[HN Gopher] An IP attorney's reading of the Stable Diffusion cla...
___________________________________________________________________
An IP attorney's reading of the Stable Diffusion class action
lawsuit
Author : spiffage
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-01-26 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (katedowninglaw.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (katedowninglaw.com)
| Animats wrote:
| 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...
| rebuilder wrote:
| 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.
| mcbits wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > 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. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing
| and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving
| a much more complex and muddled set of facts for the jury to wade
| through.
|
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > 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.
| benlivengood wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| astrange wrote:
| Is there artwork included in libjpeg?
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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.
| N1ckFG wrote:
| 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
| counttheforks wrote:
| The models are already released. They can't retroactively
| censor released models.
| hehdhdhkf wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Just an FYI, many artists create with no financial
| incentive.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > 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.
| hdjdnnhddddd wrote:
| 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.
| epistemer wrote:
| 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.
| halfnormalform wrote:
| 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.
| km3r wrote:
| The music industry is the biggest its ever been... so
| yes?
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| > 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?
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| 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.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| > 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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?
| km3r wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| None of that addresses anything I've said.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| 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.
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > 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.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| > 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?
| tadfisher wrote:
| 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.
| epistemer wrote:
| 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.
| jonhohle wrote:
| 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.
| sct202 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is not just the US, this also applies to many, many
| other countries.
| acomjean wrote:
| >"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.
| wvenable wrote:
| > 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?
| shagie wrote:
| 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_? "
| wvenable wrote:
| > 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.
| shagie wrote:
| 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_000
| 3.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-copyrightab
| le-...
|
| > 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. SS 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".
| wvenable wrote:
| 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.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Humans can be trusted not to do that thing, and get in
| trouble if they get caught.
| wvenable wrote:
| Is it not humans giving the AI prompts to do these things?
| Why does the machine in the middle matter?
| cma wrote:
| > 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?
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| krisoft wrote:
| 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.
| gugagore wrote:
| I think you underestimate the scale of data these models are
| trained on by many orders of magnitude.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| 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.
| quitit wrote:
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| 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.
| simiones wrote:
| 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).
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| 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).
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| sebstefan wrote:
| > 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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).
| threeseed wrote:
| But the artist's work itself is copyrightable.
|
| _Any_ use of that work without permission (and thus
| attribution /compensation) is the problem.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Fair use is a thing.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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...
| blibble wrote:
| 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
| hnfong wrote:
| 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)
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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 Herge)
| 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.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| 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.
| consumer451 wrote:
| 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
| shanebellone wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| 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".
| shanebellone wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| shanebellone wrote:
| "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.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| > 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?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "LLMs are illegal because anything they see is owned by other
| people"
|
| The Disney protection act rears its head...
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Rent seeking by owners of AI machines is OK, but not by
| copyright owners?
| Kiro wrote:
| Yes. Abolish all copyright. Are we hackers or not?
| manigandham wrote:
| Who is "we"?
| Kiro wrote:
| Participants on a site called Hacker News.
| TylerE wrote:
| You understand that completely kills OSS as a concept,
| right?
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Casual reminder that the endgame of the GPL was to make
| software copyright unenforceable.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| It would kill research. Why pay for R&D when a gazillion
| other companies will instantly clone it?
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Why would that be? Huge amount of OSS is released under
| fully permissive licenses.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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...
| rpdillon wrote:
| Those licenses only carry weight because of copyright.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You have my respect.
| t433 wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| I think creating art in the style of an artist is well
| covered by Fair Use.
| acomjean wrote:
| In music it sometimes isn't.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
| TylerE wrote:
| Even more famously:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogerty_v._Fantasy,_Inc.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Even if it were (which I am not competent to speak on),
| should that help to enrich some large corporation, for
| example?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Make a mouse cartoon in the style of Disney and tell me how
| well that goes down.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There is a conspicuous lack of mice in that cartoon.
| yokem55 wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| > _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.
| ok123456 wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| It most definitely is, LAION-5B contains a large amount of
| copyrighted works from DeviantArt, ArtStation, etc.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| > 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-...
| healsdata wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| likeclockwork wrote:
| People keep trying to compensate artists with exposure.
| Avicebron wrote:
| 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?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| 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.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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?
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| hooverd wrote:
| On top of that, deliberately training models to copy an
| artists work and antagonizing the artist about it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
| haswell wrote:
| > _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?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
| haswell wrote:
| > _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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
| hooverd wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| But AI companies are paying AI artists with electricity
| and computing power so they are buying copyright from AI
| artists. ;)
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| 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.
| t433 wrote:
| All art is derivative.
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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?
| angst_ridden wrote:
| 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(r) 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.)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Technology shouldn't be held back by this copyright
| nonsense.
|
| The technology isn't.
|
| The content is.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Technology too. Copyright is trying to close one way to
| monetize AI research (software and hardware).
| belter wrote:
| Are you trolling? Because I can't guess...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| No.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| msla wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| And because things are bad we should go ahead and make them
| worse?
| antiterra wrote:
| 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.
| aliqot wrote:
| 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.
| antiterra wrote:
| A computer program is not a person, so the argument that
| stable diffusion does what a person does is of limited
| relevance.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| 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?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| antiterra wrote:
| 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)
| tshadley wrote:
| "[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?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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?
| simiones wrote:
| > 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".
| rafale wrote:
| 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.
| Ukv wrote:
| 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.
| Karunamon wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| Karunamon wrote:
| 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.
| troyvit wrote:
| 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?
| nyolfen wrote:
| totally ludicrous and hard to believe you actually think
| this. please take a glance at all of human history.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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?
| williamcotton wrote:
| > 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?
| troyvit wrote:
| But then are you still an artist or are you now a
| technocrat?
| williamcotton wrote:
| An artist.
|
| You've got a lot of knots to untangle.
| [deleted]
| wvenable wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| troyvit wrote:
| 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.
| p0pcult wrote:
| why does art have to be commercial at all? artmakers will
| art, with or without compensation.
| Karunamon wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I hope this technology will become so ubiquitous that laws and
| "proper authorization" won't matter.
| xeyownt wrote:
| 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.
| counttheforks wrote:
| > 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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".
| [deleted]
| l33tman wrote:
| That wasn't the question. The question was if the learning
| process itself is violating any existing copyright laws.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| mjhay wrote:
| 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
| sfifs wrote:
| 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?
| rhino369 wrote:
| 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.
| quadcore wrote:
| _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.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| So if you were born blind, you can draw pictures?
| quadcore wrote:
| 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.
| Timon3 wrote:
| 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.
| ShrimpHawk wrote:
| 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
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| mjhay wrote:
| 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.
| km3r wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| > _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.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Computational neural networks are modeled after biological
| brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind
| of the whole goal.
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| 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
| :)
| stickfigure wrote:
| 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?
| haswell wrote:
| > _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.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| 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.
| rtepopbe wrote:
| 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| shanebellone wrote:
| 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.
| theRealMe wrote:
| 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?
| Maursault wrote:
| 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, some _one_ , 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| 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.
| theRealMe wrote:
| 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| 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.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| 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).
| williamcotton wrote:
| > 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. SS 501;
|
| 2.) violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17
| U.S.C. SSSS 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 SSSS 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 .
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
|
| Without provenance you are still creating art, but you
| are not creating original art.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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?
| threeseed wrote:
| 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 ?
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| 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.
| theRealMe wrote:
| 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?
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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.
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