then need to have a conversation about whether consciousness is the great equalizer, or if the "kind" of consciousness also plays a role.
Going back to that grizzly bear, no one wants to be there when it wakes up, but neither do we hold the bear to human standards of value. If the bear kills someone, we don't ascribe to it titles like "murderer".
But again, even if biology is not a key component, I still don't believe arguments about consciousness can be used as a basis for the ethics of the current generation of tools, which are far too primitive relatively speaking.
Modern neural networks as used in language diffusion models have absolutely nothing to do with biological brains. That was just a vision of the early pioneers 70 years ago.
>> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights?
If I read Harry Potter, then turn around a write a book about a wizard with a z-shaped scar? Who works at a school for wizards? With a pet owl? Who is an orphan? At some point I have started to violate intellectual property rules. (Ignoring all the Harry Potter material that was itself lifted from prior public domain art.)
AI systems aren't just reading, they are generating material based on the stuff they have read. They and the people controlling them have to abide the copyright rules just like any other "author".
If I read Harry Potter, then turn around a write a book about a wizard with a z-shaped scar? Who works at a school for wizards? With a pet owl? Who is an orphan? At some point I have started to violate intellectual property rules. (Ignoring all the Harry Potter material that was itself lifted from prior public domain art.)
AI systems aren't just reading, they are generating material based on the stuff they have read. They and the people controlling them have to abide the copyright rules just like any other "author".
Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time. I really don't see how it is fundamentally different. Most of Harry Potter is derivative of previous fantasy work itself. Nothing is made in a vacuum.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool
Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time.
The flaw in this argument is the word "artist". If you remove all the pictures from the data source, the AI isnt capable of generating anything. Because it's not an artist.
The flaw in this argument is the word "artist". If you remove all the pictures from the data source, the AI isnt capable of generating anything. Because it's not an artist.
Can a human "generate anything" beyond what essentially equates to random noise if they have never had any sensory input? Comparing a "trained" human brain with a "newborn" model seems strange if we actually want to delineate between what is and isn't art.
Ignoring the straw man argument here yes actually there are plenty of examples of individuals with no outside influence of art styles or references creating artworks. It's called outside art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
First, it would be great for you to explain how it is a strawman argument. In my eyes the strawman is comparing one system which has had years of training data and time with a system that has a rough structure, but misses everything beyond it. You'd have to at least give them comparable amounts of training data. Even a newly born baby has already had some sensory inputs in the womb, and starts to have a LOT afterwards.
Second, your Outsider Art is something completely different, funnily enough a strawman. Surely you're not claiming that the creators of outside art have literally never had any sensory input in their lives? Or do you really think that one painter in two timelines, in one blind and in the other not, would paint exactly the same stuff?
Second, your Outsider Art is something completely different, funnily enough a strawman. Surely you're not claiming that the creators of outside art have literally never had any sensory input in their lives? Or do you really think that one painter in two timelines, in one blind and in the other not, would paint exactly the same stuff?
So if you were born blind, you can draw pictures?
I can assure you I absolutely could. Myself to start with - and possibly better than you could :)
Only a bodyless, artificial brain cant draw anything, blind.
Only a bodyless, artificial brain cant draw anything, blind.
Citation needed :)
But Rowling knew enough to pull from prior public domain works, not other recent authors. Wizard schools are public domain. An AI author would have to know which they are allowed to use, which they can use under fair use, and which they must ask to use. Humans can do that. I am doing that right now as I use the "Harry Potter" trademark here while posting to HN without the owner's permission. AI systems scraping the internet cannot understand that needed nuance.
Not everything JK pulled from is out of copyright. But generally Authors are allowed to reuse all sorts of things. Compare say Battle Royale to the Hunger Games. Writing a story about Kids fighting to the death doesn't give you a monopoly on that storyline.
See this link, lots of recent works in there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_an...
See this link, lots of recent works in there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_an...
Generally speaking though, any work created by such models does not copy any original work closely at all. Of course there could be slip-ups, but the same could be said of human generated works, which violate fair use on a regular basis.
And copyright law deals with the difference between inspiration and copying. To vastly oversimply it, it depends how close the original is to alleged copy.
No reason you can't apply that framework to AI.
Where AI might get into more trouble is that you might be able show literal copying in a way that it's impossible to do in a person mind. Like saving chunks of a work into its model.
No reason you can't apply that framework to AI.
Where AI might get into more trouble is that you might be able show literal copying in a way that it's impossible to do in a person mind. Like saving chunks of a work into its model.
Yes and when the derived things are very similar to the original and people feel wronged, they sue and judgements come from the court.
Now if you are the company selling this product, how many people are feeling wronged and will sue - that's the class action part?
If you use the product to generate an image that is very similar to someone's art and they feel wronged and sue, would you still use it commercially?
Now if you are the company selling this product, how many people are feeling wronged and will sue - that's the class action part?
If you use the product to generate an image that is very similar to someone's art and they feel wronged and sue, would you still use it commercially?
Humans aren't just reading, we're constantly updating our brains neural nets. Both the AI system and brains may be capable of writing a copyright infringing rip off of Harry Potter, but the ability to do so isn't infringement only actually doing so.
That wasn't the question. The question was if the learning process itself is violating any existing copyright laws.
That was part of the question, but it was immediately followed with a suggestion that things need to be virtually identical to be copyright violating.
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> I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement.
Look at the extreme case, then. What if that one image is your only input, and your output is identical to it? What if your output is your input reflected over the x-axis? What if your output just crops the input? What if your output is your input cut into irregular pieces and randomly rearranged? Which outputs violate copyright?
Slightly less extreme: suppose your input is two images, and your output is those two images next to each other in a single image? Or your output is the second image, reduced in size and placed in the center of the first? What if both of the inputs are human figures, and your output is to cut out the face and hands of one image and put it onto the other?
> images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it.
Only one of these outputs are anything a counterfeiter would do. Are any of the others copyright-violating?
Look at the extreme case, then. What if that one image is your only input, and your output is identical to it? What if your output is your input reflected over the x-axis? What if your output just crops the input? What if your output is your input cut into irregular pieces and randomly rearranged? Which outputs violate copyright?
Slightly less extreme: suppose your input is two images, and your output is those two images next to each other in a single image? Or your output is the second image, reduced in size and placed in the center of the first? What if both of the inputs are human figures, and your output is to cut out the face and hands of one image and put it onto the other?
> images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it.
Only one of these outputs are anything a counterfeiter would do. Are any of the others copyright-violating?
If the input argument were true then what about apps like Adobe Lightroom.
Would they be able to use your photos for Adobe Stock without permission ?
Would they be able to use your photos for Adobe Stock without permission ?
> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights?
This isn't the kind of question that the lawyers of the defendants are going to ask the court.
They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use.
> It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.
Yeah, that's basically how the courts see it these days although for a different reason. They don't ask questions about skills or work or anything like that. They ask questions like, "is this supposed infringing work a replacement in the market for the plaintiff's work?".
The deeper questions about what the hell anyone meant by the words in the Constitution about Copyright wait for the highest courts to get involved, which is where we got this nice division between tools and what the tools are used for which allows for innovative fair use of copying other people's protected works with tools like VCRs, online book search and large language models.
This isn't the kind of question that the lawyers of the defendants are going to ask the court.
They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use.
> It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.
Yeah, that's basically how the courts see it these days although for a different reason. They don't ask questions about skills or work or anything like that. They ask questions like, "is this supposed infringing work a replacement in the market for the plaintiff's work?".
The deeper questions about what the hell anyone meant by the words in the Constitution about Copyright wait for the highest courts to get involved, which is where we got this nice division between tools and what the tools are used for which allows for innovative fair use of copying other people's protected works with tools like VCRs, online book search and large language models.
> They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use.
Those were not cases about 'generators' but about 'aggregators', a completely different class of application.
Those were not cases about 'generators' but about 'aggregators', a completely different class of application.
There's no existing legal doctrine around "generators" and "aggregators" but there is around "commercially significant non-infringing use". Something like what you're saying would need to be established by the higher courts.
Of course there is. You can't infringe without publishing a work and to pass off the work of others as a new creation because it has been shredded and then sewn back together again .
Those cases hinged on republishing works or significant parts of works as themselves, they weren't trying to pass them off as new, original works in their own right.
And this is exactly what this court case is about, whether or not Stable Diffusion ultimately is just another - complex - form of mechanical transformation or whether it creates original work.
In my opinion the only things all of these companies get wrong is that they (1) failed to obtain consent from the suppliers of the inputs to their models and (2) that they themselves have not contributed even a little bit of the input data.
The ultimate laugh test is whether or not these companies themselves slap (C) signs on everything and are willing to litigate when they believe their rights are the ones that are infringed upon. I hope for an outcome where opt-in will become the norm, that would seem to be a reasonable middle ground.
Finally, note that copyright is not a local concept but a global one - and has been for a long time - and that anything that happens on that front will have to ratified in a different forum than some US court.
Those cases hinged on republishing works or significant parts of works as themselves, they weren't trying to pass them off as new, original works in their own right.
And this is exactly what this court case is about, whether or not Stable Diffusion ultimately is just another - complex - form of mechanical transformation or whether it creates original work.
In my opinion the only things all of these companies get wrong is that they (1) failed to obtain consent from the suppliers of the inputs to their models and (2) that they themselves have not contributed even a little bit of the input data.
The ultimate laugh test is whether or not these companies themselves slap (C) signs on everything and are willing to litigate when they believe their rights are the ones that are infringed upon. I hope for an outcome where opt-in will become the norm, that would seem to be a reasonable middle ground.
Finally, note that copyright is not a local concept but a global one - and has been for a long time - and that anything that happens on that front will have to ratified in a different forum than some US court.
> And this is exactly what this court case is about, whether or not Stable Diffusion ultimately is just another - complex - form of mechanical transformation or whether it creates original work.
No, it's not at all. This court case is about:
Plaintiffs Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz (“Plaintiffs”), on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, bring this Class Action Complaint (the “Complaint”) against Defendants Stability AI Ltd. and Stability AI, Inc. (collectively “Stability”); Midjourney, Inc. (“Midjourney”); and DeviantArt, Inc. (“DeviantArt”) (all collectively “Defendants”) for:
1.) direct and vicarious copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501;
2.) violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201–1205 (the “DMCA”);
3.) violation of Plaintiffs’ statutory and common law rights of publicity, Cal. Civ. Code section 3344;
4.) violation of Unfair Competition law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200, et seq.;
5.) and declaratory relief.
So for each of those complaints the defense needs to establish that their actions fit a different narrative, one that is legally coherent and against the claims for damages.
So for copyright infringement they are going to go for a fair use defense. I'm sure they won't only reference VCRs and Google Books! I'm certain they won't talk about "aggregators" and "generators" because this is not a Supreme Court opinion. They're going to use the established legal doctrines. I'm sure that their lawyers have plenty of other relevant case law at their disposal.
As for DMCA and rights of publicity, this seems to be what motivated Stability AI to adhere to "takedown requests" as they probably had some lawyer whispering in their ear that they probably don't want to spend the time and money testing this in court if it doesn't really impact the marketability of their tool.
I haven't ready anything about the Unfair Competition law in California.
No, it's not at all. This court case is about:
Plaintiffs Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz (“Plaintiffs”), on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, bring this Class Action Complaint (the “Complaint”) against Defendants Stability AI Ltd. and Stability AI, Inc. (collectively “Stability”); Midjourney, Inc. (“Midjourney”); and DeviantArt, Inc. (“DeviantArt”) (all collectively “Defendants”) for:
1.) direct and vicarious copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501;
2.) violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201–1205 (the “DMCA”);
3.) violation of Plaintiffs’ statutory and common law rights of publicity, Cal. Civ. Code section 3344;
4.) violation of Unfair Competition law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200, et seq.;
5.) and declaratory relief.
So for each of those complaints the defense needs to establish that their actions fit a different narrative, one that is legally coherent and against the claims for damages.
So for copyright infringement they are going to go for a fair use defense. I'm sure they won't only reference VCRs and Google Books! I'm certain they won't talk about "aggregators" and "generators" because this is not a Supreme Court opinion. They're going to use the established legal doctrines. I'm sure that their lawyers have plenty of other relevant case law at their disposal.
As for DMCA and rights of publicity, this seems to be what motivated Stability AI to adhere to "takedown requests" as they probably had some lawyer whispering in their ear that they probably don't want to spend the time and money testing this in court if it doesn't really impact the marketability of their tool.
I haven't ready anything about the Unfair Competition law in California.
I've been the plaintiff in a case like this in Dutch court where the counterparty first tried to argue that since my code is 'visible to all' a fair use exemption should be granted, when that fell through they tried to argue that they did not take my code from my site but from another site which presumably took it from my site and which didn't have any attribution so that they were free to use it. Then that fell through too[1]. Then they were left with no defense at all and I ended up being awarded pretty much all of their online property.
Judges are far from stupid and a fair use defense requires that you primarily acknowledge that you are in fact infringing but that you feel that because it is fair use you should be allowed to continue to do so. This is a pretty risky strategy, especially when you are a party that is in the business of hosting other people's creative content.
We'll see how it all pans out, personally I think their position would be much, much stronger if they had bothered to obtain consent, even an opt-out email that if not responded to within say 3 months would count as consent (and no: obviously that's not the same but we're comparing the relative size of fig-leaves here).
As it stands I don't see how their 'fair use defense' will hold together under scrutiny without opening a much bigger can of worms.
[1] They had to admit infringement because of their first line of defense, then the fall-back required them to point at the site where they presumably took the code from which they could not. Don't interrupt your opponent when they are making mistakes.
Judges are far from stupid and a fair use defense requires that you primarily acknowledge that you are in fact infringing but that you feel that because it is fair use you should be allowed to continue to do so. This is a pretty risky strategy, especially when you are a party that is in the business of hosting other people's creative content.
We'll see how it all pans out, personally I think their position would be much, much stronger if they had bothered to obtain consent, even an opt-out email that if not responded to within say 3 months would count as consent (and no: obviously that's not the same but we're comparing the relative size of fig-leaves here).
As it stands I don't see how their 'fair use defense' will hold together under scrutiny without opening a much bigger can of worms.
[1] They had to admit infringement because of their first line of defense, then the fall-back required them to point at the site where they presumably took the code from which they could not. Don't interrupt your opponent when they are making mistakes.
What makes "commercially significant non-infringing use" such a great doctrine is that it lets there be some objective measurement of how generally useful a given practice is towards the benefit of the public good. The doctrine does this by establishing that the tool can be used for a myriad of ways that in no way directly compete with the original work in the marketplace. For example, when Stable Diffusion is being used for inpainting to remove a stranger from the background of a wedding photograph it is clear that Sarah Anderson is not being impacted in any way shape or form despite the fact that her works were temporarily copied as part of the data ingestion process.
This doctrine gives the lower courts a clear test that doesn't require diving deep into arguments about what it means for "computers to learn ideas" or for "language models to author".
The problem with an opt-in model is that it puts enough of a burden on a language model that it discourages non-infringing commercial creation. The opt-out-on-request model, which would need some form of legislation and probably informed by both the DMCA and right-to-be-forgotten in Euro area, would be preferable as it would have much less of a burden on model creators.
This doctrine gives the lower courts a clear test that doesn't require diving deep into arguments about what it means for "computers to learn ideas" or for "language models to author".
The problem with an opt-in model is that it puts enough of a burden on a language model that it discourages non-infringing commercial creation. The opt-out-on-request model, which would need some form of legislation and probably informed by both the DMCA and right-to-be-forgotten in Euro area, would be preferable as it would have much less of a burden on model creators.
Well, I didn't say that opt-out was the way to go, but that it would be better than nothing, which is what they have right now.
You seem to be making a very convoluted argument that eventually boils down to 'because it is useful it must be right', aka an argument from utility. But copyright law has time and again been proven to be highly resilient against such arguments. You either have rights or you don't and in a moment of clairvoyance the people that came up with the current incarnation decided that it is such an important thing that it gets bestowed upon creation. No registration required (though it can help). Just making something and boom you have a bunch of rights which you can only contract out of.
I don't think any utilitarian argument that results in the creation of new works based on the works of others will make those rights go away.
I've read your other comments and I see that this tool is useful to you but don't be persuaded so easily by the utility: If I stole your work and passed it off as my own it might be very useful to society, especially if I re-licensed it under more permissive terms or even placed in the public domain. But I would be clearly infringing on your rights. You may in fact not be in a position to claim these works as your creation.
The fact that 'my' work has a few hundred or even a few thousand such inputs rather than just one does not change the principle: I did not create the work, and that is the bit that really matters, unless you are creating a work it doesn't matter if you have the equivalent of a bitcoin tumbler for art at your disposal to pretend that you have created a work. You did not. The fact that you used a tool that obfuscates attribution and overrules the licensing terms of the original copyright holders does not mean that you can claim your hands are clean: you know exactly what is going on behind the scenes.
Personally I won't go within a mile of these tools to create work that I put my name under .
You seem to be making a very convoluted argument that eventually boils down to 'because it is useful it must be right', aka an argument from utility. But copyright law has time and again been proven to be highly resilient against such arguments. You either have rights or you don't and in a moment of clairvoyance the people that came up with the current incarnation decided that it is such an important thing that it gets bestowed upon creation. No registration required (though it can help). Just making something and boom you have a bunch of rights which you can only contract out of.
I don't think any utilitarian argument that results in the creation of new works based on the works of others will make those rights go away.
I've read your other comments and I see that this tool is useful to you but don't be persuaded so easily by the utility: If I stole your work and passed it off as my own it might be very useful to society, especially if I re-licensed it under more permissive terms or even placed in the public domain. But I would be clearly infringing on your rights. You may in fact not be in a position to claim these works as your creation.
The fact that 'my' work has a few hundred or even a few thousand such inputs rather than just one does not change the principle: I did not create the work, and that is the bit that really matters, unless you are creating a work it doesn't matter if you have the equivalent of a bitcoin tumbler for art at your disposal to pretend that you have created a work. You did not. The fact that you used a tool that obfuscates attribution and overrules the licensing terms of the original copyright holders does not mean that you can claim your hands are clean: you know exactly what is going on behind the scenes.
Personally I won't go within a mile of these tools to create work that I put my name under .
I’m willing to play this silly game for one reason: it’s absurd and I want you to look silly because you’ve now insulted my artistic practice as unoriginal so the gloves are off.
So I’ve used Stable Diffusion and I’m “literally” stealing from every artist. Prove it. Get a warrant to search my premises for signs of illegal language model use. How do you get a warrant with an image that has no visual evidence of being a copy?
So I’ve used Stable Diffusion and I’m “literally” stealing from every artist. Prove it. Get a warrant to search my premises for signs of illegal language model use. How do you get a warrant with an image that has no visual evidence of being a copy?
It's not silly. If you disconnect from the internet and you can no longer produce the same level of art that's all the proof that's required. Clearly you are sourcing it from somewhere, not your own brain.
I can prove to you that my writing and my code are mine because you can stand behind me and look over my shoulder to see that I am creating it, one bit (or at most 8) at the time. Visual evidence of it being a copy is not required: what's required is a track of creation aka provenance. This is a very well defined area in copyright. So the proof would be trivial: you recreate your work again, without access to Stable Diffusion or equivalent, while being monitored and if you can not then that would count as a bust in my book. If you're a good enough artist that you can do that and you merely use SD as a way to get some inspiration then that's another matter. But if the output of SD is in the workflow in such a way that its output is directly your input then that would be troublesome (to me). If it is copied then that still would be troublesome (to me). If you feel ok with that it is entirely up to you, but I have my views on that, which I'm perfectly at liberty to share.
And of course once you've made it work likely it is trivial to make it again so probably the above test conditions would need some sharpening but you get the principle.
Without provenance you are still creating art, but you are not creating original art. And if you were a good enough artist before SD then you should still be after, even if you're not using it and everybody else is, at least your work will be and will continue to be original.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which Rembrandt van Rijn admitted to using SD to create the Nightwatch, projecting it on a big canvas and then erasing the prompt. I figure it wouldn't give me quite the same feeling that it does today. Of course artists will use the tools that are at their disposal, but this tool essentially is a pocket sized library of all the other art that could be vacuumed up into the model and that just doesn't sit right with me. Which parts are yours and which parts are SD? If you claim an outsider can't un-entangle them to the point where cause and effect are separated do you really feel that that is the bar that should be met? If so what if I trained a model on your art exclusively and then used that to produce prompt driven 'art' to compete with you, would you think that's fair? And if not, why would the number of inputs be a factor? It's the principles that matter.
FWIW my dad made a living as a painter for quite a few years and even though I can't paint worth anything I know enough about brush technique to get oil to stick to canvas. Given this tool I could produce 'art' that I probably could pass off as original and it would likely not be detected by your standard.
But without the tool I would be absolutely hopeless so that's a pretty good argument. The more of an artist someone is the more brittle that argument becomes, there may well be a border beyond which what someone creates using such a tool does qualify as original work but again, to me, such a work would feel tainted.
Do you disclose the use of SD to the customers that buy these works?
I can prove to you that my writing and my code are mine because you can stand behind me and look over my shoulder to see that I am creating it, one bit (or at most 8) at the time. Visual evidence of it being a copy is not required: what's required is a track of creation aka provenance. This is a very well defined area in copyright. So the proof would be trivial: you recreate your work again, without access to Stable Diffusion or equivalent, while being monitored and if you can not then that would count as a bust in my book. If you're a good enough artist that you can do that and you merely use SD as a way to get some inspiration then that's another matter. But if the output of SD is in the workflow in such a way that its output is directly your input then that would be troublesome (to me). If it is copied then that still would be troublesome (to me). If you feel ok with that it is entirely up to you, but I have my views on that, which I'm perfectly at liberty to share.
And of course once you've made it work likely it is trivial to make it again so probably the above test conditions would need some sharpening but you get the principle.
Without provenance you are still creating art, but you are not creating original art. And if you were a good enough artist before SD then you should still be after, even if you're not using it and everybody else is, at least your work will be and will continue to be original.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which Rembrandt van Rijn admitted to using SD to create the Nightwatch, projecting it on a big canvas and then erasing the prompt. I figure it wouldn't give me quite the same feeling that it does today. Of course artists will use the tools that are at their disposal, but this tool essentially is a pocket sized library of all the other art that could be vacuumed up into the model and that just doesn't sit right with me. Which parts are yours and which parts are SD? If you claim an outsider can't un-entangle them to the point where cause and effect are separated do you really feel that that is the bar that should be met? If so what if I trained a model on your art exclusively and then used that to produce prompt driven 'art' to compete with you, would you think that's fair? And if not, why would the number of inputs be a factor? It's the principles that matter.
FWIW my dad made a living as a painter for quite a few years and even though I can't paint worth anything I know enough about brush technique to get oil to stick to canvas. Given this tool I could produce 'art' that I probably could pass off as original and it would likely not be detected by your standard.
But without the tool I would be absolutely hopeless so that's a pretty good argument. The more of an artist someone is the more brittle that argument becomes, there may well be a border beyond which what someone creates using such a tool does qualify as original work but again, to me, such a work would feel tainted.
Do you disclose the use of SD to the customers that buy these works?
The burden is on the accuser. Whatever world you imagine where someone can wander around and force other people to have to “show their work” without evidence is absurd.
Also, Stable Diffusion is already on my laptop so I don’t need an Internet connection, but I digress.
You’re right, I can’t make the same art with Stable Diffusion as without. The same holds for the art I can make with DAW software like Logic Pro and without. Or my guitar and without. Basically you’re leaving me with nothing but my voice, and personally, I’m in luck because I do sing and have already put effort into getting better.
I can’t see how an image that has never existed before cannot be considered original… it might not have taken much effort, but that’s something else entirely! How is any part of photography even remotely considered original in your theory of art?
Also, Stable Diffusion is already on my laptop so I don’t need an Internet connection, but I digress.
You’re right, I can’t make the same art with Stable Diffusion as without. The same holds for the art I can make with DAW software like Logic Pro and without. Or my guitar and without. Basically you’re leaving me with nothing but my voice, and personally, I’m in luck because I do sing and have already put effort into getting better.
I can’t see how an image that has never existed before cannot be considered original… it might not have taken much effort, but that’s something else entirely! How is any part of photography even remotely considered original in your theory of art?
I posit that none of these works will be copyrightable because to be copyrightable you need at least an 'anonymous artist' to assign their copyright to a company, and there is no 'anonymous artist' in these scenarios (a prompt writer can not be considered an anonymous artist, at most I guess they could try to copyright the language in their prompt. But the output, nope. Doesn't meet the requirements for copyright).
I can put a similarly simple "prompt" into Ableton to create a simple drum loop, then copyright the resulting song. What makes AI significantly different then an audio rendering engine such that only one can be copyrightable?
That the one uses generic sounds as input and the other uses specific art as input.
Stable Diffusion uses all of the art as input and this is actually incredibly important. In fact, any specific piece of art can be removed and it will still work the same and this is also incredibly important.
Both show that there is no intent for individual infringement, with along with no infringing material being produced and the significant non-infringing commercial use like family photo touch-ups, it makes for a very strong narrative for the defense!
To change lanes to art for a second…
When I’m using a tool like Logic I can coax drums, Hammond Organ, 70s analog synths, out of my laptop. I can’t make any of those sounds with my body. I need a tool.
Without Logic I would have to own a drum kit (which I happen to do), know how to play it, know how to record it… with logic I just click a dozen times and I’ve got a drummer playing four-on-the-floor.
So when I do work with a real drummer don’t tell them exactly what to play on a grid like with a drum sampler in Logic, rather they just listen in contribute. Logic has a virtual drummer that does basically the same.
How different is it to fire up another piece of software and employ a virtual painter?
Ok, shift back over to technology and creative work… what are the pros and cons of drum samplers? Don’t they put drummers out of business? Isn’t the trade-off that now a lot more people have access to nice sounding drums and that the world has more music?
Both show that there is no intent for individual infringement, with along with no infringing material being produced and the significant non-infringing commercial use like family photo touch-ups, it makes for a very strong narrative for the defense!
To change lanes to art for a second…
When I’m using a tool like Logic I can coax drums, Hammond Organ, 70s analog synths, out of my laptop. I can’t make any of those sounds with my body. I need a tool.
Without Logic I would have to own a drum kit (which I happen to do), know how to play it, know how to record it… with logic I just click a dozen times and I’ve got a drummer playing four-on-the-floor.
So when I do work with a real drummer don’t tell them exactly what to play on a grid like with a drum sampler in Logic, rather they just listen in contribute. Logic has a virtual drummer that does basically the same.
How different is it to fire up another piece of software and employ a virtual painter?
Ok, shift back over to technology and creative work… what are the pros and cons of drum samplers? Don’t they put drummers out of business? Isn’t the trade-off that now a lot more people have access to nice sounding drums and that the world has more music?
> In fact, any specific piece of art can be removed and it will still work the same and this is also incredibly important.
This is provably false: if any specific piece can be removed and there is no difference then you can keep doing that until there is no art left. I'd bet a very substantial amount of money that the output at that point will definitely have changed. Induction is a powerful thing.
This is provably false: if any specific piece can be removed and there is no difference then you can keep doing that until there is no art left. I'd bet a very substantial amount of money that the output at that point will definitely have changed. Induction is a powerful thing.
I didn’t say remove all the art, I said remove a specific piece of art. No one needs to do thought experiments. Remove all the plaintiff’s works, retrain the model, and the model is still just as useful.
Or if we want to do thought experiments, randomly remove any thousand images and the tool is still just as useful. If it’s random, not specific images, that are removed, then it is non-specific images that power the tool… yes, millions of those images, so a specific quantity is required but no specific works.
Or if we want to do thought experiments, randomly remove any thousand images and the tool is still just as useful. If it’s random, not specific images, that are removed, then it is non-specific images that power the tool… yes, millions of those images, so a specific quantity is required but no specific works.
No, the input for Ableton is a simple set of commands for how to control the synths to create the beat, the input for AI is text, the "specific art" maybe have created the model, but the model won't do anything without a prompt.
It is possible for a prompt to create a copyright violation, just like if I recreate an existing iconic drum loop it would be. But, just because a tool can infringe doesn't mean the tool itself is infringing.
It is possible for a prompt to create a copyright violation, just like if I recreate an existing iconic drum loop it would be. But, just because a tool can infringe doesn't mean the tool itself is infringing.
> It is possible for a prompt to create a copyright violation, just like if I recreate an existing iconic drum loop it would be. But, just because a tool can infringe doesn't mean the tool itself is infringing.
That's fair. But if you would sample Phil Collins (just to name one famous drummer) to create a Phil Collins sample pack and you'd then create your own drum loop with it that wouldn't mean you can't expect some expensive mail incoming. And it will likely stick.
The easiest way to create original art without having this shadow hanging over you would be to make your own sounds, use licensed sounds or to attempt to license the sounds you want to use (but that are not available for public use). Any other path is likely going to be a legal minefield and may lead to you losing your rep and a bunch of $.
There are plenty of examples of people that did this, went to court and lost.
That's fair. But if you would sample Phil Collins (just to name one famous drummer) to create a Phil Collins sample pack and you'd then create your own drum loop with it that wouldn't mean you can't expect some expensive mail incoming. And it will likely stick.
The easiest way to create original art without having this shadow hanging over you would be to make your own sounds, use licensed sounds or to attempt to license the sounds you want to use (but that are not available for public use). Any other path is likely going to be a legal minefield and may lead to you losing your rep and a bunch of $.
There are plenty of examples of people that did this, went to court and lost.
I'm going to hone in on "original art"...
What is original to begin with? What's original about Bob Dylan's Blowin in the Wind? Certainly not the form! It's a standard AB folk song. Certainly not the chords! The melody? Sure, but very bounded by Western music theory and containing a number of common American melodic tropes. The words and specific rhymes have all be used before in previous poems and light verse. He used a standard 6-string guitar with standard tuning with standard guitar chords that have been strummed in similar patterns on hundreds if not thousands of previous recordings.
Beyond the technical skill required to create something there's nothing left but just a series of choices about how to rearrange what culture has provided for you. A truly original work would be incomprehensible to an audience in a way that a truly original language would be incomprehensible to an audience. The originality, the agency of the artist, stems from the choices being made, regardless of if that tool simulates a drummer based on the placement of notes on a grid or if that tool simulates a photographer based on the input of some key words.
Now, you can certainly say that if everyone has access to Stable Diffusion that the value of its output is relatively diminished and that is of course true. The same thing happened to drum machines. No one is that impressed by a four-on-the-floor beat coming out of a laptop and they soon won't be impressed by simulated painters but this is on a different axis of examination than originality.
What is original to begin with? What's original about Bob Dylan's Blowin in the Wind? Certainly not the form! It's a standard AB folk song. Certainly not the chords! The melody? Sure, but very bounded by Western music theory and containing a number of common American melodic tropes. The words and specific rhymes have all be used before in previous poems and light verse. He used a standard 6-string guitar with standard tuning with standard guitar chords that have been strummed in similar patterns on hundreds if not thousands of previous recordings.
Beyond the technical skill required to create something there's nothing left but just a series of choices about how to rearrange what culture has provided for you. A truly original work would be incomprehensible to an audience in a way that a truly original language would be incomprehensible to an audience. The originality, the agency of the artist, stems from the choices being made, regardless of if that tool simulates a drummer based on the placement of notes on a grid or if that tool simulates a photographer based on the input of some key words.
Now, you can certainly say that if everyone has access to Stable Diffusion that the value of its output is relatively diminished and that is of course true. The same thing happened to drum machines. No one is that impressed by a four-on-the-floor beat coming out of a laptop and they soon won't be impressed by simulated painters but this is on a different axis of examination than originality.
> What's original about Bob Dylan's Blowin in the Wind?
The fact that he claims he made it, and that this went uncontested for decades is fairly strong proof that it really is his.
The fact that he claims he made it, and that this went uncontested for decades is fairly strong proof that it really is his.
> Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use.
The problem as I understand it is in all the likely "precedent" cases for this, what was being done with the scraped data was in some identifiable way different than the purpose of the source data itself. Authors Guild v Google for instance, the argument was that Google wasn't reproducing whole texts, it just used that data to make the texts searchable. Meaning the purpose of the consumption of the text by Google was to essentially make a searchable index, rather than to reproduce a book, and thus that isn't harming the authors.
In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose.
The problem as I understand it is in all the likely "precedent" cases for this, what was being done with the scraped data was in some identifiable way different than the purpose of the source data itself. Authors Guild v Google for instance, the argument was that Google wasn't reproducing whole texts, it just used that data to make the texts searchable. Meaning the purpose of the consumption of the text by Google was to essentially make a searchable index, rather than to reproduce a book, and thus that isn't harming the authors.
In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose.
> In this case, it would seem a very key difference is that this is Art being consumed and Art being produced, with no different purpose.
Sure, I mean, anyone can sit on the sidelines and imagine any sort of fantasy legal doctrines.
The one you’re imagining would have the courts deciding the purpose of art works.
In this case an example is easy. If someone uses Stable Diffusion to remove a person from the background of an image they are clearly using the tool for a separate purpose than copying Sarah Anderson’s works and making competing desk calendars.
But I guess your silly argument is that the doctored photograph is a “picture” and Sarah Anderson made “pictures” and all pictures have the purpose of “being looked at” and you want courts to decide this based on this reasoning?
Sure, I mean, anyone can sit on the sidelines and imagine any sort of fantasy legal doctrines.
The one you’re imagining would have the courts deciding the purpose of art works.
In this case an example is easy. If someone uses Stable Diffusion to remove a person from the background of an image they are clearly using the tool for a separate purpose than copying Sarah Anderson’s works and making competing desk calendars.
But I guess your silly argument is that the doctored photograph is a “picture” and Sarah Anderson made “pictures” and all pictures have the purpose of “being looked at” and you want courts to decide this based on this reasoning?
Think of it as this way:
in order to create 5 very different illustrations you need to talk with 5 people. in the end 5 people will get money when they finish with their work.
an AI consumes these artists past output and instead of paying to these artists it will gather income to the owner. So by using the output of 5 people who have spent decades on perfecting their craft, the AI generates income by stealing their work, and the money flows to the owner only, who doesn't give back anything to these people.
so in essence AI in this form kills income stream for humans, since it gives back nothing.
in order to create 5 very different illustrations you need to talk with 5 people. in the end 5 people will get money when they finish with their work.
an AI consumes these artists past output and instead of paying to these artists it will gather income to the owner. So by using the output of 5 people who have spent decades on perfecting their craft, the AI generates income by stealing their work, and the money flows to the owner only, who doesn't give back anything to these people.
so in essence AI in this form kills income stream for humans, since it gives back nothing.
Throughout history almost all skills have been learned/copied from other people. Especially things like art are learned by studying previous work.
What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot?
Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?
What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot?
Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?
For a human it takes time, it takes effort, in order to copy/learn someone's style. And the outcome is not guaranteed to be a success. There is no problem with AI, but if you generate an image with words, something like: make a painting in the style of "X artist", then maybe compensate people for their work and everybody else included, whose expertise was used during the creation of given art.
So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life.
The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work.
I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.
So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life.
The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work.
I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.
> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it)
This doesn't mean anything. If an unsecured SSH server is connected to the internet that lets anyone who connects to it in and gives them a root shell, it is still illegal to 'hack' that machine. The law cares about intent, not technicalities.
edit: Since HN decided to break with "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." again, banning me from replying: This is obviously just an example intended to show that the law cares more about intent than technical measures.
@dang Calm down dude.
This doesn't mean anything. If an unsecured SSH server is connected to the internet that lets anyone who connects to it in and gives them a root shell, it is still illegal to 'hack' that machine. The law cares about intent, not technicalities.
edit: Since HN decided to break with "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." again, banning me from replying: This is obviously just an example intended to show that the law cares more about intent than technical measures.
@dang Calm down dude.
Copyright and intrusion are different areas of the legal code and have different interpretation and allowances. For example, copyright typically has a fair use exclusion for infringement
> It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.
With this sort of model's "creation" process, is something close to everything it generates derivative of everything it ingested, since had you ingested a different set of images you'd presumably have a different model with different weights?
That's kinda sorta analogous to human creation, but a human can much more actively choose what to think about, what to ignore, what to filter out.
The human process involves an explicit creative judgement step that I don't think the image-generation-by-model process can - and that creative transformation is key, legally, to a derivative work being able to itself be copyrightable and to not be infringing.
With this sort of model's "creation" process, is something close to everything it generates derivative of everything it ingested, since had you ingested a different set of images you'd presumably have a different model with different weights?
That's kinda sorta analogous to human creation, but a human can much more actively choose what to think about, what to ignore, what to filter out.
The human process involves an explicit creative judgement step that I don't think the image-generation-by-model process can - and that creative transformation is key, legally, to a derivative work being able to itself be copyrightable and to not be infringing.
Interestingly it shows the tenuous nature of the plaintiffs case, even before getting into the plaintiff's large errors.
Since reasonably simplified information about SD is available and/or the plaintiff could have involved an expert to review his claims - it does raise a question if the function of the lawsuit is more about rattling chains rather than the merits of their argument. I.E. A deliberate ploy to extract a settlement.
Since reasonably simplified information about SD is available and/or the plaintiff could have involved an expert to review his claims - it does raise a question if the function of the lawsuit is more about rattling chains rather than the merits of their argument. I.E. A deliberate ploy to extract a settlement.
Ultimately, this is just something that has to be solved with legislation, not a court case. It's too novel a setup for a court case to deal with under existing frameworks.
I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse. But proving that illegal under current law is certainly going to be a challenge.
I have not read the original complaint but it surprises me that the lawsuit doesn't have a much stronger focus on this aspect. Copyright law is very concerned about not destroying the market for a given work through infringement, but this is a case about destroying the market for entire artists at a stroke.
But that's a hard argument in court. There's no legal basis for claiming damages because the entire market itself is being destroyed.
Though I'm not sure it's any weaker than the other claims trying to be made. The basic problem is, this isn't illegal in any sense. I don't just mean "illegal in that it must be banned" but any level of gradation in between, in the licenses, in requiring compensation, in any sort of regulation whatsoever. Technology has simply outrun law again.
I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse. But proving that illegal under current law is certainly going to be a challenge.
I have not read the original complaint but it surprises me that the lawsuit doesn't have a much stronger focus on this aspect. Copyright law is very concerned about not destroying the market for a given work through infringement, but this is a case about destroying the market for entire artists at a stroke.
But that's a hard argument in court. There's no legal basis for claiming damages because the entire market itself is being destroyed.
Though I'm not sure it's any weaker than the other claims trying to be made. The basic problem is, this isn't illegal in any sense. I don't just mean "illegal in that it must be banned" but any level of gradation in between, in the licenses, in requiring compensation, in any sort of regulation whatsoever. Technology has simply outrun law again.
I think it's not going to be that hard to argue that the company is infringing the copyright of those whose images they are using. Especially once the judge is show how similar the output of SD can be to a particular artist's images with the right prompts (proving that SD has memorized a significant amount of those images).
Some artists images just don't contain much entropy though?
If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"?
I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others.
This seems like a bad test because generic barely-creative works are much more easily generated by AI engines regardless of the source training data. I wonder if we're going to see IP troll style behavior from artists drawing many obvious things so they'll have standing to sue (and negotiate a 'fuck off' settlement) with AI art engines.
If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"?
I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others.
This seems like a bad test because generic barely-creative works are much more easily generated by AI engines regardless of the source training data. I wonder if we're going to see IP troll style behavior from artists drawing many obvious things so they'll have standing to sue (and negotiate a 'fuck off' settlement) with AI art engines.
This example has already been countered multiple times. You can not copyright a solid blue painting, you can only copyright an 'installation' of such. People in these discussions act as if copyright only came into being and hasn't been legislated/litigated for quite a while now. But then, these people can't even be bothered to look at copyright requirements that there be at the least an 'anonymous artist' that created the work to be copyrighted (and hint, a prompt writer does not count as such, anymore than a machinist inputting CAD requirements suddenly owns copyright to each factory part their machine spits out).
> If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"?
Probably not, though even this may be debatable given the specific prompt and specific similarities (for example, if it generated the exact color and exact aspect ratio for a prompt like "Yves Klein IKB 79", I could see an argument for infringement; if it generated the same thing for a prompt like "filled-in 16:5 rectangle with color #0000FF", it would be arguable that it isn't).
> I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others.
The important question in copyright is, theoretically, if you actually copied the specific piece or if you happened to create a similar-looking piece by accident. The difficulty of proving one or the other varies with the specific circumstances. For example, it's rather hard to claim you happened to paint a picture almost identical with Picasso's Guernica. It's rather easy to claim that signing an empty piece of canvas was entirely your idea and you weren't copying Dali's signed empty canvases.
Similarly for AI, the copyright discussion will come down to how much of its output is identifiable pieces of other's artworks, especially when prompted for such. I personally haven't played with it, but if it's possible to get SD or other similar models to produce identical or very similar copies of (pieces of) some artist's works using relatively simple prompts*, it should be a pretty slam-dunk case of copyright infringement.
* by this I mean prompts that don't themselves encode the information, like I showed in my "16:7 rectangle with solid color #0000FF" example.
Probably not, though even this may be debatable given the specific prompt and specific similarities (for example, if it generated the exact color and exact aspect ratio for a prompt like "Yves Klein IKB 79", I could see an argument for infringement; if it generated the same thing for a prompt like "filled-in 16:5 rectangle with color #0000FF", it would be arguable that it isn't).
> I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others.
The important question in copyright is, theoretically, if you actually copied the specific piece or if you happened to create a similar-looking piece by accident. The difficulty of proving one or the other varies with the specific circumstances. For example, it's rather hard to claim you happened to paint a picture almost identical with Picasso's Guernica. It's rather easy to claim that signing an empty piece of canvas was entirely your idea and you weren't copying Dali's signed empty canvases.
Similarly for AI, the copyright discussion will come down to how much of its output is identifiable pieces of other's artworks, especially when prompted for such. I personally haven't played with it, but if it's possible to get SD or other similar models to produce identical or very similar copies of (pieces of) some artist's works using relatively simple prompts*, it should be a pretty slam-dunk case of copyright infringement.
* by this I mean prompts that don't themselves encode the information, like I showed in my "16:7 rectangle with solid color #0000FF" example.
We are on the verge of "A picture is worth a thousand words" being deterministically quantifiable and testable. I think the politics of art are about to get very weird and interesting.
Solid blue is superlative example, but I think the amount of creativity in different artworks has a HUGE amount of variance. You can kind of "score" any artwork using and AI Art engine in terms of "what is the minimum number of terms in a prompt that I can use to recreate a substantially similar image (that wasn't a part of the training set)"
Some artists' styles can probably be articulated in no fewer than 600 words. Other artists can probably be articulated in 6. The quantifiable amount of interesting decisions in a piece of art has orders of magnitude of variance.
If someone (manually) copies your style and lets AI train on their works, your 600-word masterpiece could instantly drop to 15-words once (human created non-copyright infringing) derivatives are in the training set.
We are explorers of the frontiers of latent space, and theres going to be all sorts of new things for people to get mad about along the way.
Solid blue is superlative example, but I think the amount of creativity in different artworks has a HUGE amount of variance. You can kind of "score" any artwork using and AI Art engine in terms of "what is the minimum number of terms in a prompt that I can use to recreate a substantially similar image (that wasn't a part of the training set)"
Some artists' styles can probably be articulated in no fewer than 600 words. Other artists can probably be articulated in 6. The quantifiable amount of interesting decisions in a piece of art has orders of magnitude of variance.
If someone (manually) copies your style and lets AI train on their works, your 600-word masterpiece could instantly drop to 15-words once (human created non-copyright infringing) derivatives are in the training set.
We are explorers of the frontiers of latent space, and theres going to be all sorts of new things for people to get mad about along the way.
Sure, the amount of entropy in a piece of art that is an interesting concept, but it is entirely irrelevant to the definition of copyright. Copyright rests entirely on whether you are copying someone else's artwork, regardless of how low entropy that art work is. The only place where entropy comes in is when discussing either specific non-copying claims (such as in my previous answer) or questions of what constitutes derived works.
Consider that even cooking recipes (the particular descriptions) are copyrighted, even though they are mostly technical descriptions of a simple process (the recipe itself is not copyrighted, the specific wording is).
Consider that even cooking recipes (the particular descriptions) are copyrighted, even though they are mostly technical descriptions of a simple process (the recipe itself is not copyrighted, the specific wording is).
Even in the strictest possible strengthening of IP law, where you need the artists written permission before feeding their data into a neural network, I think the market for artists is doomed.
Disney can train a model from every frame of their video library as well as whatever they can find which is unambiguosly public domain. Then they could hire a few hundred artists to draw whatever the model is bad at by the end of this process for finetuning.
Disney can train a model from every frame of their video library as well as whatever they can find which is unambiguosly public domain. Then they could hire a few hundred artists to draw whatever the model is bad at by the end of this process for finetuning.
I agree, actually. There are interests enough in having something like this that someone will even pay artists to make the art to feed the model, and as the models improve, they'll probably need increasingly less training data, too. A human artist does not need thousands of samples to copy Picasso's or Monet's style. They need extensive training and practice to get to the point they can copy anybody's style at all (I'm completely incapable of it for all practical purposes, for instance), but once they have the training they can do a passable job of copying a style off of just a single sample. Skilled artists who have studied history and go beyond the surface of the art can even do a more-than-passable job.
e.g., there's copying Dali's color tone, realism level, and general look, and then there's understanding the why of what he is doing and being able to translate that out with some skill. You may never 100% match Dali directly, but a human doesn't necessarily need a lot of data to reach this level. And of course there will be a valid market in copying his tone, realism level, and general look even without a deeper level of semantic copying. A lot of the AI art is already this, but the person crafting the prompt and then performing a conscious selection of the result can bring their own semantics to the art in the process, it is not strictly speaking necessary to have copied them from the original artist.
This is actually part of what is going through my mind when I expect this will be solved via legislation. Well... for a given value of "solved". I expect whenever Congress gets around to this, any law they will end up passing will have HN up in arms and I expect to be armed with a torch & pitchfork myself, such is my confidence in Congress on this front. But even given that Congress is going to royally mess it up, it may yet be less messed up than the inevitable hodgepodge of conflicting precedents that will precede Congress' efforts, because while in my opinion there is no coherent legal principle that will hold the decisions together, the lawsuits will arise, the decisions will be made, and the precedents will be set. The mere inability to retain logical coherence does not stop our legal system.
e.g., there's copying Dali's color tone, realism level, and general look, and then there's understanding the why of what he is doing and being able to translate that out with some skill. You may never 100% match Dali directly, but a human doesn't necessarily need a lot of data to reach this level. And of course there will be a valid market in copying his tone, realism level, and general look even without a deeper level of semantic copying. A lot of the AI art is already this, but the person crafting the prompt and then performing a conscious selection of the result can bring their own semantics to the art in the process, it is not strictly speaking necessary to have copied them from the original artist.
This is actually part of what is going through my mind when I expect this will be solved via legislation. Well... for a given value of "solved". I expect whenever Congress gets around to this, any law they will end up passing will have HN up in arms and I expect to be armed with a torch & pitchfork myself, such is my confidence in Congress on this front. But even given that Congress is going to royally mess it up, it may yet be less messed up than the inevitable hodgepodge of conflicting precedents that will precede Congress' efforts, because while in my opinion there is no coherent legal principle that will hold the decisions together, the lawsuits will arise, the decisions will be made, and the precedents will be set. The mere inability to retain logical coherence does not stop our legal system.
> I think the market for artists is doomed.
Art is the creative aspect not the skill in creating things. Art will be fine, those who just are scribes for painting are doomed.
Art is the creative aspect not the skill in creating things. Art will be fine, those who just are scribes for painting are doomed.
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style
I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.
I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.
I don't.
Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons.
Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this.
[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons.
Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this.
[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
Moral rights is indeed "the right to be identified as the author of a work".
I don't think it means the author has a right to all similar styles. If I can legally ask somebody to paint me something in the style of a famous (living) artist, that person presumably having seen and studied their famous works for a while, why should I not be able to ask the AI to do the same thing?
(I understand there might be people who think even a human person emulating the style of another artist is morally wrong, but at least that's a consistent argument)
I don't think it means the author has a right to all similar styles. If I can legally ask somebody to paint me something in the style of a famous (living) artist, that person presumably having seen and studied their famous works for a while, why should I not be able to ask the AI to do the same thing?
(I understand there might be people who think even a human person emulating the style of another artist is morally wrong, but at least that's a consistent argument)
Moral arguments aren't very consistent, in my experience — when I first heard someone suggest that people start with feelings and then create a narrative (not necessarily coherent) to fit those feelings, a lot of the weird things started to make a lot more sense.
I'm told that for people who think Rolex watches are important, a fake Rolex is much worse than not having a Rolex at all: the item is a signal much like a peacock tail, the signal is de-valued by making things easy.
I'm told that for people who think Rolex watches are important, a fake Rolex is much worse than not having a Rolex at all: the item is a signal much like a peacock tail, the signal is de-valued by making things easy.
it's quite common in UK contracts of employment to try and transfer the moral rights to the Employer
but this isn't enforceable, they cannot be transferred
but this isn't enforceable, they cannot be transferred
An artist's style is not copyrightable so I doubt it makes much of a difference. My guess is that showing good faith will make the lawsuit go over easier, because there's nothing illegal about paying someone to copy someone else's style (and not just a replica).
But the artist's work itself is copyrightable.
Any use of that work without permission (and thus attribution/compensation) is the problem.
Any use of that work without permission (and thus attribution/compensation) is the problem.
Fair use is a thing.
Fair use as a legal doctrine has significant practical problems - specifically, it's an open legal question with mind-bogglingly large sums of money at stake until and unless you get sued and spend six-figure sums in court to find out. Prudent risk management will forgo all sorts of activities that are clearly fair use under US law but happen to piss off large companies with expansive legal departments.
But when companies are solely profiting from it then it ceases being fair.
I think this restriction was more about trying to shut up some very vocal people on social media and less about the law.
Copying an artists style is legal in every jurisdiction in which Stability operates.
Copying an artists style is legal in every jurisdiction in which Stability operates.
There's a big difference between 'rework my drawing to look like it was painted by Goya' and 'render this drawing in the style of Lisa Frank' or any living visual artist famed for a specific identifiable style as opposed to a particular image.
Comics are one example of an area where individual artists might develop a large body of work in a very distinctive style. You probably know what a Tintin comic (by Belgian artist Hergé) looks like. And lots of Manga artists have very specific and instantly identifiable styles. Individual artistry is a little less obvious with popular western comics because the best-known titles tend to be superhero franchises where the characters/story world are owned by a corporation and individual artists come and go.
Comics are one example of an area where individual artists might develop a large body of work in a very distinctive style. You probably know what a Tintin comic (by Belgian artist Hergé) looks like. And lots of Manga artists have very specific and instantly identifiable styles. Individual artistry is a little less obvious with popular western comics because the best-known titles tend to be superhero franchises where the characters/story world are owned by a corporation and individual artists come and go.
I thought many comics work with a team of artists to create their work. Largely by having 1 person create the style and other's learning to mimic it. Let alone having different people do the line work, shading, coloring, etc.
Right....which involves a fair amount of productive and administrative labor to assemble and operate. If I can take a collection of scans and feed them into my diffusion appliance and have it pop out and endless supply of new panels 24-7, the economics of the handcrafted original artwork factory start to look really bad.
Upside: the brilliant artist Rohan Kishibe falls under a bus, but while his loss is tragic his artistic legacy lives on - hooray!
Downside: up-and-coming artist Rohan Kishibe is on the verge of breaking through commercially, but the publishers of Shonen Lump, who invested heavily in AI, floods the market with work from Kohan Rishibe, and our hero is derided as a mere imitator.
Upside: the brilliant artist Rohan Kishibe falls under a bus, but while his loss is tragic his artistic legacy lives on - hooray!
Downside: up-and-coming artist Rohan Kishibe is on the verge of breaking through commercially, but the publishers of Shonen Lump, who invested heavily in AI, floods the market with work from Kohan Rishibe, and our hero is derided as a mere imitator.
I don't even think it extends to this, it's simply because it's automated. I have no talent in the area, but I know that artists can copy one another's styles. You see it in talented art student master copies, and hell I'd bet most professional cartoonists could draw a page what looks pretty damn close to a series of Tintin panels when you squint.
Well yes, automation makes a massive difference because with a machine you can crank hundreds of panels in a particular style in the time it takes a human artist to do a single one.
In fact, I generated a bunch of Tintin panels between writing my earlier comment and this one, and they're bad but not terrible - mainly because I asked for 'Tintin riding a bicycle [...]' and it's having trouble with things like the bicycle spokes. Two out of the 4 'feel' right in terms of the line drawing style, color palette, foreground-background composition, level of background detail etc.
In fact, I generated a bunch of Tintin panels between writing my earlier comment and this one, and they're bad but not terrible - mainly because I asked for 'Tintin riding a bicycle [...]' and it's having trouble with things like the bicycle spokes. Two out of the 4 'feel' right in terms of the line drawing style, color palette, foreground-background composition, level of background detail etc.
>The complaint includes a section attempting to explain how Stable Diffusion works. It argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data.
I've seen the collage tool argument several times, and I don't agree with it. But I can understand why people believe it.
You see, there's a very large number of people who use AI art generators as a tracing tool. Like, to the point where someone who has never touched one might believe that it literally just photobashes existing images together.
The reality is that there's three ways to use art generators:
- You can tell it to generate an image with a non-copyright-infringing prompt. i.e. "a dog police officer holding a gun"
- You can ask it to replicate an existing style, by adding keywords like "in the style of <existing artist>"
- You can modify an existing image. This is in lieu of the random seed image that is normally provided to the AI.
That last one is confusing, because it makes people think that the AI itself is infringing when it's only the person using it. But I could see the courts deciding that letting someone chuck an image into the model gives you liability, especially with all of the "you have full commercial rights to everything you generate" messaging people keep slapping onto these.
Style prompting is one of those things that's also legally questionable, though for different reasons. As about 40,000 AI art generator users have shouted at me over the past year, you cannot copyright a style. But at the same time, producing "new" art that's substantially similar to copyrighted art is still illegal. So, say, "a man on a motorcycle in the style of Banksy" might be OK, but "girl holding a balloon in the style of Banksy" might not be. The latter is basically asking the AI to regurgitate an existing image, or trace over something it's already seen.
I think a better argument would be that, by training the AI to understand style prompts, Stability AI is inducing users to infringe upon other people's copyright.
I've seen the collage tool argument several times, and I don't agree with it. But I can understand why people believe it.
You see, there's a very large number of people who use AI art generators as a tracing tool. Like, to the point where someone who has never touched one might believe that it literally just photobashes existing images together.
The reality is that there's three ways to use art generators:
- You can tell it to generate an image with a non-copyright-infringing prompt. i.e. "a dog police officer holding a gun"
- You can ask it to replicate an existing style, by adding keywords like "in the style of <existing artist>"
- You can modify an existing image. This is in lieu of the random seed image that is normally provided to the AI.
That last one is confusing, because it makes people think that the AI itself is infringing when it's only the person using it. But I could see the courts deciding that letting someone chuck an image into the model gives you liability, especially with all of the "you have full commercial rights to everything you generate" messaging people keep slapping onto these.
Style prompting is one of those things that's also legally questionable, though for different reasons. As about 40,000 AI art generator users have shouted at me over the past year, you cannot copyright a style. But at the same time, producing "new" art that's substantially similar to copyrighted art is still illegal. So, say, "a man on a motorcycle in the style of Banksy" might be OK, but "girl holding a balloon in the style of Banksy" might not be. The latter is basically asking the AI to regurgitate an existing image, or trace over something it's already seen.
I think a better argument would be that, by training the AI to understand style prompts, Stability AI is inducing users to infringe upon other people's copyright.
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset.
This is incredibly disheartening. Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense.
This is incredibly disheartening. Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense.
I'm not sure I understand the point you're making. Its disheartening that artists can opt-out of having a computer algorithm make derivative versions of their creations?
I'm probably on the opposite side of the fence. I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. The training set should be limited to public domain and CC-0 until such a time it can comply with attribution; then other CC works could be incorporated.
I'm probably on the opposite side of the fence. I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. The training set should be limited to public domain and CC-0 until such a time it can comply with attribution; then other CC works could be incorporated.
It's disheartening because it's a great loss to everybody. Almost none of the people that were generating images in a style of some artist will contact this artist and pay to have an image created.
So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work from the people who tried the AI commercially and got results that weren't completely satisfactory. Now barely anyone will ever have any contact with their art (relatively speaking vs scenario of virality).
Basically the only people who win are the lawyers and handful of artists that were mislead by lawyers primitive argumentation. Everybody else looses. First and foremost artists and art lovers but also AI researchers and hardware manufacturers.
So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work from the people who tried the AI commercially and got results that weren't completely satisfactory. Now barely anyone will ever have any contact with their art (relatively speaking vs scenario of virality).
Basically the only people who win are the lawyers and handful of artists that were mislead by lawyers primitive argumentation. Everybody else looses. First and foremost artists and art lovers but also AI researchers and hardware manufacturers.
This reads like you know what’s best for artists and takes their point of view completely for granted.
As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
> So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work
I’ve seen this sentiment, but it does not match the reality we see play out on the web every day.
The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
It makes no sense to me that the introduction of an AI tool would suddenly solve the problem of attribution instead of just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
> So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work
I’ve seen this sentiment, but it does not match the reality we see play out on the web every day.
The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
It makes no sense to me that the introduction of an AI tool would suddenly solve the problem of attribution instead of just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
> This reads like you know what’s best for artists and takes their point of view completely for granted.
I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions.
> As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service.
> The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
As for prompts that don't mention specific authors ... you shouldn't kid yourself that AI won't be able to completely naturally recreate your style from styles similar to yours even it it never seen yours. After all that's what you did to create your style. You created a variation on similar styles you saw during your education as an artist.
> ... just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
steal, theft ... what do artists actually loose in those brazen robberies?
Copyright conglomerates created language that doesn't reflect reality. But it reflects most primitive human instincts evolved in the world of scarcity not abundance.
I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions.
> As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service.
> The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
As for prompts that don't mention specific authors ... you shouldn't kid yourself that AI won't be able to completely naturally recreate your style from styles similar to yours even it it never seen yours. After all that's what you did to create your style. You created a variation on similar styles you saw during your education as an artist.
> ... just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
steal, theft ... what do artists actually loose in those brazen robberies?
Copyright conglomerates created language that doesn't reflect reality. But it reflects most primitive human instincts evolved in the world of scarcity not abundance.
AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service.
Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost. The line of thinking you articulate here is extremely familiar to anyone who does creative work. It's the same argument that producers use to get people to work for free or cheap on films, that broadcast or streaming services use to justify very low payouts to content creators, that commercial commissioners use to try and get art for free etc. The creative field is absolutely full of promoters who offer to match artist to audience, with the promoters getting the first cut of ticket sales and the artist getting the last or none.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
Only if you are already kinda famous. Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. I, an unscrupulous publisher, note that the market for ghost stories is currently booming and decide to buy, or perhaps generate from AI, and bunch of mediocre ghost stories, and then publish them with 'art in the style of scotty79.' I make a little app offering 'best new ghost stories every day!!' for $1, put it in app stores, and make $7 million before the ghost story fad runs its course. You get nothing, and consumers who got familiar with your style by paying $1 or looking at ads to use my app don't care about you because I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
Maybe a few of them will do the work of combing back through the history of the fad and to find which artists influenced the 'daily ghost story' aesthetic. Maybe this will lead to a revival of interest in your work even though the fad it was associated with has come and gone. Good luck with that.
The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost. The line of thinking you articulate here is extremely familiar to anyone who does creative work. It's the same argument that producers use to get people to work for free or cheap on films, that broadcast or streaming services use to justify very low payouts to content creators, that commercial commissioners use to try and get art for free etc. The creative field is absolutely full of promoters who offer to match artist to audience, with the promoters getting the first cut of ticket sales and the artist getting the last or none.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
Only if you are already kinda famous. Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. I, an unscrupulous publisher, note that the market for ghost stories is currently booming and decide to buy, or perhaps generate from AI, and bunch of mediocre ghost stories, and then publish them with 'art in the style of scotty79.' I make a little app offering 'best new ghost stories every day!!' for $1, put it in app stores, and make $7 million before the ghost story fad runs its course. You get nothing, and consumers who got familiar with your style by paying $1 or looking at ads to use my app don't care about you because I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
Maybe a few of them will do the work of combing back through the history of the fad and to find which artists influenced the 'daily ghost story' aesthetic. Maybe this will lead to a revival of interest in your work even though the fad it was associated with has come and gone. Good luck with that.
The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
> Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost.
I'm not sure how did you manage to miss thousands of artists able to capitalize on sudden and accidental fame for decades without any prior arrangements. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible. Also to put this in context compare this with how often very popular artists get completely screwed by huge copyright behemoths earning a score of money but mostly for someone else, someone completely uncreative.
> https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Trying to buy something for exposure is absolutely abhorrent because you try to coax someone into doing work for no money. And for nothing basically because people who try to pay with exposure don't really provide any significant exposure 99.99% of times.
If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material. That's why they never opposed it when other artists were learning from their art. That and of course that target of their wrath would be basically the entire rest of the art community which wouldn't make them very popular.
> Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. .... I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
That's completely fine in my book. And if those generated stories get really popular so I learn about them I might do just a little bit of online marketing to inject my name in the discussions about them and publish new ones to my fresh new subscribers ahead of time. Heck, I could create my own generated and fine-tuned manually content and sell it just like that guy does since he's already proven a business model for me.
Compare now this with the world of strict copyright where this guy doesn't even know I exist, same goes for swaths of fans of ghost stories. Or let's assume he knows and wants to deal with me. Since he's the one with the money I'll be severely dependent of him and strongly disadvantaged in any deal. But let's assume we struck a deal that's nice for me. There's no way I'll be able to produce new ghost stories every day. Not to mention I wouldn't wish that workload on my worst enemy. So no business happens and many people have their love for ghost stories un-satiated, many didn't discover their love for ghost stories and I am 100% still poor struggling author who's known by nobody.
World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
> The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
And yet you vehemently defend the system that created this situation and refuse to even consider alternatives.
I'm not sure how did you manage to miss thousands of artists able to capitalize on sudden and accidental fame for decades without any prior arrangements. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible. Also to put this in context compare this with how often very popular artists get completely screwed by huge copyright behemoths earning a score of money but mostly for someone else, someone completely uncreative.
> https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Trying to buy something for exposure is absolutely abhorrent because you try to coax someone into doing work for no money. And for nothing basically because people who try to pay with exposure don't really provide any significant exposure 99.99% of times.
If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material. That's why they never opposed it when other artists were learning from their art. That and of course that target of their wrath would be basically the entire rest of the art community which wouldn't make them very popular.
> Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. .... I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
That's completely fine in my book. And if those generated stories get really popular so I learn about them I might do just a little bit of online marketing to inject my name in the discussions about them and publish new ones to my fresh new subscribers ahead of time. Heck, I could create my own generated and fine-tuned manually content and sell it just like that guy does since he's already proven a business model for me.
Compare now this with the world of strict copyright where this guy doesn't even know I exist, same goes for swaths of fans of ghost stories. Or let's assume he knows and wants to deal with me. Since he's the one with the money I'll be severely dependent of him and strongly disadvantaged in any deal. But let's assume we struck a deal that's nice for me. There's no way I'll be able to produce new ghost stories every day. Not to mention I wouldn't wish that workload on my worst enemy. So no business happens and many people have their love for ghost stories un-satiated, many didn't discover their love for ghost stories and I am 100% still poor struggling author who's known by nobody.
World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
> The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
And yet you vehemently defend the system that created this situation and refuse to even consider alternatives.
> If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material.
This seems like an odd way to frame this. The reality is closer to "artists were never included in the conversation to begin with". Arguing that "no one forced them to create anything new" seems irrelevant when you consider that without the content, none of this exists to begin with.
The problem is the assumption that artists are or should be universally fine with this.
> World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
If you want to argue against copyright, that's fine, and I have plenty of issues with the current iteration of this framework of rules. But that is not the same argument as "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons".
I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
They are important but distinct problems.
This seems like an odd way to frame this. The reality is closer to "artists were never included in the conversation to begin with". Arguing that "no one forced them to create anything new" seems irrelevant when you consider that without the content, none of this exists to begin with.
The problem is the assumption that artists are or should be universally fine with this.
> World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
If you want to argue against copyright, that's fine, and I have plenty of issues with the current iteration of this framework of rules. But that is not the same argument as "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons".
I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
They are important but distinct problems.
> The problem is the assumption that artists are or should be universally fine with this.
I don't think anybody assumes all artists will be fine with it. But being disgruntled doesn't automatically mean you should be the one who makes the decisions. Virtually every human has a stake in this because nearly everybody consumes some art. It's time we put stronger emphasis on the rights of everybody else, instead of just mostly people who bought copyright, and artists those people think have the right to exploit.
> "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons"
I don't think I'm saying there's some technical reasons those tools aren't infringing. Just overwhelming moral, practical and economical reasons that they should be allowed to operate and treated just like human artists who too can mimic and mix styles and nobody can deny them authorship unless they copy specific complex elements nearly verbatim.
Btw if human artist think AI got to close to one of his works he can prove it beyond all doubt by registering their creations on some blockchain with his key and timestamp and I wouldn't be against banning this specific AI artwork that got too close.
Banning use of all published art as teaching material by default is not the way to go in my opinion. Banning imitating specific style is bad too. Imagine portrait painters banned photography from using classical portrait compositions to protect their jobs. Or denied photographers even looking at portraits so they can never learn to imitate.
> I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
Maybe, but AI is the wonderful opportunity to discuss the spirit of horrible rules we currently have. Best opportunity we had since creation of social networking sites that chipped those rules away a bit.
I don't think anybody assumes all artists will be fine with it. But being disgruntled doesn't automatically mean you should be the one who makes the decisions. Virtually every human has a stake in this because nearly everybody consumes some art. It's time we put stronger emphasis on the rights of everybody else, instead of just mostly people who bought copyright, and artists those people think have the right to exploit.
> "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons"
I don't think I'm saying there's some technical reasons those tools aren't infringing. Just overwhelming moral, practical and economical reasons that they should be allowed to operate and treated just like human artists who too can mimic and mix styles and nobody can deny them authorship unless they copy specific complex elements nearly verbatim.
Btw if human artist think AI got to close to one of his works he can prove it beyond all doubt by registering their creations on some blockchain with his key and timestamp and I wouldn't be against banning this specific AI artwork that got too close.
Banning use of all published art as teaching material by default is not the way to go in my opinion. Banning imitating specific style is bad too. Imagine portrait painters banned photography from using classical portrait compositions to protect their jobs. Or denied photographers even looking at portraits so they can never learn to imitate.
> I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
Maybe, but AI is the wonderful opportunity to discuss the spirit of horrible rules we currently have. Best opportunity we had since creation of social networking sites that chipped those rules away a bit.
AI "artists" are commissioners in my view. If the learning and creating is done by the model, the model is the rights holder. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
But AI companies are paying AI artists with electricity and computing power so they are buying copyright from AI artists. ;)
> I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions.
This still doesn't give you standing to speak on behalf of artists, and "because I know better than lawyers do" is generally a problematic form of argument. It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
> I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
This is a very one-dimensional view of what makes art, and how the broader community plays a role. I have no illusions about where I stand as an individual photographer among the multitude of photographers in terms of raw technical talent and capability. But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
> I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
This assumes the only reason I would be upset is because of lost sales. I take photos for the love of it. I don't currently sell them. If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely. And even if I turned this into a business, "lost sales" is still only one of multiple factors.
Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently. There are AI-art sharing communities emerging where prompts are held tight, because the authoring of the prompt is the only thing the "AI artist" brings to the table. Even if prompts were universally provided, that doesn't solve the issue of permission, or imply that this is automatically an acceptable form of attribution to all artists overnight.
When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
And yet, when we talk about a system that unlocks a seemingly limitless portal through which the life's work of every artist is made systematically available to the entire world without limit, with no consultation with the original creators, those worries about unattributed benefit just disappear.
I'm curious how you feel about the video game scenario?
This still doesn't give you standing to speak on behalf of artists, and "because I know better than lawyers do" is generally a problematic form of argument. It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
> I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
This is a very one-dimensional view of what makes art, and how the broader community plays a role. I have no illusions about where I stand as an individual photographer among the multitude of photographers in terms of raw technical talent and capability. But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
> I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
This assumes the only reason I would be upset is because of lost sales. I take photos for the love of it. I don't currently sell them. If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely. And even if I turned this into a business, "lost sales" is still only one of multiple factors.
Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently. There are AI-art sharing communities emerging where prompts are held tight, because the authoring of the prompt is the only thing the "AI artist" brings to the table. Even if prompts were universally provided, that doesn't solve the issue of permission, or imply that this is automatically an acceptable form of attribution to all artists overnight.
When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
And yet, when we talk about a system that unlocks a seemingly limitless portal through which the life's work of every artist is made systematically available to the entire world without limit, with no consultation with the original creators, those worries about unattributed benefit just disappear.
I'm curious how you feel about the video game scenario?
> This still doesn't give you standing to speak on behalf of artists
Sure. That's why I don't speak on their behalf. I'm just voicing my opinion about harmful silliness of the scheme they allowed themselves to be coaxed into.
> It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
Silently ignored in lawyers arguments are all the consumers of culture. All the people who wrote the prompts and all the people who drew great joy from looking at AI creation. They'd get literally nothing if the case of strict copyright so their collective loss is great because they are many.
> But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
Sure, opinions may vary. Only actual data can resolve who's wrong. And the number for compensation of artists in copyright industry are not great when compared to viral gains from attention based, open economy.
> If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely.
If you haven't lost anything why do you care? Why do you want to devoid others of joy they draw from availability of artwork?
> Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently.
It's the internet. People talk. Nothing stays secret. And at any point in time original artist or their fan can chip in and say, "yeah, that's exactly like mine, see?". And no-one can do anything about it.
> When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
Yeah. Using AI artwork in a very specific style would generate same kind of news. And those games are not very good and they don't make much money. So not only there's no harm, severe ostracism. There's also not much opportunity to have any gain if copyright was strictly observed. And as you noticed it already happens. Darkest Dungeon had very fresh and attractive art-style. Now it's very easy to randomly encounter in Play Store cheap clicker games blatantly ripping off that esthetics. It's not directly stolen, but it's pretty much what AI would do if someone was hell bent on replicating the esthetics. Yet humans did it. What's the loss to Darkest Dungeon graphic designer? Exactly zero.
And I think games that would start with AI art and got really popular ... they'd invite original artist for DLC or to get on the news or for just good will of the public. Public relationships is very important when selling games.
Sure. That's why I don't speak on their behalf. I'm just voicing my opinion about harmful silliness of the scheme they allowed themselves to be coaxed into.
> It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
Silently ignored in lawyers arguments are all the consumers of culture. All the people who wrote the prompts and all the people who drew great joy from looking at AI creation. They'd get literally nothing if the case of strict copyright so their collective loss is great because they are many.
> But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
Sure, opinions may vary. Only actual data can resolve who's wrong. And the number for compensation of artists in copyright industry are not great when compared to viral gains from attention based, open economy.
> If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely.
If you haven't lost anything why do you care? Why do you want to devoid others of joy they draw from availability of artwork?
> Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently.
It's the internet. People talk. Nothing stays secret. And at any point in time original artist or their fan can chip in and say, "yeah, that's exactly like mine, see?". And no-one can do anything about it.
> When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
Yeah. Using AI artwork in a very specific style would generate same kind of news. And those games are not very good and they don't make much money. So not only there's no harm, severe ostracism. There's also not much opportunity to have any gain if copyright was strictly observed. And as you noticed it already happens. Darkest Dungeon had very fresh and attractive art-style. Now it's very easy to randomly encounter in Play Store cheap clicker games blatantly ripping off that esthetics. It's not directly stolen, but it's pretty much what AI would do if someone was hell bent on replicating the esthetics. Yet humans did it. What's the loss to Darkest Dungeon graphic designer? Exactly zero.
And I think games that would start with AI art and got really popular ... they'd invite original artist for DLC or to get on the news or for just good will of the public. Public relationships is very important when selling games.
On top of that, deliberately training models to copy an artists work and antagonizing the artist about it.
> So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work from the people who tried the AI commercially and got results that weren't completely satisfactory.
I think it's quite presumptuous to unequivocally state that artists lose with this. Is it a complicated situation? Yes, of course, too complicated for such certainty. That's a wonderful thing to believe, but it's just as plausible (I'd argue far, far more plausible as the tech improves) that clients who would formerly pay for their work no longer have to.
I think it's quite presumptuous to unequivocally state that artists lose with this. Is it a complicated situation? Yes, of course, too complicated for such certainty. That's a wonderful thing to believe, but it's just as plausible (I'd argue far, far more plausible as the tech improves) that clients who would formerly pay for their work no longer have to.
> but it's just as plausible (I'd argue far, far more plausible as the tech improves) that clients who would formerly pay for their work no longer have to.
With the volume of AI art generated was an even single actual case of that?
With the volume of AI art generated was an even single actual case of that?
It's absolute and total loss for every artist for nearly any artist that won't voluntarily opt-in.
When you consider laws regarding organ donors you might appreciate how socially harmful might be wrong defaults.
When you consider laws regarding organ donors you might appreciate how socially harmful might be wrong defaults.
People keep trying to compensate artists with exposure.
They could have gone viral because an AI recreated their art style to the degree that they could? And therefore people would abandon the AI to pay the artist individually?
I'm not sure I follow, wouldn't those people just us the AI to continue creating what they want unless you think that driving the artist to compete monetarily with an AI will somehow work in the artist's favor?
> They could have gone viral because an AI recreated their art style to the degree that they could?
I didn't know of any artist (except for long dead ones) that I saw the names of in prompts.
> And therefore people would abandon the AI to pay the artist individually?
If you have particular commercial needs you discovered through the use of AI you might want to go to the source, not for everything, but for some things. It might be easier to explain some of the stuff you need to a live human than to AI. AI images are still very imperfect and prompts are not easy to create.
I didn't know of any artist (except for long dead ones) that I saw the names of in prompts.
> And therefore people would abandon the AI to pay the artist individually?
If you have particular commercial needs you discovered through the use of AI you might want to go to the source, not for everything, but for some things. It might be easier to explain some of the stuff you need to a live human than to AI. AI images are still very imperfect and prompts are not easy to create.
I had absolute zero interest in digital art before, now I have some and would at least react to the artists often mentioned in prompts. They didn't get any money from me before, but the chance is > 0.0 now at least, I might at some point commission some original digital art and now I would checkout both the AI and the humans. Before this I might instead have opted for a stock photo for $5.
But who knows how the numbers turn out in the long run. I don't think the artists is the group that's going to get the most annoyed in the next couple of years - copy writers and programmers, 3D artists, basically anybody who's doing grunt work..
I think the main problem with all of this is that it has entered our lives so fast, compared to other revolutions.
But who knows how the numbers turn out in the long run. I don't think the artists is the group that's going to get the most annoyed in the next couple of years - copy writers and programmers, 3D artists, basically anybody who's doing grunt work..
I think the main problem with all of this is that it has entered our lives so fast, compared to other revolutions.
Personally - I tend to think along the lines that we should be applying roughly the same rule of thumb here as we do for people.
People are allowed to view private art, draw inspiration and ideas from it, and execute on those to create new things.
Why should we limit AI any differently?
If the end result is too close to the original - apply the same guidelines you would for any other artist who copied your work.
Otherwise... you're not allowed copyright over a particular style (for damn good reason). While I would like to see artists retain some form of revenue, I don't think this is really the most pressing issue on that front.
People are allowed to view private art, draw inspiration and ideas from it, and execute on those to create new things.
Why should we limit AI any differently?
If the end result is too close to the original - apply the same guidelines you would for any other artist who copied your work.
Otherwise... you're not allowed copyright over a particular style (for damn good reason). While I would like to see artists retain some form of revenue, I don't think this is really the most pressing issue on that front.
> I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in
This is the crux of the issue for me. It's a different set of rules for AI companies than everyone else. If I started selling pirated copies of Nintendo games they would send an army of lawyers after me and this "opt-out" reasoning would not be a valid defense in court. These AI companies are trying to get away with stealing art and other content with a simple "whoopsie, we promise we won't do it again" when people demand that their own rights be respected.
This is the crux of the issue for me. It's a different set of rules for AI companies than everyone else. If I started selling pirated copies of Nintendo games they would send an army of lawyers after me and this "opt-out" reasoning would not be a valid defense in court. These AI companies are trying to get away with stealing art and other content with a simple "whoopsie, we promise we won't do it again" when people demand that their own rights be respected.
It is a different set of rules, just not in the way you're depicting it. This is not piracy. The whole point is that the AI is using this work in a way that is transformative, just like a person would.
It's not copying, it's breaking down work to it's foundational features and recombining those features with others to make new things. Literally exactly what humans do when they make art.
If a person was doing what these models are doing it not only wouldn't be illegal, it would be laughable if we even had the discussion.
It's not copying, it's breaking down work to it's foundational features and recombining those features with others to make new things. Literally exactly what humans do when they make art.
If a person was doing what these models are doing it not only wouldn't be illegal, it would be laughable if we even had the discussion.
But it's not a person doing it. It's a machine learning model owned and operated by a company. It doesn't have capacity to "think", claiming otherwise is highly dubious since anyone truly "learning" from art wouldn't also replicate watermarks in their "original" work. More importantly, people have limited output capacity and it's why copyright was invented in the first place, i.e. scale.
Current trajectory will only harm original creators, there is zero consideration or benefit for them. On the other side you have companies that stand to make billions off of their work.
Arguing in favor of such a system is, in my mind, appalling. Either ensure that copyright law prohibits unauthorized machine learning from valuable original art or abolish it completely.
Current trajectory will only harm original creators, there is zero consideration or benefit for them. On the other side you have companies that stand to make billions off of their work.
Arguing in favor of such a system is, in my mind, appalling. Either ensure that copyright law prohibits unauthorized machine learning from valuable original art or abolish it completely.
Your conflating a lot of issues here that just muddy the waters.
First, whether particular features like watermarks end up in the end product or not is not terribly relevant. The particular model implementation that produces that behavior doesn't understand that watermarks are not a desirable part of the transformed end products, whereas humans do. In that way, the AI is certainly a little more 'honest' about what it's doing. It would be trivial to make the AI understand this, and stop reproducing watermarks.
You claim that the model performing this work is somehow different because AI doesn't 'think' about problems, as evidenced by strange artifacts, whereas presumably humans do think about them because of the absence of these artifacts. I'm curious why this makes a difference. If a model was sufficiently advanced that you were unable to differentiate a painting made by a human along certain themes and an AI along certain themes would it be somehow less objectionable? Why or why not? If the end product is of identical quality why should it matter the route you take to get there, in the eyes of the law?
You bring up scale, but scale is also not relevant. Say that I create a school devoted to training legions of artists to produce paintings in the style of a particular artist, while maintaining a transformative aspect. Is this illegal because I'm doing it at scale? No. If that's not illegal, why is it illegal to do it with code? Because it's more efficient? In what other domain is producing creative work more efficiently by transforming existing work illegal?
First, whether particular features like watermarks end up in the end product or not is not terribly relevant. The particular model implementation that produces that behavior doesn't understand that watermarks are not a desirable part of the transformed end products, whereas humans do. In that way, the AI is certainly a little more 'honest' about what it's doing. It would be trivial to make the AI understand this, and stop reproducing watermarks.
You claim that the model performing this work is somehow different because AI doesn't 'think' about problems, as evidenced by strange artifacts, whereas presumably humans do think about them because of the absence of these artifacts. I'm curious why this makes a difference. If a model was sufficiently advanced that you were unable to differentiate a painting made by a human along certain themes and an AI along certain themes would it be somehow less objectionable? Why or why not? If the end product is of identical quality why should it matter the route you take to get there, in the eyes of the law?
You bring up scale, but scale is also not relevant. Say that I create a school devoted to training legions of artists to produce paintings in the style of a particular artist, while maintaining a transformative aspect. Is this illegal because I'm doing it at scale? No. If that's not illegal, why is it illegal to do it with code? Because it's more efficient? In what other domain is producing creative work more efficiently by transforming existing work illegal?
> It's a machine learning model owned and operated by a company.
How's that different from a human artist shackled to a company by some secret agreements in which he's not the stronger side?
How's that different from a human artist shackled to a company by some secret agreements in which he's not the stronger side?
I was sued back in the Palm Pilot days for writing a game that involved moving blocks. The company that owned Palm Pilot rights to Tetris® claimed I was violating their trademark, which was clearly frivolous and incorrect. But I was just a dumb guy who had coded an original game, and they were a company with lawyers on retainer.
It doesn't matter what the law says or what is "right." It comes down to who has the power and who doesn't.
(The other difference between what humans do and what AIs do is a matter of scale. A human imitates by spending many hours to duplicate a work of art. An AI can churn out millions in a second. That's a separate issue, though.)
It doesn't matter what the law says or what is "right." It comes down to who has the power and who doesn't.
(The other difference between what humans do and what AIs do is a matter of scale. A human imitates by spending many hours to duplicate a work of art. An AI can churn out millions in a second. That's a separate issue, though.)
> transformative, just like a person would.
No, it is transformative just like a computer would. A person would be inspired and create some kind of unique work. A prompt would - given identical start-up conditions - result in the exact same image over and over again no matter who entered the prompt.
Even a trained monkey giving the prompt would result in the same output, as would 'thumper' or the closest local equivalent.
No, it is transformative just like a computer would. A person would be inspired and create some kind of unique work. A prompt would - given identical start-up conditions - result in the exact same image over and over again no matter who entered the prompt.
Even a trained monkey giving the prompt would result in the same output, as would 'thumper' or the closest local equivalent.
Unfortunately, a lot of these artists opted-in the moment they uploaded their art to the internet. Once you do that, much like uploading your source code or compiled binary, it's hard to reverse the consequences. All that really happened is that the consequences changed, and a lot of people weren't prepared for it.
Yeah, it's disheartening. There's also no good way to fix it; the cost of storing copies of their art is negligible, and AI trains the same whether the material is copyright or creative commons. If you get Stability AI to omit your art, then Unstable Diffusion will be trained on your likeness. Opt-out of that one, and some guy in Nevada personally sponsors a bespoke model for making copies of your art.
So, I agree with the parent. The most tragic part is not the short-term fight, it's the long-term consequences. Artists will have to internalize what software developers realized decades ago; creating takes work, and copying is free.
Yeah, it's disheartening. There's also no good way to fix it; the cost of storing copies of their art is negligible, and AI trains the same whether the material is copyright or creative commons. If you get Stability AI to omit your art, then Unstable Diffusion will be trained on your likeness. Opt-out of that one, and some guy in Nevada personally sponsors a bespoke model for making copies of your art.
So, I agree with the parent. The most tragic part is not the short-term fight, it's the long-term consequences. Artists will have to internalize what software developers realized decades ago; creating takes work, and copying is free.
> Artists will have to internalize what software developers realized decades ago; creating takes work, and copying is free.
This is very dismissive, the scale is what makes the difference. You can get away with pirating all types of content for personal use.
AI companies are essentially trying to legalize that, but in reverse - taking from small creators to enrich the shareholders of their billion dollar corporations.
If you try to play by these rules and create a million dollar business that distributes various copyrighted content from the internet (e.g. AAA games, movies or music) you'll very quickly realize how much their stance on copyright changes.
This is very dismissive, the scale is what makes the difference. You can get away with pirating all types of content for personal use.
AI companies are essentially trying to legalize that, but in reverse - taking from small creators to enrich the shareholders of their billion dollar corporations.
If you try to play by these rules and create a million dollar business that distributes various copyrighted content from the internet (e.g. AAA games, movies or music) you'll very quickly realize how much their stance on copyright changes.
Distinguishing between personal use and commercial use doesn't really work though. It lets you sue certain parties into the ground, for all the good it does you, but it doesn't stop people from deriving and profiting from your work. Probably more than half the Fortune 500 companies are in brazen violation of the GPL, does that stop them from abusing it and profiting from it? Not in the slightest.
Power ultimately belongs to whoever can wield it with the least friction. It's not fair or right, but it's the way they play in the business world.
Power ultimately belongs to whoever can wield it with the least friction. It's not fair or right, but it's the way they play in the business world.
Your last sentence makes no sense, you don't think artists have been impacted by digital copying until now? Every genre of artist from music, movies, tv, photographers, and visual artists have been involved in this problem ever since the moment those art forms were digitized.
All art is derivative.
The definition of “derivative” and its historical context look nothing like the new reality created by generative AI.
To continue blindly applying historical understanding to fundamentally new technologies creates huge blind spots, and I’d argue similar to pretending that the creation of ever more destructive weaponry requires no changes to the rules of engagement in warfare.
The game has changed.
To continue blindly applying historical understanding to fundamentally new technologies creates huge blind spots, and I’d argue similar to pretending that the creation of ever more destructive weaponry requires no changes to the rules of engagement in warfare.
The game has changed.
Yes, it is disheartening. Technology shouldn't be held back by this copyright nonsense. Public domain? Come on. Public domain barely exists anymore with the modern multicentury copyrights.
What we need is enough computation power to run these models on our own computers, on our phones even. Then we'll be able to do whatever we want and there's nothing they can do about it.
What we need is enough computation power to run these models on our own computers, on our phones even. Then we'll be able to do whatever we want and there's nothing they can do about it.
> Technology shouldn't be held back by this copyright nonsense.
The technology isn't.
The content is.
The technology isn't.
The content is.
Technology too. Copyright is trying to close one way to monetize AI research (software and hardware).
> Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense.
These are orthogonal issues at this point.
The one concern I do have is that the “lawyer nonsense” (read: AI companies playing fast and loose with current laws) will stack the regulatory deck against AI technology unnecessarily - essentially because of an unforced error that brings negative attention to the technology.
Put another way, these companies are asking to have a spotlight put on them by being so flippant about copyright and ethics issues. This spotlight could have been avoided with better behavior, and the tech would still appear magical and remain one of the most impactful jumps in tech in decades.
These are orthogonal issues at this point.
The one concern I do have is that the “lawyer nonsense” (read: AI companies playing fast and loose with current laws) will stack the regulatory deck against AI technology unnecessarily - essentially because of an unforced error that brings negative attention to the technology.
Put another way, these companies are asking to have a spotlight put on them by being so flippant about copyright and ethics issues. This spotlight could have been avoided with better behavior, and the tech would still appear magical and remain one of the most impactful jumps in tech in decades.
It's not 'playing fast and loose'.
It's an area where there are no existing laws. We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.
It's an area where there are no existing laws. We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.
Are the existing laws written in a way that is favorable to generative AI? No. But the laws do exist.
Whether or not one believes those laws apply to generative AI seems to be based on one's belief in how similar that AI software is to humans.
I'd argue that systematically ingesting 2.3 billion images is not remotely human (one of a myriad of reasons the comparisons break down), and that it is a long stretch to claim that this falls into the realm of fair use as originally envisioned.
It is this insistence that the software is human enough to be granted human-like status that is playing fast and loose with the definitions of things, ranging from consciousness, to learning, to the interpretation of those concepts relative to current laws.
I believe new laws will be written, and old laws will be updated. There's no question that the current legal system is not well equipped for various generative AI systems. But I don't think the current laws have nothing to say.
And I'd still argue that this conversation can be separated from the one about indiscriminately slurping up artist's content.
> We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.
Please don't argue against straw men. There are legitimate concerns from artists across disciplines and genres, and this isn't just isolated shrieking.
Artist backlash is frankly one of the most natural outcomes I could imagine from a system that uses their work without permission. Many of the people who are complaining loudly are not against AI, just against the use of their work without consent or attribution.
I'm both extremely excited about the possibilities the software unlocks and concerned about the implications. AI can exist without ignoring the rights of artists.
Whether or not one believes those laws apply to generative AI seems to be based on one's belief in how similar that AI software is to humans.
I'd argue that systematically ingesting 2.3 billion images is not remotely human (one of a myriad of reasons the comparisons break down), and that it is a long stretch to claim that this falls into the realm of fair use as originally envisioned.
It is this insistence that the software is human enough to be granted human-like status that is playing fast and loose with the definitions of things, ranging from consciousness, to learning, to the interpretation of those concepts relative to current laws.
I believe new laws will be written, and old laws will be updated. There's no question that the current legal system is not well equipped for various generative AI systems. But I don't think the current laws have nothing to say.
And I'd still argue that this conversation can be separated from the one about indiscriminately slurping up artist's content.
> We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.
Please don't argue against straw men. There are legitimate concerns from artists across disciplines and genres, and this isn't just isolated shrieking.
Artist backlash is frankly one of the most natural outcomes I could imagine from a system that uses their work without permission. Many of the people who are complaining loudly are not against AI, just against the use of their work without consent or attribution.
I'm both extremely excited about the possibilities the software unlocks and concerned about the implications. AI can exist without ignoring the rights of artists.
There are exactly zero laws about using openly published materials for learning. Human learning but also machine learning.
There's implicit assumption that if you can get a hold of a copy and manage to learn from it you are free to use what you learned in your creations.
There's implicit assumption that if you can get a hold of a copy and manage to learn from it you are free to use what you learned in your creations.
> There's implicit assumption that if you can get a hold of a copy and manage to learn from it
But there are explicit laws about how you acquire copies of things, and whether they apply seems to be based on what someone believes “learning” to be.
Your claim relies on the belief that a computer ingesting images is similar to a human learning from those images.
But there are explicit laws about how you acquire copies of things, and whether they apply seems to be based on what someone believes “learning” to be.
Your claim relies on the belief that a computer ingesting images is similar to a human learning from those images.
Isn't that how people learn art and writing: they study good artists and writers?
In the United States, a legal derivative work, which isn't a parody, needs to make three substantive changes from the original. It's fair to say that creating new works in the same style or 'look-and-feel' of an artist would satisfy that at prima facie.
In the United States, a legal derivative work, which isn't a parody, needs to make three substantive changes from the original. It's fair to say that creating new works in the same style or 'look-and-feel' of an artist would satisfy that at prima facie.
There should be no "AI companies" in the first place. This stuff should be running on our own computers. That way they cannot set any stupid limits on it.
For sake of argument, let's assume that the six-figure (seven, maybe?) price tag on the hardware was no longer a factor and it was possible to train the models locally, I think the sources of the content everyone is trying to train their local model against would quickly shut down the inundation of traffic they're receiving from the hundreds of thousands of individual computers all trying to build their own "unlimited" model.
The computing requirements enforce the current reality that the training of models will be centralized.
This places a larger ethical burden on those central entities, IMO.
The computing requirements enforce the current reality that the training of models will be centralized.
This places a larger ethical burden on those central entities, IMO.
Decentralize it somehow. People contribute computing power to projects like folding@home. Why not do the same thing for AI? A distributed, decentralized, censorship resistant AI model anyone can contribute to would be world changing.
Somebody should make a crypto where mining is based on doing backpropagation.
Where are all these self trained artists who learned their craft in a bubble, devoid of outside influence from other artists? Is it because there's a better paintbrush now, or is it because that paintbrush is not the 'real' way?
This reminds me of the backlash against the wacom community on deviantart in the early days.
This reminds me of the backlash against the wacom community on deviantart in the early days.
A computer program is not a person, so the argument that stable diffusion does what a person does is of limited relevance.
Is it?
The model learns concepts from images, not the images itself. It has developed general solutions explaining light, colors, composition, objects and their relation to one another, facial features and too many more concepts to even begin enumerating them.
How is this different from a human studying art, literature, music, etc. to learn concepts and then apply them in creating new pictures, novels or songs?
The model learns concepts from images, not the images itself. It has developed general solutions explaining light, colors, composition, objects and their relation to one another, facial features and too many more concepts to even begin enumerating them.
How is this different from a human studying art, literature, music, etc. to learn concepts and then apply them in creating new pictures, novels or songs?
It is different simply because it’s not a human. We can and often do assign laws that affect the automation of something a human can do. For example, installing a device on a firearm that repeatedly pulls the trigger creates a machine gun that is highly restricted legally, regardless of whether a human can easily pull the trigger at the same rate.
Further, just because we can talk about how artists, at a high level do the same thing as AI image generators, the actual mechanism is not exactly the same and is therefore still subject to distinct regulation.
Even if you were able to somehow establish that computer programs should have the same rights as people (since they are made and used by people,) you’re still not out of the woods. Much debate remains about what creativity and originality means when talking about human generated content in an IP sense, and adding the programmatic aspect doesn’t simplify things. (eg The Sina Qua Non of Copyright is Uniqueness, Not Originality https://tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v20/v20p327.pdf)
Further, just because we can talk about how artists, at a high level do the same thing as AI image generators, the actual mechanism is not exactly the same and is therefore still subject to distinct regulation.
Even if you were able to somehow establish that computer programs should have the same rights as people (since they are made and used by people,) you’re still not out of the woods. Much debate remains about what creativity and originality means when talking about human generated content in an IP sense, and adding the programmatic aspect doesn’t simplify things. (eg The Sina Qua Non of Copyright is Uniqueness, Not Originality https://tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v20/v20p327.pdf)
> It is different simply because it’s not a human
So? An excavator clearly isn't a human, but it digs holes in the ground by the same principles that a human using only his bare hands would, only faster and more efficient.
So? An excavator clearly isn't a human, but it digs holes in the ground by the same principles that a human using only his bare hands would, only faster and more efficient.
So then it can be subject to laws that are different than those that apply to a human.
In Washington you must dig for clams with human power, you cannot use a hydraulic clam pump. There was a time where you could down 50 birds with a single firing of a punt gun. This was made illegal, even if you could still eventually bag 50 birds with a normal shotgun.
In Washington you must dig for clams with human power, you cannot use a hydraulic clam pump. There was a time where you could down 50 birds with a single firing of a punt gun. This was made illegal, even if you could still eventually bag 50 birds with a normal shotgun.
For one, a computer cannot hold a copyright so a work produced by a computer is not copyrightable, whereas a derivative work made by a human can be.
Same as with cameras, brushes, etc. these models are tools, that humans use.
I can setup stable diffusion on a computer, I can put a brush next to a roll of canvas, or hammer and chisel next to a block of marble. Neither of these setups will create art on its own.
I can setup stable diffusion on a computer, I can put a brush next to a roll of canvas, or hammer and chisel next to a block of marble. Neither of these setups will create art on its own.
Rent seeking by owners of AI machines is OK, but not by copyright owners?
I think creating art in the style of an artist is well covered by Fair Use.
Make a mouse cartoon in the style of Disney and tell me how well that goes down.
That's because you run into trademark laws, not copyright. Not to mention, if you can make the case that your art of the mouse is Parody, then it falls squarely under fair use.
Plagiarism is very much a matter of copyright, not trademark infringement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...
Here you go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead
> The game's creators, brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, took inspiration from the rubber hose style of the golden age of American animation and the surrealist qualities of works of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Fleischer Studios, Warner Bros. Cartoons, MGM Cartoon Studio and Walter Lantz Productions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead
> The game's creators, brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, took inspiration from the rubber hose style of the golden age of American animation and the surrealist qualities of works of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Fleischer Studios, Warner Bros. Cartoons, MGM Cartoon Studio and Walter Lantz Productions.
There is a conspicuous lack of mice in that cartoon.
In music it sometimes isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Even more famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogerty_v._Fantasy,_Inc.
Even if it were (which I am not competent to speak on), should that help to enrich some large corporation, for example?
Yes. Abolish all copyright. Are we hackers or not?
Spoiler alert: They're not!
This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.
This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.
pg did originally call it 'startup news' but i don't think you have standing to accuse him of 'appropriating' the term 'hacker' until you've hacked together something of comparable significance to on lisp or viaweb
You understand that completely kills OSS as a concept, right?
So what? Free software was literally created in reaction to copyright protections getting extended to software. They make no sense in a world without copyright.
By the way, it would also kill proprietary software as a concept. Source code leak? It's no longer a crime to use it. We'd never have to read licensing nonsense ever again.
By the way, it would also kill proprietary software as a concept. Source code leak? It's no longer a crime to use it. We'd never have to read licensing nonsense ever again.
It would kill research. Why pay for R&D when a gazillion other companies will instantly clone it?
And yet the list of the most important inventions there are no inventions created by companies. All tax funded.
Corporations R&D is great at one thing, making things cheaper to produce and thus more widely available. And that's wonderful. But actually we want corporations to steal that tech from each other because then the consumer benefits the most.
Corporations R&D is great at one thing, making things cheaper to produce and thus more widely available. And that's wonderful. But actually we want corporations to steal that tech from each other because then the consumer benefits the most.
What about a simple basic item like Velcro? Or the printing press? Or the copier? Telegraph?
Your claim is… simply utterly untrue.
Your claim is… simply utterly untrue.
I exaggerated a bit but none of your examples are from corporate R&D.
Those inventions were mostly self funded by individual inventors who in some cases had a great trouble getting the business interested in the invention at all.
Also how does velcro compare against LED, laser or microchip in terms of importance?
Those inventions were mostly self funded by individual inventors who in some cases had a great trouble getting the business interested in the invention at all.
Also how does velcro compare against LED, laser or microchip in terms of importance?
Why would that be? Huge amount of OSS is released under fully permissive licenses.
Permissive licenses like "if you use this code you must also make your code available under the same license" form the basis of the world's most often used open source software.
Open licenses are not the same as abolishing copyright.
Open licenses are not the same as abolishing copyright.
Those are not permissive licenses. Those are copyleft licenses. As I said, a lot of software uses permissive ones.
https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...
https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...
“Permissive” provided the code is attributed, which the products you advocate for do not do.
Those licenses only carry weight because of copyright.
I was talking about permissive licenses. They have very few conditions:
https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...
Their weight is irrelevant. They would carry pretty much as much meaning in the complete absence of copyright.
In the world of sensible defaults they wouldn't need to exist at all.
https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...
Their weight is irrelevant. They would carry pretty much as much meaning in the complete absence of copyright.
In the world of sensible defaults they wouldn't need to exist at all.
Software licenses exist because copyright enables author to dictate terms. Without that, there are no software licenses. This is where the "without copyright, there is no OSS" comes from.
> Their weight is irrelevant.
I think we're having different conversations. The only thing I'm talking about is whether terms can be legally enforced without copyright.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but it seems to be something like "Permissive licensing is basically like public domain." I don't agree with that line of thinking because of the attribution requirement in permissive licenses, but if that's what you're getting at, I get what you mean.
> Their weight is irrelevant.
I think we're having different conversations. The only thing I'm talking about is whether terms can be legally enforced without copyright.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but it seems to be something like "Permissive licensing is basically like public domain." I don't agree with that line of thinking because of the attribution requirement in permissive licenses, but if that's what you're getting at, I get what you mean.
Free and open source software licenses are redundant in a world where copyright and intellectual property laws don't exist, and no form of media (including software) can legally be owned by anyone.
Casual reminder that the endgame of the GPL was to make software copyright unenforceable.
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You have my respect.
Strongly disagree, IP law (despite it's misuse by a certain mouse mascot'd company) is extremely important and protecting artists work and their livelihood.
The price floor on art commissions is already very low and AI effectively makes that cost zero, while providing zero compensation to the thousands of artists. Without their work, there's no Stability AI. From an ethical standpoint Stability is in the wrong, and from a legal one I think the class has a very strong case to recover damages.
The price floor on art commissions is already very low and AI effectively makes that cost zero, while providing zero compensation to the thousands of artists. Without their work, there's no Stability AI. From an ethical standpoint Stability is in the wrong, and from a legal one I think the class has a very strong case to recover damages.
StableDiffusion is not based on art commissions. You can search https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ and see what kind of nonsense it usually has trained on.
It most definitely is, LAION-5B contains a large amount of copyrighted works from DeviantArt, ArtStation, etc.
Are those all commissions?
The aesthetic subset is .05% Artstation:
https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/im...
Not sure if that's a large amount or not. They could've used robots.txt if they didn't want to be indexed.
The aesthetic subset is .05% Artstation:
https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/im...
Not sure if that's a large amount or not. They could've used robots.txt if they didn't want to be indexed.
> Note that this is only a small subset of the total training data: about 2% of the 600 million images used to train the most recent three checkpoints, and only 0.5% of the 2.3 billion images that it was first trained on. [1]
That dataset only covers "aesthetic" clip terms as well. Not to mention a lot of images come from Pinterest and other aggregators.
[1] https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-...
That dataset only covers "aesthetic" clip terms as well. Not to mention a lot of images come from Pinterest and other aggregators.
[1] https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-...
I think this is why it was very important that their first release of the model weights (the v1.4 model) was and will continue to be very important. While training an entire model from scratch requires an insane amount of data and compute right now (and will continue to be out of reach of individuals for some years I think), fine-tuning the model can be done on a consumer graphics card (they call it Dreambooth)... and I believe we will see further refinements that allow more and more useful tuning and features being built by individuals on top that original model, making it more and more powerful for specific uses. So even if future efforts change the functionality, or nerf the output in some way, there will always be people developing tools on the original weights. That cat is out of the bag.
ChatGPT has shown that attempting to train the model to decline certain types of requests is of limited effectiveness and readily circumvented. The ability to make custom checkpoints and tools like Dreambooth will further limit these restrictions.
It would be a spectacularly shitty world where IP protection is only granted to entities with a legal budget that eclipses the GDP of Antigua, and not to smaller independent creators.
The ends of having an useful model like stable diffusion doesn't really justify just ignoring the IP rights of tens of thousands of creators who were already having a pretty rough time making ends meet. That's just a shitty thing to do.
The ends of having an useful model like stable diffusion doesn't really justify just ignoring the IP rights of tens of thousands of creators who were already having a pretty rough time making ends meet. That's just a shitty thing to do.
It's already the case that independent creators get their works pulled on bogus copyright claims.
Copyright law isn't friendly to small creators, and big creators use it as a cudgel with absolutely no consequences.
Copyright law isn't friendly to small creators, and big creators use it as a cudgel with absolutely no consequences.
And because things are bad we should go ahead and make them worse?
A lawyer who works on YouTube channel Corridor Crew posted a decent breakdown on this lawsuit recently as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857
Great write-up. SD's removing the ability to imitate styles will probably go a long way to quell objections, though it will be interesting to see if there's a future legal split over the styles of living and dead artists. I don't imagine that anyone would object to 'autoseurat' for example.
I can see see a future dispute arising over outpainting (beginning with an existing copyrighted work) but there infringement and identity of the infringer (the user, not the toolmaker) is more clear.
I can see see a future dispute arising over outpainting (beginning with an existing copyrighted work) but there infringement and identity of the infringer (the user, not the toolmaker) is more clear.
I've been saying this since it came out...
Stable Diffusion is equivalent to hip-hop sampling in the 80s and 90s. The outcome is obvious.
Stable Diffusion is equivalent to hip-hop sampling in the 80s and 90s. The outcome is obvious.
I’ve heard this argument on numerous occasions but I have never heard someone justify it or why they believe it.
Are there specific similarities that make you believe these are equivalent scenarios? Not just “it feels thematically similar”.
Are there specific similarities that make you believe these are equivalent scenarios? Not just “it feels thematically similar”.
It's the closest thing to a precedent.
Hip-hop originally recorded and transformed vocals, instruments, and beats to create something new from pieces of something old. The practice occurred without permission and obviously ended up in court. Now sampling requires a licensing agreement. The additional cost has fundamentally changed the genre (over the last 40 years).
Hip-hop and tech both ignored IP rights because neither started with a legal framework and both would have found the additional cost prohibitive.
Hip-hop originally recorded and transformed vocals, instruments, and beats to create something new from pieces of something old. The practice occurred without permission and obviously ended up in court. Now sampling requires a licensing agreement. The additional cost has fundamentally changed the genre (over the last 40 years).
Hip-hop and tech both ignored IP rights because neither started with a legal framework and both would have found the additional cost prohibitive.
That's helpful. I wasn't aware of the eventual licensing enforcement.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules).
I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefore is by definition not infringing.
I suspect this might be where the flurry of downvotes came from.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules).
I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefore is by definition not infringing.
I suspect this might be where the flurry of downvotes came from.
"you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules"
The systems are similar too despite having completely different internal processes. Both transformed existing IP without permission, to produce sufficiently remixed art as an output. A sufficiently generic abstraction would look very similar despite the disparity of domain.
The primary difference between hip-hop and Stable Diffusion is that AI cannot rationalize, explain, or attribute inspiration to a final product.
There was no aha moment and thus no creativity. It has no vested interest in its work.
The systems are similar too despite having completely different internal processes. Both transformed existing IP without permission, to produce sufficiently remixed art as an output. A sufficiently generic abstraction would look very similar despite the disparity of domain.
The primary difference between hip-hop and Stable Diffusion is that AI cannot rationalize, explain, or attribute inspiration to a final product.
There was no aha moment and thus no creativity. It has no vested interest in its work.
I think there is a pretty big difference though. In the case of sampling you can play the original against the new media and show that they are 'the same'. I have no idea how you would go about doing something similar for Stable Diffusion. "Those three pixels look different when you remove image X from the training set" is probably not a convincing argument to anyone.
So the litmus test for IP theft is "efficacy of obfuscation"?
Remember, input is fundamentally required. Without that dataset, Stable Diffusion delivers exactly nothing.
Remember, input is fundamentally required. Without that dataset, Stable Diffusion delivers exactly nothing.
>Remember, input is fundamentally required. Without that dataset, Stable Diffusion delivers exactly nothing.
That's true of lots of things that are legally considered transformative though. E.g. without all those books that Google scanned, Google Books would be completely useless.
That's true of lots of things that are legally considered transformative though. E.g. without all those books that Google scanned, Google Books would be completely useless.
I don't really understand the argument about danger mouses grey album being different from just a random "mash up" because the artistic merit behind the grey album. Sure the grey album is likely much more pleasant to listen to and would likely be considered worthy of copyright itself, where a random mash might not be. That doesn't change the fact that danger mouse had to ask permission to use Jay Zs and the Beatles work (and likely had to pay), or otherwise would have violated copyright. So how is that argument relevant. Nobody is arguing that composing images via stable diffusion prompts (like making some collage) is not a creative process. The argument is does one have to have permission/licence of the original creators.
It's interesting the IP attorney cites The Grey Album as being an example of something that is legal, when the reality is that the case was never brought because the original artists wishes meant it was unattractive for EMI to pursue the case.
I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.
I'd rather not risk stunting progress in areas like language translation, malware scanning, DDOS prevention, spam filtering, product defect detection, scientific data analysis, autonomous vehicles, voice dictation, narration/text-to-speech engines, drug discovery, protein folding, optimization in production lines/agriculture/logistics, detecting seizures and falls, weather forecasting and early-warning systems, etc. just to let Getty Images have what they feel entitled to.
Best outcome in my opinion would be for the output to be judged on a case-by-case basis, like human works are, not for machine learning on data without "proper authorization from the owner" to inherently count as infringement.
Best outcome in my opinion would be for the output to be judged on a case-by-case basis, like human works are, not for machine learning on data without "proper authorization from the owner" to inherently count as infringement.
I hope the exact opposite. AI, including AGI if we ever get there, cannot be allowed to be strangled in its crib by artificially limiting the information it can learn from in the name of IP maximalism. IP law already goes way too far, the line should be drawn here.
If you want new art you probably want some form of IP. What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?
It becomes harder and harder to create new art when every art style, every melody, every plot point is owned by someone else and you're prevented from using it.
If the things that Stable Diffusion produces isn't art, then new art will be made in the same way it was made before copyright existed (patronage).
If it is art, then it will be made both by patronage and by people saying: "Hey StableChatSiri, make me some art."
(People will still do the later even if it doesn't count as art).
Hm. Thinking of patrons, does anyone know how many artists and sculptors there were in 1710 England?
If it is art, then it will be made both by patronage and by people saying: "Hey StableChatSiri, make me some art."
(People will still do the later even if it doesn't count as art).
Hm. Thinking of patrons, does anyone know how many artists and sculptors there were in 1710 England?
> What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?
Because when I have access to these tools I will make better art than the technocrat with access to these tools?
Because when I have access to these tools I will make better art than the technocrat with access to these tools?
But then are you still an artist or are you now a technocrat?
An artist.
You’ve got a lot of knots to untangle.
You’ve got a lot of knots to untangle.
Who cares? Seriously. The technology is far more important than their little incentives. Copyright has already destroyed computer freedom and the internet. It can't be allowed to destroy yet another awesome innovation.
I keep programming computers just because I like it. Maybe they'll keep creating too for the same reasons. Maybe they won't. It's irrelevant either way.
I keep programming computers just because I like it. Maybe they'll keep creating too for the same reasons. Maybe they won't. It's irrelevant either way.
Really? I have little problem with computer freedom and if the internet was destroyed you wouldn't be able to leave comments on HN.
The nihilistic feeling that it's irrelevant whether new art is created kindof proves my point.
The nihilistic feeling that it's irrelevant whether new art is created kindof proves my point.
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totally ludicrous and hard to believe you actually think this. please take a glance at all of human history.
[deleted]
why does art have to be commercial at all? artmakers will art, with or without compensation.
Many people create art with the only incentive is that they want to. 3.3 million guitars were sold in the US in 2021. Many of those will never be used outside of a bedroom.
Love of their craft. The same reason anybody undertakes any creative endeavor without charging for it. I admit my position is a bit extreme, but I would like to see the concept of IP abolished as it has become an abusive dead weight on culture.
More moderately, all art is derivative at the end of the day. None of it was created ex nihilo. We already have legal guardrails for direct reproduction of specific characters and specific pieces, and that is plenty. The fact that maximalists want to kill a nascent technology by restricting the right to learn from, something that even our extremely slanted laws have carveouts for, is nothing short of offensive.
More moderately, all art is derivative at the end of the day. None of it was created ex nihilo. We already have legal guardrails for direct reproduction of specific characters and specific pieces, and that is plenty. The fact that maximalists want to kill a nascent technology by restricting the right to learn from, something that even our extremely slanted laws have carveouts for, is nothing short of offensive.
The technology behind AI and AGI does not depend on copyrighted work. If the models are trained on original work, public domain works, or extremely permissively licensed work (CC0, WTFPL) then there simply is no IP conflict.
The use of including copyrighted materials in the trained model was a choice, not some obvious fact about the nature of AI. All of this could've been avoided if the data set did not include unlicensed work in the first place.
The use of including copyrighted materials in the trained model was a choice, not some obvious fact about the nature of AI. All of this could've been avoided if the data set did not include unlicensed work in the first place.
Remember that, at least in this country and I believe in all countries who signed onto the Berne Convention, copyright is the default.
If your AI is limited to only training on the paucity of explicitly permissibly licensed/public domain content (and as I think about it more, this would only apply to things that are permissibly licensed without an attribution requirement, which is something there is no meaningful way to do in a model like the one we are discussing) your AI will not be very useful. With that in mind, I would argue that yes, it absolutely is an obvious fact about its nature.
If your AI is limited to only training on the paucity of explicitly permissibly licensed/public domain content (and as I think about it more, this would only apply to things that are permissibly licensed without an attribution requirement, which is something there is no meaningful way to do in a model like the one we are discussing) your AI will not be very useful. With that in mind, I would argue that yes, it absolutely is an obvious fact about its nature.
I hope this technology will become so ubiquitous that laws and "proper authorization" won't matter.
[deleted]
Am I the only one who thinks this just isn't defined well enough to be decided by the judiciary? It should be legislated. My opinion is that ML training should be distinctly different from human learning.
I agree that it should both be legislated, and substantially different to human learning. In the US (or UK) however, most legislators are such intellectual lightweights that they have no hope of grasping even the basics of what they are legislating.
> future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset.
How does this work? Do they retrain the model from scratch every week? Or is it somehow possible to retroactively remove specific training-set items from the already-trained model?
How does this work? Do they retrain the model from scratch every week? Or is it somehow possible to retroactively remove specific training-set items from the already-trained model?
“LLMs are illegal because anything they see is owned by other people”
The Disney protection act rears its head…
The Disney protection act rears its head…
"[The complaint] argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data."
As noted in OP, this is an outstandingly bad definition of Deep-Neural-Networks, and the lawsuit should fail when the court hears an explanation from any competent practitioner.
However, a correct definition would make the lawsuit far more interesting, imo. Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How does this entity affect social well-being, how should existing laws be modified--if at all-- with the welfare of humanity in mind, etc?
As noted in OP, this is an outstandingly bad definition of Deep-Neural-Networks, and the lawsuit should fail when the court hears an explanation from any competent practitioner.
However, a correct definition would make the lawsuit far more interesting, imo. Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How does this entity affect social well-being, how should existing laws be modified--if at all-- with the welfare of humanity in mind, etc?
> Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means.
How can you claim with a straight face that this is a better explanation of what an NN is?
An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. It is much much closer to "a giant archive of compressed images being used to interpolate between them" (though it's not that) than it is to a "superhumanly talented artist".
How can you claim with a straight face that this is a better explanation of what an NN is?
An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. It is much much closer to "a giant archive of compressed images being used to interpolate between them" (though it's not that) than it is to a "superhumanly talented artist".
> An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input.
Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close. You'll need more than wikipedia to appreciate what deep-neural-networks are doing here, it's dimensional space that's key. What DNNs do that is similar to the human brain is that they order "concepts" in high-dimensional space. Colors, textures, shape and hierarchies of same are organized and cross-referenced with text in an incredibly complex connectome. It would be useless to memorize images with their textual descriptions as that would be horrendously inefficient/ineffective during inference. Rather, the model must do what we do and understand what makes an image a "landscape" or a "portrait" or a "cartoon". It needs to understand what is an artist's style and how to perform it on a work never before created.
"Understanding" can only mean ordering meaningless letters and pixels in multidimensional space so that they line up with human understanding (and human 'understanding', in turn, can only mean ordering meaningless sensory perceptions in the brain's multidimensional connectome such that reality turns out to be approximately predicted and controlled). The only systems that work this way efficiently are neural networks, biological and artificial.
Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close. You'll need more than wikipedia to appreciate what deep-neural-networks are doing here, it's dimensional space that's key. What DNNs do that is similar to the human brain is that they order "concepts" in high-dimensional space. Colors, textures, shape and hierarchies of same are organized and cross-referenced with text in an incredibly complex connectome. It would be useless to memorize images with their textual descriptions as that would be horrendously inefficient/ineffective during inference. Rather, the model must do what we do and understand what makes an image a "landscape" or a "portrait" or a "cartoon". It needs to understand what is an artist's style and how to perform it on a work never before created.
"Understanding" can only mean ordering meaningless letters and pixels in multidimensional space so that they line up with human understanding (and human 'understanding', in turn, can only mean ordering meaningless sensory perceptions in the brain's multidimensional connectome such that reality turns out to be approximately predicted and controlled). The only systems that work this way efficiently are neural networks, biological and artificial.
> Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close.
First of all, we have no idea how biological NNs learn, how they represent information, how they reason etc. Given what we do know, there is no reason to assume any similarity with ANNs on any of those fronts. Just to give one example, we know very well that a single biological neuron encodes significant information and is capable of reasoning on its own. In fact, even non-neuronal biological cells are capable of such - especially looking at single-celled organisms, which display extraordinarily complex behaviors with no NN in sight.
Second of all, we don't exactly understand how the huge models we have actually encode the higher-level representations of the training set that they store. Of course, we can say for sure that they are not literally storing a copy of the data on simple space requirements. But we can also say for sure that their "understanding" of the data, as well as their capacity for inference, is significantly different from our own - since they make certain mistakes that are nearly impossible for a human to make, while showing super human abilities in other aspects. So, if anything, we must conclude that whatever it is they are doing, it is most certainly not a way of understanding the information the way we understand it.
First of all, we have no idea how biological NNs learn, how they represent information, how they reason etc. Given what we do know, there is no reason to assume any similarity with ANNs on any of those fronts. Just to give one example, we know very well that a single biological neuron encodes significant information and is capable of reasoning on its own. In fact, even non-neuronal biological cells are capable of such - especially looking at single-celled organisms, which display extraordinarily complex behaviors with no NN in sight.
Second of all, we don't exactly understand how the huge models we have actually encode the higher-level representations of the training set that they store. Of course, we can say for sure that they are not literally storing a copy of the data on simple space requirements. But we can also say for sure that their "understanding" of the data, as well as their capacity for inference, is significantly different from our own - since they make certain mistakes that are nearly impossible for a human to make, while showing super human abilities in other aspects. So, if anything, we must conclude that whatever it is they are doing, it is most certainly not a way of understanding the information the way we understand it.
My initial definition was "like a super-humanly talented artist": this is very different from a human being who also happens to be an artist. Stable Diffusion does only art with text-prompting well, nothing else, and will take a very different "mental" route to creation as a human. But nevertheless it still creates "super-humanly talented" art because it is widely recognized as incredibly good, few artists can do this as well, probably none can do it with comparable range, and certainly no one can match its speed. Therefore its effect on society is as if a super-humanly talented artist could be effortlessly cloned. Where is the laughable conclusion that requires me to force a straight face?
What is laughable is that these abilities could come from interpolation or collage (not your claim but the plaintiff's). The only way these abilities could occur is if Stable Diffusion can represent image and text very similar to the way human brains comprehend them. The argument here is simple: what are the odds that StableDiffusion/DNNs have hit on a representational method that is totally different from human brains yet yields the same recognition, praise and admiration for the artist from everyone who sees it? Seems to me close to 0.
What is laughable is that these abilities could come from interpolation or collage (not your claim but the plaintiff's). The only way these abilities could occur is if Stable Diffusion can represent image and text very similar to the way human brains comprehend them. The argument here is simple: what are the odds that StableDiffusion/DNNs have hit on a representational method that is totally different from human brains yet yields the same recognition, praise and admiration for the artist from everyone who sees it? Seems to me close to 0.
> it is widely recognized as incredibly good, few artists can do this as well, probably none can do it with comparable range
I very much disagree. Pretty much any halfway decent artist (say, anyone able to at least caricature recognizable people) is able to produce this kind of imitative art, when/if they are aiming for this type of copying. I've seen nothing coming out of SD that I couldn't expect to find on DeviantArt, at least if I commissioned it specifically. Most human artists of course don't do this, since people usually don't like reproductions (apart from posters) or copying others' style. Note as well the huge problem SD has with consistent fine details (especially text, but also often hands and even faces).
Of course, I fully agree on the speed factor (and would add scale/cost) in which SD without a question is far beyond humanity, obviously. That is a meaningful difference that is very likely to affect markets like decorative prints and other low-value art.
Perhaps this basic disagreement (which is of course ultimately subjective, unless someone is going to do a blind taste test) explains the difference of opinions for the rest of the points.
I very much disagree. Pretty much any halfway decent artist (say, anyone able to at least caricature recognizable people) is able to produce this kind of imitative art, when/if they are aiming for this type of copying. I've seen nothing coming out of SD that I couldn't expect to find on DeviantArt, at least if I commissioned it specifically. Most human artists of course don't do this, since people usually don't like reproductions (apart from posters) or copying others' style. Note as well the huge problem SD has with consistent fine details (especially text, but also often hands and even faces).
Of course, I fully agree on the speed factor (and would add scale/cost) in which SD without a question is far beyond humanity, obviously. That is a meaningful difference that is very likely to affect markets like decorative prints and other low-value art.
Perhaps this basic disagreement (which is of course ultimately subjective, unless someone is going to do a blind taste test) explains the difference of opinions for the rest of the points.
I'm assuming that you disagree specifically that few artists can essentially create derivative art (i.e avoiding plagiarization but being clearly influenced by artist X or paying homage to artist Y, etc.) as well as top SD models. Well, what about a blind test: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwo...
Now, sure, winning just 1 contest isn't going to settle the matter but I think it provides reasonable evidence that SD is heading to elite quality at a rapid pace. Above, the submitter Allen was responsible for directing and cleaning the results so deserves credit. However, Allen is also using a year-old MidJourney model that has likely improved dramatically already.
It seems uncontroversial that even if SD models aren't in the top-tier of imitative/derivative art (or "art from text" as that genre evolves) right now, they will be soon.
Now, sure, winning just 1 contest isn't going to settle the matter but I think it provides reasonable evidence that SD is heading to elite quality at a rapid pace. Above, the submitter Allen was responsible for directing and cleaning the results so deserves credit. However, Allen is also using a year-old MidJourney model that has likely improved dramatically already.
It seems uncontroversial that even if SD models aren't in the top-tier of imitative/derivative art (or "art from text" as that genre evolves) right now, they will be soon.
> the lawsuit will fail when the court hears an explanation from an expert
So how often does this happen? Somehow I'm too cynical to believe that a judge would rule against the intellectual property industry. The whole thing is based on absurd concepts to begin with, concepts that can be reduced to the ownership of unique numbers. Once a society accepts that, what difference do explanations make?
So how often does this happen? Somehow I'm too cynical to believe that a judge would rule against the intellectual property industry. The whole thing is based on absurd concepts to begin with, concepts that can be reduced to the ownership of unique numbers. Once a society accepts that, what difference do explanations make?
That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement.
Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA takedown request without a copyright registration, but you can't enforce it in court without one.[2] This raises the question of, if you as a service receive a DMCA takedown request, should you ask the requestor to send proof of copyright registration, and if they don't, ignore the request?
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/registration/
[2] https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright...
Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA takedown request without a copyright registration, but you can't enforce it in court without one.[2] This raises the question of, if you as a service receive a DMCA takedown request, should you ask the requestor to send proof of copyright registration, and if they don't, ignore the request?
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/registration/
[2] https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright...
Is this requirement to register specifically a feature of the DMCA? It seems quite surprising if, as the article claims, “people who don’t have registered copyrights cannot enforce their copyrights in court.”
That would mean that the vast majority of artwork posted online is essentially free to exploit in the USA, since I’m sure most people do not routinely register their works with the copyright office before posting them.
That would mean that the vast majority of artwork posted online is essentially free to exploit in the USA, since I’m sure most people do not routinely register their works with the copyright office before posting them.
Unless they're legally obligated to show proof of copyright registration for the takedown notice to be a valid, it would be risky to assume they didn't register it just because they didn't show proof.
Most of this revolves around the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. That is, doing a takedown without authenticating the ownership of the copyright provides immunity against being sued for contributory infringement. But to actually win such a lawsuit, the purported copyright owner would have to show proof of registration.
This suggests an online process which looks like this:
* US Service provider offers web page for DMCA notices.
* Web page requests that the user enter copyright registration info.
* If user fails to provide registration info, web page offers links to various national copyright registration sites to register a copyright. A payment receipt for copyright registration is acceptable as temporary proof of registration, but must be followed up within some period of time by actual proof of registration.
* Temporary proof of registration is enough for a takedown, but the material will go back up if full proof is not submitted later.
This would put a big dent in nuisance DMCA claims. The service provider might get sued occasionally, but for big providers, it's probably worth litigating this once or twice. The companies that have valuable IP file copyright registrations. Disney will be able to show a copyright registration on all their movies.
This suggests an online process which looks like this:
* US Service provider offers web page for DMCA notices.
* Web page requests that the user enter copyright registration info.
* If user fails to provide registration info, web page offers links to various national copyright registration sites to register a copyright. A payment receipt for copyright registration is acceptable as temporary proof of registration, but must be followed up within some period of time by actual proof of registration.
* Temporary proof of registration is enough for a takedown, but the material will go back up if full proof is not submitted later.
This would put a big dent in nuisance DMCA claims. The service provider might get sued occasionally, but for big providers, it's probably worth litigating this once or twice. The companies that have valuable IP file copyright registrations. Disney will be able to show a copyright registration on all their movies.
How can this possibly be a valid good faith argument? Either they're in breach of authors' copyright which extends to every piece of art that they included in the dataset without permission, or they're in the clear and aren't obligated to respond to removal requests.
This reads like damage control to me in an effort to temporarily silence the loudest critics.