[HN Gopher] Stable Attribution
___________________________________________________________________
Stable Attribution
Author : mkeeter
Score : 716 points
Date : 2023-02-05 22:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stableattribution.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stableattribution.com)
| convexfunction wrote:
| You ever feel like this specific propaganda war is actually
| unwinnable? Many people are extremely motivated to bullshit the
| public (usually sincerely though I kind of doubt it in this
| case), and from I've seen, the public are far more willing to
| believe the 3 extremely online artists who they've heard an
| opinion on the topic from than the 1 software engineer/data
| scientist who actually knows half a thing about machine learning
| they've heard an opinion on the topic from, let alone the growing
| cornucopia papers and high-production-value websites that seem to
| say "it's just a plagiarism machine" if you don't know anything
| about the subject vs the approximately one website I've ever seen
| that says "no, you are being lied to".
|
| I'd like to believe this isn't one of those things where we can
| only move on by everyone who believes the various correlated
| falsities dying, but I don't think I can.
| poxrud wrote:
| I find the original images that were used to generate the art to
| be much more beautiful and emotion evoking than the strange and
| lifeless AI images. Maybe it's just my subconscious but for me
| something always seems off with the AI generated art.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| the copyright people are insufferable. In my experience those who
| complain the most about copyright and "AI art theft" and whatnot,
| either
|
| 1) have a vested business interest in not automating this kind of
| stuff (e.g. they churn out low-effort quickturnaround copy /
| design), so the automation is coming for yet another mind-numbing
| half-automated (sorry non-stop CMD+C / CMD+V isn't really
| "creating" anything novel or of value). Yeah those SEO spam gigs
| will be written by robots now, how quaint.
|
| 2) are copyright justice warriors who are raging for the sake of
| it, meaning they aren't even designers, artists, writers or
| anything like that.
|
| 3) do create some kind of art / text etc., but of a quality that
| is not putting them at risk of getting the badge of honor that is
| "in style of <copyright justice warrior>".
|
| At the core of all this rage is just envy at someone being
| smarter and more successful than you are - in computer science,
| in statistics, in business, in art, in writing. Yeah someone did
| something so good it made it into Stable Diffision as a "named
| prompt". Yeah someone was actually capable of creating Stable
| Diffusion.
|
| Protectionists are disgusting.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| I just tried this with an image I took with my phone and it gave
| me 10-15 images that the "ai" used to generate my image, proving
| this is an absolute fraud of a concept.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I assumed fraud, but also just dumb.
|
| The genie isn't going back on the bottle.
| FL410 wrote:
| TBH I think misrepresenting this as identifying the "actual"
| source training material to make an image is way worse than
| what SD is doing. That's just a blatant lie.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| The story sounds like either satire or blatant misrepresentation
| of reality. The Internet was full of images without attribution
| way before Stable Diffusion appeared. Why do people feel
| compelled to invent nonsensical narratives to demonize AI?
| sva_ wrote:
| Sounds almost like a biblical story about some past paradise.
| If only you hadn't eaten the fruit, then everything would be
| alright.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Is there still any chance for a human to come up with something
| new an AI can't? Haven't all the possible ideas ans/or "sub-
| ideas" already been implemented and fed into "AIs"?
|
| I suspect the humanity is omniscient and it's only problem is
| lack of possibility to keep everything it knows in a mind
| simultaneously and connect the dots. An "AI" seems to be a
| solution to this problem.
|
| Even an individual human could be almost omniscient if he could
| simultaneously put everything he has ever knew/thought/seen into
| his working memory.
| madsmith wrote:
| I gave it a picture of the Mahi Mahi and jambalaya I was having
| in a restaurant. It showed me pictures of food. Fair enough. But
| it's completely disingenuous to say it's finding attribution to
| any images you give it.
|
| Finding similar pictures in an embedding space does not mean any
| of those pictures are part of the attribution chain any more than
| anything else.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Very nice initiative but undermined by the fact that it doesn't
| give attribution. Only asks for providing one and depends on the
| honesty of the users about that.
|
| Maybe just do reverse image search in google for the first
| approximation of attribution?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Wu Tuo da
| breck wrote:
| First, it's a beautiful site.
|
| Second, a rant.
|
| Look, if you are a photographer or artist or writer, your
| individual contributions to civilization are zero. I'm sorry I
| have to be the one to break the bad news to you. It's just the
| mathematical truth.
|
| We are still in the childish (c)opywrong era of civilization
| where people born in privilege were brainwashed into thinking
| they were special snowflakes and their creative contributions to
| humanity are far more valuable than they actually are.
|
| Your contributions, I don't care if you are a modern day Da
| Vinci, are but a grain of sand on a Mount Everest of human
| creation.
|
| That photo you took? Far far far easier than the immense amount
| of effort it took to build that camera and get it into your
| hands. That book you wrote? Far far far easier than the thousands
| of years it took to evolve the letters and words you used to
| write it. That song you sang? Trivial compared to the collective
| efforts of hundreds of millions of people who pioneered music
| theory and instruments.
|
| People who clamor for attribution ironically spend relatively
| little time digging into the details of all histories of all the
| ideas they are building upon.
|
| I'm not saying go out and plagiarize. I'm not saying stop
| creating. I am saying to wake up and think from root principles
| about ideas and the absolute stupidity of the (c)opywrong regime.
| All these big AI models are ignoring (c)opywrong law, and you
| should too. Even better, contribute to the fight to pass and
| amendment to abolish (c)opywrong once and for all.
|
| </endrant>
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Getty Images v. Stability AI - Complaint_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 - (194 comments and
| counting)
| intrasight wrote:
| As one of my best friends told me in 1971 (we were six!), every
| image and sound that we produce has already been produced
| somewhere else in the infinite universe.
| renonce wrote:
| The observable universe has only 10^80 atoms. A small image of
| 128x128 pixels has more variations than that.
| dqpb wrote:
| This is complete and utter bullshit.
| Imnimo wrote:
| How did this get to the front page of HN? This is so
| transparently asinine. In what universe does finding a nearest
| neighbor constitute attribution?
| waffletower wrote:
| This site is broken from my vantage. I uploaded a Stable
| Diffusion render of a banal trash can sitting on a lawn. It
| returned a picture of fiery ruins floating in the sky. While the
| attributions it returned for this image I did not upload looked
| somewhat similar in style, they were definitely different enough
| to indicate that Stable Diffusion created something new and
| different -- assuming that Stable Attribution is definitive in
| the referencing relevant training sources. I don't believe that
| it is.
| vivegi wrote:
| If the training data set is truly open, the raw inputs (or URLs
| to the sources) should be available. Isn't a direct image lookup
| on the source data a better way to do attribution? (For example:
| using methods similar to a Google Image Search)
|
| At least from a legal perspective, protection (i.e.,
| indemnification) should be offered to those who are clearly
| attributing their sources (which means they shouldn't be
| violating copyrights in the first place) and if they don't use
| clear attribution of sources, they should hold the burden of
| proof to show that they are not violating copyrights.
| esskay wrote:
| This is a bit flawed. By providing a non-ai photo it just picks
| up similar photos and claims they were used to generate it.
|
| It's a nice, but as I say, flawed concept.
| saurik wrote:
| I gave it a photo I had Stable Diffusion 1.4 generate from the
| prompt "avatar for saurik". If you dig through the CLIP database,
| you will find that the model was trained on a ridiculously large
| number of copies of my Twitter profile photo due to it being
| included when people screenshot popular tweets I've posted
| (which, notably, also means that it is rather low resolution).
|
| https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=e89f1e94-067b-4ab8-...
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1434747464/square_400x4...
|
| Given that I only said "saurik" and SD came up with something
| that not only looks more than quite a bit like me but is more
| than quite a bit similar to the pose of my profile photo, I'd say
| _clearly_ that photo would be one of the most important
| photographs in the database to show up when asking "which human-
| made source images were used by AI to generate this image"...
|
| ...and yet, whatever algorithm is being used here--which I'm
| guessing is merely "(full) images similar to this (full) image"
| as opposed to "images that were used to make this image"--isn't
| finding it; which, to me, means this website is adding more noise
| than signal to the discussion (in that I think people might learn
| the wrong lessons or draw the wrong conclusions).
| louison11 wrote:
| This. They probably simply used an "image similarity"
| algorithm, of which many are readily available and do not
| require much computing power. The credit at the bottom of the
| website for "Chroma", a startup with no live product and
| hiring, suggests this could be a growth hack. Like "let's ride
| the buzz of the moment with a barely useful tool quick to
| develop, hit front page of HN, and get some visibility." Good
| for them, it worked, but yeah the product is probably bogus as
| you've demonstrated.
| chaostheory wrote:
| It's not for nothing. Like Twitter, the idea is so obvious,
| but only when someone introduces it to the masses.
|
| This just needs to be done at the source. Ie whatever AI
| service is generating the image should generate attribution
| as part of the result
|
| I was surprised that they even had a prototype. I thought
| this was just a really good CTA
| bemmu wrote:
| This will spread further than HN, as this is a current hot
| topic, and journalists are dying for more things to write
| about it.
|
| Whether or not this tool works, expect it to make the rounds
| on any tech publications that have previously written "stable
| diffusion bad" -type stories.
| heliumcraft wrote:
| relevant:
|
| https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/
|
| https://github.com/rom1504/clip-retrieval
|
| Ironically, the stableattribution.com authors didn't give any
| attribution or credit to clip-retrieval and its developer
| rcme wrote:
| They don't need to, as clip-retrieval is licensed under the
| MIT license.
| [deleted]
| HDevo wrote:
| The MIT license disagrees: The above
| copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
| included in all copies or substantial portions of the
| Software.
|
| Besides, even if you don't interpret this as "attribution",
| it's still ironic coming from this particular project.
| janekm wrote:
| It is ironic, but MIT license definitely does not require
| attribution from websites using the code on the backend
| (otherwise you'd see a rather large attribution list at
| the bottom of Google.com or any website...)
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Perhaps it's confused because the real you looks _exactly_ like
| Leonidas Kavakos!
| http://thelistenersclub.timothyjuddviolin.com/wp-content/upl...
| Thorentis wrote:
| Are you the guy who made Cydia for jailbroken iPhones all those
| years ago? Had no idea you were on HN!
| sogen wrote:
| Yes, the one and only Saurik!
| junon wrote:
| This was my suspicion. It just seems like a glorified image
| similarity search instead of a real reversal of the stable
| diffusion process.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Am I seeing the same thing you are in those two images you
| linked to?
|
| The first one, generated by AI has you looking at the camera.
| The other one has you looking at an instrument. They don't look
| much like each other to me, in terms of pose or anything.
|
| The first images suggested by Stable Attribution looks a lot
| more like the AI image to me, in terms of pose and everything.
| csande17 wrote:
| That's the point. The website is finding images that look
| similar, not the images the algorithm actually used to
| generate that picture for the prompt "avatar for saurik".
| Retr0id wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. How does Stable Diffusion
| know "what does saurik look like?". The answer is of course
| that it's seen saurik's profile pic in training data. Stable
| Attribution is not showing that.
|
| As another comment[1] points out:
|
| > This appears to be just looking for the nearest neighbors
| of the image in embedding space and calling those the source
| data.
|
| Stylistically similar images are not the same as source
| images.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| Interesting. So it only shows images that were transformed
| / mixed to get the output, but does not show images used to
| learn how to transform / select them?
|
| Sounds very much like a human would do it.
|
| If I 'know' how to recognize saurik and I know how anime is
| supposed to look like, I can check my digital photo library
| for a picture of saurik and than use that picture as a
| template to draw an anime version of saurik. If someone
| later asked me what pictures I used the photo is the only
| one I'd present. Not the thousands of anime pictures I have
| seen teaching me what anime looks like, nor the picture my
| eyes took meeting saurik.
| space_fountain wrote:
| I think saying exactly what an ai of sufficient
| complexity is doing is a mater for philosophy more than
| science. But idk if transforming or mixing is how I'd
| describe what this is doing. In particular it truly does
| not have a complete representation of any of the images
| it was trained on. They just wouldn't fit. It does of
| course have an understanding of how embeddings relate to
| images that is informed by the images it's seen so maybe
| that counts, but I'm not sure if it's useful in
| understanding the limitations or how to improve models
| like it
| makomk wrote:
| The author of this tool is even aware of that argument
| and just dismisses it with no real justification:
| https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1622360994579357696
| williamcotton wrote:
| > historically, creatives have been among the first to
| embrace new technologies. ever since the renaissance,
| artists have picked up every new tool as it's become
| available, and used it to make great things.
|
| > these people aren't 'luddites'
|
| This is just total bullshit. I know plenty of artists who
| are embracing this technology to make all sorts of things
| that tools like SD were not designed to do, like
| psychedelic music videos, etc.
|
| What the author means is that a few loud blue check marks
| on Twitter who claim to be artists have been tweeting,
| get ready for it, inflammatory claims.
| space_fountain wrote:
| I do want to clarify that I think stable diffusion and
| tools like it can engage in illegal copying. For example
| it will happily produce infringing images of logos and
| even somewhat random other images
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03860.pdf. It seems like it's
| devoting an uneven amount of its weights to different
| images, but I remain unconvinced that's all it can do, or
| at least anymore all it can do than for a human artist
| nonbirithm wrote:
| This is what happens when you overtrain a model too.
| Recent developments have allowed partial sets of model
| weights called LoRAs to be added to the diffusion model.
| These models can be fine-tuned independently in under
| half an hour. If you set the learning rate too high, it
| will start reproducing the source material with extremely
| high fidelity. This is what overfitting does.
|
| My conclusion is there is an argument to be made for
| infringement in some cases, _but_ it 's based on degrees
| instead of absolutes. If infringement is defined as
| "copyrighted works were used in this dataset", then at a
| certain point (low enough learning rate) it becomes
| impossible to tell if infringing data was used. You'd be
| working with weight amounts that are so miniscule they
| could be rounding errors, yet by that definition would
| still be infringing.
|
| And since any arbitrary data can be used with some set of
| keywords, the standard for what constitutes "infringing"
| changes with each model. As in, it would probably be hard
| to have a benchmark test that can definitively state
| "this model violates copyright." Any number of keywords
| can be trained on to obfuscate the prompt needed to
| reproduce the data, assuming there was even a high enough
| LR for the data to be reproduced similarly enough.
|
| I'm unsure if there can ever be one standard for when a
| set of a bunch of floating point numbers can pass the
| threshold for constituting infringement. This is applying
| an absolute standard to a fuzzy algorithm. It's like
| compressing a JPEG, at _some_ level of compression on the
| scale a picture of Mickey Mouse becomes unintelligible.
| But with JPEGs it isn 't really useful to have an
| unintelligible picture of Mickey Mouse. However, it _can_
| be extremely useful to have a LoRA with the weights
| underfit just enough to where the diffusion gives novel
| outputs.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > i spoke to law profs about this - the analogy which
| kept coming up is the vcr. initially basically a piracy
| machine, it brought to life an enormous content market.
| had it been banned, creators would have been worse off in
| the long run.
|
| It's called Sony v Universal, and the legal doctrine for
| fair use that resulted is a test for "commercially
| significant non-infringing use", of which a tool used for
| inpainting to remove power lines, latent space
| psychedelic visuals, and photo booth-painterly-style all
| are.
|
| Imagine if Stable Diffusion was made illegal. Someone
| accuses me of using this illegal tool for one of these
| non-infringing uses, that is an image that doesn't look
| like anyone else's image as far as the court is concerned
| for copyright. I put the image on my website. If the
| image itself is not at all infringing, then what is the
| evidence that Stable Diffusion was used? Should the
| police be issued a warrant to search my private property
| for proof that I used Stable Diffusion without a shred of
| evidence or based on a tool that will always have both
| false positives and negatives?
| Kuinox wrote:
| Stable diffusion doesn't transform or mix images in text
| to img.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| [flagged]
| ForestCritter wrote:
| I think you may have a point. I can see familiar references
| and recognize certain artists in ai art without help, yet
| when I look at the supposed source photos, for the most
| part, I dont really see it.
| saurik wrote:
| The slight adjustment of where I'm looking is minor. The
| instrument is uncommon and honestly difficult to get stable
| diffusion to generate correctly at all; though, from my
| experience playing with this (I spent a lot of time trying to
| figure out why it knew who I was before discovering the CLIP
| database browser), I'm going to argue that the reason that
| hand is showing up in the position it is is because of my
| hand holding the violin there. Frankly, we might also as well
| start nitpicking that the suit-like thing being worn in the
| generated image is not a tuxedo and the generated person
| looks a tad bit rounded and has more hair ;P.
|
| However, the key thing here is: do you really think "avatar
| for saurik" is going to come up with something out of the
| blue--out of all the numerous random images of people that
| exist and who have avatar/profile photos... people wearing
| lots of different clothing and in different orientations--
| where we can even be talking about such silly things as props
| and gaze direction? I will assert that would be ridiculous.
| Clearly seeing at least _one_ photo of me (and AFAIK it was
| only trained on thousands of copies of that single photo) was
| absolutely crucial to the construction of this image, and yet
| this website isn 't finding any such to show as it isn't
| really doing what it is claiming to do (and it isn't clear to
| me how it could without the original prompt).
|
| From there, SD is upscaling from memory a lot and filling in
| a ton of details (as almost all of the copies of my photo it
| was trained on are very small, embedded in screenshots of
| tweets), but the cornerstone of that construction is clearly
| my Twitter profile photo... and then, once you do that, you
| can go back and attempt to rationalize "these were the photos
| that were most similar to the photo that we generated, and so
| I guess those were what the algorithm used to generate this
| image", but--at least in this case--it is pretty obvious that
| that isn't how this worked as there's no way you start with
| "avatar of saurik" and arbitrarily pluck an image that is
| this similar to the one photo of saurik you have.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| > Clearly seeing at least one photo of me (and AFAIK it was
| only trained on thousands of copies of that single photo)
| was absolutely crucial to the construction of this image,
| and yet this website isn't finding any
|
| I think there are two separate ideas that are being
| conflated here. The first idea is that there is a mapping
| between text input and a joint text/image embedding space.
| For that mapping, yes, your profile photo (paired with some
| caption text that says saurik) would have to be the most
| important training input because, as you say, how else does
| SD know what "saurik" looks like?
|
| But the second idea is the mapping from the shared latent
| space to an image output. It is NOT necessarily true that
| your profile photo is the most significant training example
| for the generated image. That's because the text "saurik"
| can map to a neighborhood in the latent space that has all
| the photos this tool retrieved -- photos which are indeed
| very similar to the generated image.
|
| As an example, let's say that I resemble Ben Affleck. And
| you type in "throwaway1851" and you get back an image that
| does look like me, but also looks an awful lot like Ben
| Affleck. In this case I really wouldn't be surprised if my
| one profile photo didn't contribute much to the generated
| image as compared to a dozen different photos of Ben
| Affleck. Perhaps the original mapping just pointed to
| Affleck anyway, because I wasn't significant enough to end
| up taking space in the model's parameters.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Utter bullshit. Even image of Pele on a main page of the site
| does not have any actual style dependencies from the images
| proposed by the site.
|
| I have uploaded my image made by SD: https://ibb.co/3NxPdNw The
| list of proposed sources seems to be very random.
|
| EDIT:
| https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=541edf3c-6281-4177-...
|
| Bullshit.
|
| People learning every day to draw they are learning from other
| images. They using others styles and some time they are coming up
| with a unique style which was never used before. SD does the
| same. You can't recover original images. You can have similar
| style or composition, but you will never recover original image.
| cush wrote:
| What a gorgeous site. Love the aesthetic and the idea!
|
| In Who Owns the Future, Jerron Lanier proposes that the only path
| to an economy with a sustainable middle class not ruled by Google
| and Facebook is through this kind of attribution and subsequent
| micro-royalties. It's a fascinating read
| minimaxir wrote:
| This seems like https://haveibeentrained.com with
| counterproductive pretentiousness.
| margorczynski wrote:
| When writing code on my n-th job I should pay something to the
| n-1 companies I've worked before as my skills were honed working
| on their proprietary code? If I ever hear that Oracle is
| searching for executives I'll point them out to you, sure you'll
| get along just fine
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Even if this did work, why would people want such a piece of
| software?
| version_five wrote:
| Linking training data to the output of an ML model is an
| extremely important area of research. It potentially takes away
| much of the "black box" aspect by understanding what a model is
| basing it's decision on. For example, sample attribution can be
| used to inform data collection, to see if a model is operating
| correctly, or to decide whether the output should be trusted -
| there's currently lots of talk about chatGPT making stuff up
| and not sourcing it's output. This would be the answer.
|
| The page in this thread doesn't do attribution, as I said in my
| other comment. But if it was possible, it would be very
| important to the field
| goldemerald wrote:
| This is a great website, but not in the way the authors intended.
| Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is
| clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art. Here's a random
| example
| https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=a2666aee-0a1a-411b-...
|
| I will admit this is a nice tool for verifying the creations of
| SD aren't pure copies, so I think it will be useful for a time.
| But as AI-generated images start to taint future datasets,
| attribution is going to be significantly more complicated.
| humanizersequel wrote:
| Does it even matter?
|
| This is my hangup about luddite hand wringing with claims that
| the existence of Stable Diffusion and tools like it constitute
| some violation of the rights of the artists whose data was
| included in the training set. Existing laws on copyright
| infringement and whatnot don't persecute the paintbrushes, they
| go after the artist who published infringing material. Why
| should this be any different?
| romwell wrote:
| >Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is
| clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art.
|
| You seem to be taking _their word_ that the examples _they_
| explicitly provided are truth.
|
| That is, that they show you all the important sources for the
| AI, without which the output would be drastically different.
|
| As other comments show, this is not the case.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yeah this is probably the future, it seems like the vast
| majority of the time the output is very unique, but if there is
| far too much source material for a particular prompt, it
| copies. Say a prompt like "Mona Lisa".
|
| So now you can just use this tool to verify your output is
| safe.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Here's another example:
| https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1ecefeff-cc12-46e5-...
| mrtksn wrote:
| The discussion over novelty is useless, all these legal
| structures like copyrights patents royalties and licenses are
| about creating business structures to allow artist or inventors
| be compensated.
|
| They were already imperfect in it and now suddenly a new
| technology drags their work into the wilderness with no
| stuctures for compensation.
|
| The images created by the AI are indeed novel but they feed on
| the work of people who spent decades building this style. Of
| course artist themselves feed from each other but they usually
| don't interfere with the business. So let's say, if an artist
| developed a particular style and someone wants to hire them for
| a business project like a game they can't feasibly just learn
| that style and use it so they hire the artist. Later other
| people catch on this style and develop over it. It only works
| because monetising through copying the style is not very
| feasible.
|
| Suddenly you have a machine that makes it feasible. Instead of
| hiring the artist or licensing their works, you train your
| machine on it and start generating any number of images of that
| style or combination with other style without paying the people
| who come up with all that.
|
| How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending years
| of developing that style/method?
|
| I'm fine with getting rid of all that copyright and license
| stuff but let's not pretend that what's happening now is a fair
| endeavour.
| pkaye wrote:
| I don't think style can be copyrighted.
| brookst wrote:
| > How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending
| years of developing that style/method?
|
| I'm not sure. How are they providing compensation to every
| other artist whose work they've seen? To all of the people
| who gave them feedback and criticism?
|
| The arts have existed for far, far longer than IP law and
| copyright and royalties. This idea that artists have no
| influences and that human art is not derivative is just
| weird.
| XorNot wrote:
| This presumes the "style" is unique. It probably is, but it's
| also influenced by what was already out there.
|
| The idea of a specific artist having a unique style they
| learn is dying right now: the faster and cheaper way to
| develop a style will be to train an AI model on public domain
| work, and tweak till you get something you like. Then use it
| as part of a process to go from sketch and composition to
| output. If you must, play with your own style and make a
| custom model - that technology has gotten very accessible
| very quickly.
|
| This is a gnashing of teeth over an unexpected price shock:
| creatives have been feeling pretty assured that automation
| wasn't coming for their revenue because what they did was a
| unique human endeavor that a soulless machine could not
| possibly threaten. It was _meant_ to be factory workers and
| retail staff first.
|
| People aren't worried about copyright. People are worried
| that a skillset acquired at substantial sacrifice is about to
| become irrelevant and are desperately latching on to any
| perceived lifeline.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > This presumes the "style" is unique
|
| Doesn't presume such thing.
| josephg wrote:
| The core of your concern (& argument) seems to be the problem
| of existing business models becoming disrupted by this
| technology.
|
| But the point of good law isn't to protect an established
| business model. If that were the case, we would have outlawed
| the loom because it displaced weavers, and the camera (sorry
| portrait painters) and the iPhone. (How many telegraph
| operators are left? None!)
|
| When an artist learns to draw, they copy almost all their
| ideas from other art they've seen that they like. That's how
| humans learn. I'm learning to compose music at the moment and
| everything that sounds good to me is probably a remix of
| musical ideas I've heard before in other songs. If I grew up
| in a different music tradition (say, ancient India) then all
| of my ideas about musicality would be different.
|
| It seems to me that the only difference between me and stable
| diffusion is that stable diffusion copies less than I do, but
| from more sources.
|
| Also, the idea that artists can't learn each other's styles
| is totally wrong. I heard an interview years ago with an art
| director at blizzard. The interviewer pointed out that
| blizzard's games all have different art styles, and asked how
| they swap between styles. "Do you have different art teams?".
| The art director laughed and said that was the difference
| between amateur artists and professionals. Professional
| artists can be given a style and a brief and they can draw in
| the style. When they move between games, he said, the whole
| art team spends about 2 weeks practicing concept art for game
| they're moving to and critiquing each others' work to align
| their styles. Then it's smooth sailing. That's how they hire
| artists too - they ask them to draw some concept art in the
| style of one of their games.
|
| Sounds far fetched? That's what we do when we hire and
| onboard programmers. Art for hire isn't any different.
| wpietri wrote:
| > But the point of good law isn't to protect an established
| business model.
|
| Really? The Constitution specifically includes a bit about:
| "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by
| securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
| exclusive right to their respective writings and
| discoveries". That was quickly followed by the first
| copyright act.
|
| As I understand it, the copyright portion of this was
| exactly to protect the established business model for
| writers, which was publishing and selling copies of their
| work. In particular, protect it against other people
| publishing editions of their work.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| The stated goal is "to promote the progress of science
| and useful arts". Protecting an established business
| model via copyright was merely a means to that end, not
| the end in itself.
|
| In this case, diffusion models are actually a perfect
| example of "the progress of science and useful arts". The
| law should be structured in such a way as to _promote_
| such progress, not hinder it.
| chii wrote:
| > the exclusive right
|
| exactly. This usage of works for _training_ is not part
| of that exclusive right, as far as i can tell. Otherwise,
| it would be a copyright violation for a human to read and
| learn off an existing works.
| romwell wrote:
| >This usage of works for _training_ is not part of that
| exclusive right, as far as I can tell.
|
| _Training_ the AI isn 't the problem.
|
| _Publishing_ output generated by it (by making it
| available _to anyone else other than yourself), however,_
| is _.
|
| >Otherwise, it would be a copyright violation for a human
| to read and learn off an existing works
|
| You have the right to read and memorize the entirety of
| the Harry Potter series.
|
| You do _not* have the right to start a podcast where you
| recite the entire book from memory.
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| This technology was clearly not one anticipated when the
| Constitution or the first Copyright Act was written. Or
| any of the later ones.
|
| This will not fit in existing laws, so we have to go back
| to the purpose, "promote the progress of science and
| useful arts" via "securing for limited times to authors
| and inventors" particular rights.
|
| What specific rights we'll need to secure here are going
| to take a while to work out. But new technologies have
| forced updates to copyright laws many times, and I' sure
| this won't be the last time.
| chii wrote:
| > You do not* have the right to start a podcast where you
| recite the entire book from memory.
|
| which is fine - this is public broadcasting of the works,
| which is part of the exclusive rights of the owner.
|
| However, this is not what the AI is doing.
| romwell wrote:
| >However, this is not what the AI is doing.
|
| Yes, this is what _the people who use the AI_ are doing.
| As well as people who _release the AI model_ or a product
| that uses it.
| pksebben wrote:
| but they're not. Works derived stylistically are not
| copies.
|
| Were they publishing copies, your harry potter analogy
| would hold, but that is categorically not the thing
| happening.
|
| Diffusion is not compression, or copying. It's stylistic
| synthesis, which is more like someone reading all the
| Harry Potter books, then doing a podcast about Harry
| Potter fan fiction.
|
| Which, incidentally, exists (1)
|
| 1 https://www.fanaticalfics.com/
| gokuldas011011 wrote:
| So, that falls on particular outputs. Copyright
| infringements at the level per creations!
| chii wrote:
| > the people who use the AI are doing
|
| if the people are using the AI to replicate an exiting
| works, to try to loophole the copyright act, then they
| will just get sued.
|
| > release the AI model or a product that uses it
|
| I argue that the model itself cannot be construed as
| copyright violation. After all, the model is information.
| What if i released a table of all of the word frequencies
| from books, and published that table? The table of word
| frequencies does not violate the copyright of the books
| from which it was derived.
|
| Just because you _could_ re-derive the original books
| from this dataset, doesn't mean the dataset violates
| copyright. It _could_, if the dataset cannot do anything
| else (e.g., i just zipped up the text of the books and
| released that). But the AI model does not _only_ output
| the original, but it could also generate new works.
| bgidley wrote:
| The question is how did you do training. If in the
| process you 'copied' the image (e.g. from network to
| memory) you did require copyright.
|
| Reading with a human is not copying, but reading by
| machine is - there are several cases where that has been
| enforced. This is covered by reproduction rights.
| tveita wrote:
| "business model" feels like a very narrow lens to view this
| through. This isn't weavers or telegraph operators, this is
| coming for all human art forms.
|
| We are potentially creating an all-seeing instant
| plagiarism machine that saps away not just monetary
| compensation but even credit and recognition.
|
| Spend 2 years writing your novel? You'll barely sell a
| single copy, but people will happily pay 2 cents to hear
| GPTx's paraphrase of it.
|
| Spend 5 months in the jungle with wild animals to snap that
| perfect picture? The magazine covers will be Dalle 5
| rendering "nature photograph of orangutan cradling its new
| born baby in the style of X", your royalties won't cover
| buying a single lens.
| chii wrote:
| > This isn't weavers or telegraph operators, this is
| coming for all human art forms.
|
| so somehow the arts is above the telegraph operators or
| weavers?
|
| > but people will happily pay 2 cents to hear GPTx's
| paraphrase of it.
|
| except if you can tell that the novel GPTx "paraphrased"
| is a derivative work from yours, rather than
| transformative, you can either sue for loyalties, or take
| action. If you cannot tell if GPTx is sourcing from your
| works, even if it is, then there's no case to stand on.
| The AI wrote a better novel than the human.
|
| > Spend 5 months in the jungle
|
| and there's a lot of people doing "organic",
| "handcrafted" produce/foods. They tend to be very
| expensive compared to mass produced factory foods, and
| the market for it is relatively small. Just because
| something is difficult to do, doesn't automatically mean
| that people need to be paying for it to allow it to
| continue to exist. If it isn't profitable, stop doing it,
| rather than demand the world be changed to allow for it
| to continue.
| romwell wrote:
| >except if you can tell that the novel GPTx "paraphrased"
| is a derivative work from yours, rather than
| transformative, you can either sue for loyalties, or take
| action.
|
| Respectfully, no.
|
| The top comment in this thread is saurik asking Stable
| Diffisuion to generate "an avatar of saurik" and getting
| a veritable likeness of themselves back.
|
| It would be laughable to think that this is feasible
| without _the model having labeled photos of saurik_ ,
| which are all posted by (go figure) saurik.
|
| The AI also generated a "better" photo than the one
| saurik posted. The AI saurik has more hair.
|
| That doesn't change the fact that without the source
| material, _this output would not exist_. Nor that it
| would be really hard for saurik to "take action" on
| that.
|
| ----
|
| In the end, the experiment to do would be very simple.
| Exclude certain data from the training set, retrain the
| model, give it the same prompt, and see _whether the
| output changes significantly_.
|
| If it does, then that data was _indispensable_ for
| generating the output for that prompt.
|
| Something tells me we won't see such experiments done by
| OpeanAI any time soon.
| l33tman wrote:
| "If it does, then that data was indispensable for
| generating the output for that prompt."
|
| It gets murkier than this, by far. The diffusion models
| are not just trained on images, but on text. It varies by
| implementation but Stable Diffusion for example used a
| pre-trained CLIP transformer network from OpenAI (and
| subsequently OpenCLIP). CLIP can have internal
| associations between words that in turn steer the
| diffusion image generation.
|
| To given a simple example of how this could work (I'm not
| saying this particular example does work though): the
| model in total could understand that a "swedish flag"
| consists of a "yellow cross on a blue background", and it
| could have yellow crosses in its image training set, but
| _no images of Swedish flags_ , and it would still
| understand how to draw a "Swedish flag" based on the
| language semantics.
|
| Just as a human, actually.
|
| So, this won't work. A style can be inferred and
| described and it doesn't necessarily need to be in the
| _image_ training set _at all_.
| zarzavat wrote:
| A paraphrased novel is clearly a copyright violation
| under existing laws. If you use GPT to produce one, then
| you will be sued.
|
| This does _not_ imply that the underlying model is a
| copyright violation. There is no case law on the
| copyright status of models but it is generally believed
| that training a model is fair use.
|
| In the human analogy: it is legal to read Harry Potter
| and to learn Harry Potter from memory such that a copy of
| it is stored within your head. But if you reproduce and
| publish or perform substantial parts of Harry Potter from
| memory you are violating copyright (subject to the
| various exceptions to copyright: quotation, parody, etc).
| tveita wrote:
| > so somehow the arts is above the telegraph operators or
| weavers?
|
| Yes, obviously. We haven't found 40,000 year old
| telegraph stations in caves. No one thinks weaving is an
| intrinsic part of being human.
|
| The cat is out of the bag, but we should think very
| carefully about what we're leaving behind before we
| embrace an artless society.
|
| > Just because something is difficult to do, doesn't
| automatically mean that people need to be paying for it
| to allow it to continue to exist. If it isn't profitable,
| stop doing it, rather than demand the world be changed to
| allow for it to continue.
|
| This I find positively pro-dystopian. Who cares about
| reality when we can get regurgitated fakes generated much
| cheaper? Just write "crying woman bleeds from head in
| front of ruined building, warzone (pulitzer) [trending on
| Flickr]" in the little text box, click generate, ship it,
| and go for coffee.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| > This I find positively pro-dystopian. Who cares about
| reality when we can get regurgitated fakes generated much
| cheaper?
|
| Who cares about playing against a chess player when you
| can just play against an AI opponent for free on your
| computer?
|
| Who cares about going to a fancy bar when you can just
| drink at home for less?
|
| Who cares about buying expensive concert tickets when you
| can just watch a recorded version for free on the
| internet later?
|
| Who cares about buying a luxury car when a basic model
| gets you from A to B just as well?
|
| .
|
| People like you and many many others who think these
| questions are dumb will be the primary market for art.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sure, it's disruptive and that's fine. The problem is that
| there's no mechanism to compensate the people who enable
| your new disruptive machine.
|
| As I said, humans learn but the phase humans do it still
| allows for people be compensated.
|
| I'm not anti-AI at all, I think its great and I think the
| artist who can leverage it can hugely benefit from it but
| it is not fair to just take something from people away.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The "problem" is only a problem if you assume that
| everything creates a right to be compensated.
|
| The busker doesn't get compensated if I listen to him as
| I walk by (unless I choose to). He doesn't get
| compensated even if he has a really cool, kinda-unique
| idea, I get inspired by it, and start doing something
| very similar (without outright copying him in the sense
| of copyright). He doesn't get compensated even if I get
| my friends to join me and put him out of business.
|
| Copyright is already an artificial piece of compensation
| that was added, and that is debatable (copyright can be
| seen as "theft from the commons"). It intentionally
| covers certain things and doesn't cover others, and this
| seems to fall under "others", as long as the training
| data was obtained legally.
|
| I expect that to be the real problem, especially where
| content was reposted without permission.
| bioemerl wrote:
| I don't get the assumption that there should be. The
| machine was trained on publicly available hard that was
| already free. Why do people think they need to be
| compensated for something they put up online for free?
|
| They don't have the right to not allow people to learn
| from it, that's just never been a part of copyright.
| dahart wrote:
| Available for free online is not a valid justification
| for copying under copyright law, though, right? You can't
| distribute something just because you can see it. True
| for museums and magazines as it is for online content.
|
| > They don't have the right to not allow people to learn
| from it, that's just never been a part of copyright.
|
| Yeah this is true. Stable Diffusion and other neural
| networks are not "learning" from it they way humans do
| though, it's remembering and remixing and interpolating
| pixels (fixed expression), which is a part of copyright.
|
| BTW compensation is not a very accurate summary of this
| problem. Machines that borrow someone's style and copies
| and remixes without attribution is inherently problematic
| far beyond artists who live off selling their art, it
| dilutes both creativity and credit, in addition to
| undermining people who have to work much harder than the
| computer to produce images. These AI completely _depend_
| on being given human-created art to begin with, and the
| companies that are making them and using them are already
| making handsome profits, so it's reasonable to expect
| some kind of return in addition to proper credit.
| pksebben wrote:
| it's not remembering pixels. for it to do that, it would
| have to have the pixels stored somewhere. It does not.
|
| The laion 5b dataset is in the neighborhood of 220TB. (1)
| That is how much storage space you need to remember the
| pixels.
|
| The stable diffusion 1.5 checkpoint is 7gb. (2)
|
| 1 https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/datase
| t_exa...
|
| 2 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-
| diffusion-v1-5/tree/m...
| dahart wrote:
| It is effectively remembering pixels, and we can prove it
| because it can regenerate some of the training images
| verbatim, close enough to violate copyright law. It
| doesn't matter that it's compressed.
| temp512345 wrote:
| It is exactly remembering the pixels. Just not all of
| them and it obviously fills in gaps (more hair as
| mentioned in a another post). You can consider the way it
| stores those pixels as a lossy compression format. If I
| copy a music sample but I store a compressed version of
| it (mp3 for example) you will not find the original bits
| in my database at all. I am still violating copyright.
| pksebben wrote:
| But it's really not, though. It's remembering something
| related to the pixels, yeah, but that's like remembering
| the shape a line can take or the color of the sky.
|
| To extend your musical analogy, it's remembering that
| many songs are in 4/4 time, and that major chords sound
| appealing.
|
| Also, were you to compress anything, an mp3 or a picture,
| in a lossy fashion, to that degree of compression
| (~10^-5), you would no longer have anything resembling
| the original. The audio would be glitchy noise, and the
| image would be a scattering of apparently random pixels a
| few pixels wide.
|
| Here's the thing - I empathize that this is disruptive
| _in a very similar fashion_ to a tool that _does_ store
| compressed copies of the work in question. It is capable
| of doing the same kind of damage. There 's a conversation
| to be had there - but it's just not compression. That's
| not how the thing works.
| Supermancho wrote:
| >> Why do people think they need to be compensated for
| something they put up online for free?
|
| > Available for free online is not a valid justification
| for copying under copyright law, though, right?
|
| Legal and attribution and licensed are all terms that are
| usually involved, but the core assertion is more or less
| correct. eg Images on billboards are protected by
| copyright in a similar manner. Something displayed on a
| website does not invalidate the copyright of the author
| or indemnify the owner of the site (or downstream users)
| from licensing conditions.
| mrtksn wrote:
| They put it online for free for human consumption.
| Because the tech is very new, old concepts and laws don't
| cover it and that's not the point.
|
| The assumption that there must be compensation comes from
| the capitalist society that we live in. Switching to
| Communism or something else can be a solution to not
| directly pay people who do works and still have them
| around.
| bioemerl wrote:
| I think what we are seeing here is a proxy argument.
|
| Artists do not care about the copyright of people being
| able to learn from their art and reproduce it.
|
| It is not been an issue for decades, because it is a long
| established standard of copyright. You can't copy a work
| directly, you can learn from it and reproduce your own
| sort of stuff.
|
| What's different now is that this is a tool which artists
| can be replaced by. They not angry that their art has
| been learned from. Artists are angry that there is a tool
| which can replace them. And artists are looking for a way
| to make sure that tool is hampered as much as physically
| possible.
|
| If it were not learning copyright it would be something
| else, and whatever that's something else is it would also
| probably be something with proxy for that core issue.
|
| Imagine we had created an AI which was perfect, it could
| take your exact description of anything you asked it for
| and drew that thing.
|
| And then I went and asked it for a picture of Mickey
| mouse in the style of Disney. Because it's a perfect AI
| perfectly reproduces it.
|
| Who is in the wrong? I think it's absurd to think the
| creators of the AI would begin the wrong, because they
| did their job perfectly. It's a perfect app, it is a tool
| capable of literally anything.
|
| At the end of the day, it's the person using the tool to
| violate copyright who is in the wrong, assuming they
| distribute those images.
|
| And I don't believe the answer here is communism, I
| believe the answer is the same answer we've had for
| decades for the same situation. People need to find new
| jobs and learn new skills and do new things.
|
| And as programmers, it's probably going to happen to us
| too, about as soon as it happens to artists. Time to
| consider to start to learn to weld or build homes or
| something like that.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't think we can look into this from copyright
| standpoint. It was already not working very well in the
| digital age, now it's completely useless.
|
| I don't object that people should learn new skills and
| find new jobs, my concern is that people who actually put
| huge effort to produce that "training data" are now left
| dry. They should be compensated and move on, I'm
| completely against hampering the abilities of AI in order
| to preserve the current business structures.
| bioemerl wrote:
| The problem is, the net contribution of most artists to
| these systems is next to zero.
|
| It's greater than zero, otherwise the AI wouldn't exist,
| but these AI are trained off of 5 billion plus examples.
|
| Examples that required work to collect and sort through.
| Examples that required millions of dollars worth of
| compute time to make into something useful.
|
| What is there to compensate them for? These machines are
| not actually going to make these companies that much
| money either. The tools are open source. Competition is
| going to reduce profit on these systems to a very slim
| margin.
|
| You have to not only compensate for the fact that they
| aren't involved in actually creating the AI, so they're
| only getting a fraction of what this thing is worth in
| the first place. Then you have to consider that there are
| five billion images in the training set.
|
| The compensation is going to be nothing.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I agree, the situation is not ideal. These machines
| should't been trained on their work in first place.
|
| Currently compensating the artists would be like the
| Pirate Bay compensating the studios for their production
| costs through the gambling ads they run. No new move
| would have been ever made if that was the case.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Isn't this machine never being invented a net loss for
| society?
|
| I want my computer to be able to summon images out of the
| ether if I ask it for a picture of anything I could
| imagine. I could not imagine a positive system that would
| value such a small group of individuals over the need of
| the whole in a situation like this.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| The tech is out there. This whole discussion is a waste
| of energy, it will never, ever be undone. Focus on what's
| next, not what you've lost.
| grumbel wrote:
| The Google bot has been consuming their art for many
| years, even copying it verbatim into Google's site and
| yet they didn't complain.
|
| This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than
| about violation of copyright. And yes, that's scary, but
| unavoidable as tech progresses. I don't think anything
| good could come from trying to strickten copyright here.
| The AI is obviously not copying directly, at best it
| takes a bit of inspiration from other works, something
| artists themselves do plenty themselves.
|
| Something like UBI might help with the monetary needs
| eventually. Though the fear part might start getting
| really interesting in the near future. What do you do
| with your life when AI is better at it than you? When
| everything you can create, can be created by the AI
| faster and better?
| zerocrates wrote:
| People and companies have complained an enormous amount
| about Google's usage of images, particularly their
| inclusion in Google's site, and legal action or the
| threat thereof has caused Google to change how Google
| Images works before.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > This seems much more about the fear of competitions,
| than about violation of copyright
|
| Yep, it's all about being compensated and yes copyrights
| are already very problematic and creativity limiting
| concept.
|
| People in these industries happen to be the first to face
| AI revolution but it will come for as all, eventually.
| UBI might be something but I don't know, it seems like
| hard times are ahead of us.
| chii wrote:
| > People in these industries happen to be the first to
| face AI revolution
|
| as has many other industries that faced automation and
| become obsolete. The fact that it is AI derived doesn't
| make it different than Luddites before.
| adriand wrote:
| Artists shouldn't have to compete _against themselves_.
| If these AI companies didn't use the work of artists, the
| output would suck! I'm sure many artists would be happy
| to compete against the artistic talents of software
| developers. But they're not, they're having to compete
| against their own work.
|
| I listened to an interview with an artist who referenced
| the "three C's":
|
| Consent
|
| Credit
|
| Compensation
|
| These seem reasonable to me. The request isn't to
| eliminate the technology. It's that artists should be
| able to consent to their work being used. Works derived
| from their work should include credit. And, they should
| be compensated.
| bioemerl wrote:
| The request is to eliminate the technology. The training
| data set for stable diffusion has 5 billion images. Even
| if it was a single dollar per image, the data set as a
| whole would cost $5 billion.
|
| Getting consent of all the authors within that 5 billion
| images, managing the infrastructure of paying them, would
| be a Herculean task, and the cost of that task would far
| outrun the 5 billion spend if you gave a dollar for each
| image.
|
| That would kill any and all possibility of an open source
| AI model. The future where this happens would be a very
| dystopian one.
| pksebben wrote:
| This. I see and understand the FUD on behalf of the
| artists. It's real; this is going to change things in a
| way that makes their lives harder, and that sucks.
|
| What I see in the discussion is a results first, truth
| second thing. This is understandable - in an existential
| fight, damn the consequences - I'm swinging for my own
| survival.
|
| What's missing from that analysis though, is that by
| constricting open source models, you're not by any
| measure stopping the development or deployment of these
| models. Google will make one. Microsoft will make one.
| Apple will make one.
|
| Adobe will make one. Then, in order to use these
| technologies, you will have to pay. A lot - and it won't
| be paying the artists. Sure, the initial training night
| send out a few cents for each work included, a small
| price for Google to pay to prevent competition. But
| you're smoking the wrong shit if you think for a second
| that won't change as soon as the lead is cemented.
|
| So now you're still looking for another job, and you
| don't even get to play with this new tech and continue
| making art, because you don't work for Google.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It's insane how much of a gift to artists Stable
| Diffusion is, this tech could have been wrapped up in
| extremely expensive subscriptions by any of the current
| creative tool rent barons but it was handed to us all for
| free.
|
| Many are too angry and small minded to see how lucky we
| are. A tool beyond anything Adobe currently ships today,
| for free. Could have easily been a AutoCad level
| subscription (10k+ a year IIRC that would have left you
| behind if you hadn't paid.
| pksebben wrote:
| I think that some of the friction here is about mindset.
| I have a lot of friends who are artists, and many of them
| consider this stuff 'tech shit I'll never understand'; I
| think, because we've culturally set ourselves up in a
| strata of 'professionals' (who are assumed to be better /
| smarter / uniquely capable) and non-professionals (who
| are born without _whatever it takes to grok x_ ). This is
| along many lines - my artist friends in question both
| believe they understand something about the creative
| process that the art-uninitiated will never get, and that
| 'tech shit' is leagues beyond what they'll ever get,
| because they did bad in math.
|
| But here's the thing; I have never 'done art' as a part
| of my identity, and yet I can listen to them talk about
| it and understand where they're coming from enough to
| contribute.
|
| Also, I work in tech and I didn't even make it through
| basic trig. I have a GED and a set of scattered community
| college credits that are never going anywhere because of
| a GPA < 2.
|
| The whole idea that there are 'this type of person' and
| 'that type of person' and that those are immutable is a
| horrific and dangerous lie.
|
| But some people have bought it.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Who do I credit when I use SD inpainting to remove power
| lines from the background of a personal vacation photo?
| blkhawk wrote:
| Everybody who ever made a photograph that shows blue sky
| and posted it online - easy.
| astrange wrote:
| Capitalism isn't when you pay for things, it's when
| there's capital you can sell.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The capital of the artists is their intellectual
| property, that's the point.
| pixl97 wrote:
| So if I look at everything you created with an omniscient
| view how many violations will I find in your artwork?
|
| These days it's both publishers and artists attempting to
| create RMS's world of a right to read.
| astrange wrote:
| "Capitalism" is selling the right itself to someone else,
| not earning royalties from it. IP rights are government
| creations; it's not like you signed a contract with each
| royalty payer.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a profit
| off of their art.
|
| Under communism artists would be barred from making art
| entirely, ordered by the state to work in a place where
| it is deemed to be productive.
| couchand wrote:
| You must be joking? It's obvious if you actually care to
| look that leftist governments value the arts much more
| than liberal ones.
| astrange wrote:
| Is there a study on this? (Serious question.)
|
| It would seem that it opens you up to the problem of
| other people deciding whether you're an artist or not and
| if so whether you're a good artist.
|
| The same of course happens with capitalism, where it's
| your customers doing it. (Or in the case of books, which
| are almost never profitable, the VC-like publishers
| deciding to give you advances.)
|
| So of course the reason modern mixed economies are good
| is there's more than one set of people that you may be
| able to convince to fund you.
| ilyt wrote:
| > Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a
| profit off of their art.
|
| Sure they would, it would just be "I got paid to do this
| art/music piece that then someone will use in their
| product they sell"
| ForestCritter wrote:
| Actually, you are wrong. The capital of the artist is to
| physically create art. AI has to be fed physically
| created art and the told by humans what it is being fed.
| AI is not 'inspired', it is statistically driven by a
| human written progam, using mapping of human made work,
| labeled, tagged and defined by more humans to render a
| shopping list input by another human. Humans are using
| programming technology, written by humans to exploit
| other humans physical work.
| astrange wrote:
| > The capital of the artist is to physically create art.
|
| Surely that's their labor? Capital is the factor of
| production that isn't labor (or land if Georgist.)
| ForestCritter wrote:
| It is expected of any professional artist to have an
| online portfolio if they are serious about generating
| work. Scraping my portfolio that I put out because I want
| to generate revenue is a shitty thing to do. Also
| 'trained' is a complete misnomer. AI is fed images made
| by humans, labelled and tagged by humans, categorized by
| styles defined by humans, then plotted, copied, traced by
| a program written by humans. Along comes a human who
| inputs keywords and the AI uses statistics and algorythm
| programs also written by humans to amalgamate a resulting
| 'work of art' for the human with no physical art making
| effort. If you were to erase all tags and labelling from
| source images you would find zero learning happened. Art
| is made with physical motor skills, time and effort. AI
| is a human made program that uses human made imagery,
| classified by more humans to generate a shopping list
| written by another human who want art that requires no
| effort of aquiring the physical skill needed to make the
| art. With no physical product, there is no AI art and
| that art costs the maker. Public and free are not
| synonomous. If you want to physically copy my art, go for
| it, I will applaud your skill, but taking my art and
| shoving it in a program with a bunch of other art to
| dilute the provenance doesn't change that you are
| utilizing the effort and skill of artists for your own
| gain. If you can live with that, then I am very sad for
| you.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Art is made with physical motor skills, time and
| effort.
|
| Hasn't been about the motor skills time and effort for a
| long long time. Art has been about the idea rather than a
| fetishization of how much time and skill something takes
| to build.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Art is made with physical motor skills, time and effort
|
| Apparently it isn't. Now a computer can do it.
|
| > that requires no effort of aquiring the physical skill
| needed to make the art.
|
| So what? This doesn't matter.
|
| > If you want to physically copy my art, go for it
|
| This is the same thing as if a computer does it.
| tveita wrote:
| > Apparently it isn't. Now a computer can do it.
|
| Why do we need farmers when you can just buy a burger at
| McDonald's?
| stale2002 wrote:
| False equivalence.
|
| My AI art generator works right now, on my PC. If
| everyone stopped making art, the "normal" way, my AI art
| generator would still work.
|
| This is a false equivalence to your example, because if
| farmers stopped farming, then it would not be possible to
| make burgers.
|
| But, thats usually what happens when someone comes up
| with a pithy, one off meme response, like you just did,
| instead of actually responding to the substance of the
| argument. (I expect any future response from you, to
| instead not be engaging with the substance, and instead
| coming up with reasons why the silly analogy still works)
| ForestCritter wrote:
| Thanks, I needed that chuckle
| bioemerl wrote:
| > Also 'trained' is a complete misnomer.
|
| This here shows that you are speaking without
| understanding what you are speaking about.
|
| AI is absolutely trained. It's a process that is quite
| literally inspired by the way we understood neurons to
| work in the 1970s.
|
| AI start with a big batch of random numbers. There's a
| big fancy scientific method used to adjust those numbers
| in order to cause the system to learn to do some task.
|
| The process creates genuine and novel understanding of
| the problem space at hand. AI trained to do something
| simple, like add two numbers, will have a real solution
| to add two numbers in them once you have finished
| training them.
|
| With bigger problems, similar understanding certainly
| exists and in some cases has been proven to exist.
| However, once you get to the difficult problems with
| billions of parameters, it's very difficult for us to
| check that because if we could we would have just written
| it without needing to use an AI in the first place.
|
| There are lots of researchers who do lots of study and
| effort to ensure that AI are actually producing real
| outputs and have genuine understanding of the problems
| face they are working in. Do not insist that AI has no
| understanding if you have not taken the time to learn
| about those techniques.
|
| Stable diffusion has genuine understanding of different
| images and how to produce them within it. It is not a
| simple system that reproduces would already exists. It is
| not a collage tool. It is not incapable of producing
| novel outputs.
|
| Diffusion models are perfectly capable of producing any
| image that can possibly exist. It is only a matter of
| time before someone invents a new style that hasn't been
| seen before, and someone else is able to find a
| combination of descriptive words that causes stable
| diffusion to produce that output.
|
| Or that someone produces a novel combination of words,
| chucks it into stable diffusion (or some other AI model),
| and produces a new style of art.
|
| > Art is made with physical motor skills, time and
| effort. AI is a human made program that uses human made
| imagery, classified by more humans to generate a shopping
| list written by another human who want art that requires
| no effort of aquiring the physical skill needed to make
| the art. With no physical product, there is no AI art
|
| This is simply not true. Art is incredibly cultural,
| vaguely defined, and often involves little to no work at
| all. If someone prompts an AI, gets a result, and sticks
| it to a wall, calling it art, it is probably able to be
| considered art.
|
| > If you want to physically copy my art, go for it, I
| will applaud your skill, but taking my art and shoving it
| in a program
|
| In short, it appears that you are threatened by the
| existence of AI and the copyright argument is not
| actually about copyright, it's about ensuring that the
| competition does not exist, and that people did not have
| access to these tools that might make artists less
| valuable.
| ForestCritter wrote:
| I personally care very little for copyright or copycats.
| I have great disdain for those who would profit off the
| backs of the labor of others. Saying that art often
| involves little to no effort just shows how ignorant you
| are of the subject. I am not threatened by AI and frankly
| I don't see it as competition, it's not really that good.
| Besides that the majority of my art is three dimensional.
| I am just saddened by how it will be misused to
| disrespect the effort and labor of the artists that it is
| feeding off of. No matter how complex AI might be, it is
| not sentient and it relies on human work and direction
| and is therefore not actually creating.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I personally care very little for copyright or
| copycats. I have great disdain for those who would profit
| off the backs of the labor of others._
|
| This is actually an anti-capitalist argument, rather than
| an anti-AI one.
|
| That doesn't weaken the argument, IMO, but it does help
| to know whose ox you're trying to gore.
| [deleted]
| waffletower wrote:
| There is no compensation for any usage save for
| duplication. No works are being taken away. Style is not
| and has not been copyrightable. If the disrupted lobbies
| are powerful enough, the law may change in this regard.
| To do so, would be a tragic corruption of fair use.
| social_quotient wrote:
| So the parent post to yours said he's taking piano
| lessons. Let's suppose he becomes great. And let's
| suppose he writes his own music. How is Taylor Swift
| supposed to get paid by him from his early lessons which
| have undoubtedly played a key role in not only his love
| for music but the song he writes today?
| mrtksn wrote:
| She doesn't because it's not a business issue for her.
| She is not getting paid when you sing her songs with your
| friends too and this is also not a problem.
|
| I'm not thinking from the current definitions of right
| and compensation structures and I'm not calculating fees
| here. What I say is that if you build your thing on top
| of other people's work and put them out of business this
| needs to be addressed because you will cause huge
| problems to the people who made your machine possible in
| first place and you will dry up your source of
| "inspiration" because you will no longer have people
| making living of it.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| You are fundamentally not addressing the issue.
|
| Previously, someone was being paid to produce something.
|
| Now, they are no longer being paid and the business can
| get the same thing "for free".
|
| You can argue the same issue about out sourcing
| programmers to south east Asia.
|
| Is it good or bad?
|
| "...but how do we compensate the programmers who lost
| their jobs?"
|
| It's just economics right?
|
| ...but saying that doesn't address the social issues that
| this technology is creating.
|
| People. Out of jobs.
|
| Bluntly, that's what it boils down to.
|
| Are you ok being replaced by a $0.02 / hour dude from
| Thailand? By a $0.001 / hour AI?
|
| You think, maybe, it's fair for the people being replaced
| to feel a bit upset about it?
|
| I do.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Neoluddism isn't solved by smashing the machines...
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > You are fundamentally not addressing the issue.
|
| You are fundamentally not understanding the issue.
|
| People don't have an inherent right to be an artist just
| because they are an artist.
|
| They can get upset, smash the machines in a Luddite
| frenzy or try to use the law to stifle competition but
| the simple fact is nobody owes them anything. Maybe they
| win a lawsuit or two but the AIs will just get trained on
| out of copyright work and art styles (for those who now
| pay for graphic artists and whatnot) will change like
| they do every generation.
|
| I, for one, look forward to an AI generated animated
| Matisse dancer selling me milk.
| waffletower wrote:
| Use of AI models is far from "free". Even given their
| prior existence, ignoring their research and training
| cost, AI models like Stable Diffusion require energy and
| computing resources to execute, and require iteration and
| selection labor for raw image content to be created. Once
| raw content has been created, the content still requires
| processing (i.e. color correction) and integration (i.e.
| editing, scaling etc.) labor. If analog reproductions are
| desired, they also require capital to produce.
| josephg wrote:
| > People. Out of jobs.
|
| > You think, maybe, it's fair for the people being
| replaced to feel a bit upset about it?
|
| I think it makes all sorts of sense that people are upset
| about stable diffusion.
|
| And, people being upset isn't a good reason to change the
| law or outlaw the new technology.
|
| Today the word "luddite" is a slur. But luddites were
| real people who made the same argument you're making. In
| their case, they were a secret group of textile workers
| so upset by the introduction of the mechanical loom that
| they went around sabotaging equipment.
|
| Suppose we wound the clock back and the luddites won a
| legal battle and successfully outlawed the mechanical
| loom in the UK. Knowing what we know now, would you
| support a law like that to protect the jobs of textile
| workers in the 19th century? I sure wouldn't - it would
| have decimated the economy of the UK and stunted
| innovation.
|
| Thats the danger of using the law to protect the status
| quo. Sometimes the status quo needs to change to make
| room for what comes next, regardless of how painful that
| change is. The law doesn't exist to protect your business
| model.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
|
| We're at the verge of the second industrial revolution. I
| have no idea how it shakes out, but I don't think
| clinging desperately to the old ways of doing things will
| be a winning strategy in the long run.
| couchand wrote:
| The true story of the Luddites is just one more chapter
| in the long history of state repression of the working
| people any time they organize together to improve their
| lot.
|
| The law shouldn't protect the status quo, it should
| protect human beings. Unfortunately, the law usually
| protects the wealthy first and only.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > But the point of good law isn't to protect an established
| business model
|
| But there are plenty of bad laws that protect business
| models. Hell, copyright - the law in question - is intended
| to protect certain models. Regulatory Capture is a term for
| a reason.
|
| I agree with other points of yours though. Copying in art
| is for sure a thing, and same with style changing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
| astrange wrote:
| > How many telegraph operators are left? None!
|
| They're in the Navy, aren't they?
| visarga wrote:
| > How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending
| years of developing that style/method?
|
| By claiming that style and all future works that look like
| it, barring humans and AI from ever drawing anything else
| that has a similar style. Copyright used to cover just the
| expression, now we want it to cover all possible expressions
| of a style.
| stonith wrote:
| > So let's say, if an artist developed a particular style and
| someone wants to hire them for a business project like a game
| they can't feasibly just learn that style and use it so they
| hire the artist. Later other people catch on this style and
| develop over it. It only works because monetising through
| copying the style is not very feasible.
|
| I don't think copying an art style is that hard. Professional
| artists in your example of the game industry can absolutely
| imitate each other upon request. If using the same style as
| another artist were so difficult games with multiple artists
| wouldn't have a coherent art style, but they do because the
| studio will develop a style guide and use their senior
| artists to guide the juniors.
|
| > How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending
| years of developing that style?
|
| They haven't been in the past and they shouldn't be. They're
| compensated for the specific works they produce which are
| granted copyright. This is a good thing because otherwise the
| artistic domain would be horrendously polluted with claims,
| and producing original art would be like navigating a legal
| minefield.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > hey haven't been in the past and they shouldn't be
|
| So what's your suggestion, free food and housing for the
| artistic types or mercy killings?
| stonith wrote:
| Nothing. Continue as we currently are where artistic
| style is not protected, but output is. Artists get work
| making art as they always have, but they're competing
| against AI that can pump out shit quality work very
| quickly. If you can't do better than that as an artist
| then you should find another line of work.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > free food and housing for the artistic types
|
| Food and housing should be a human right, and it is only
| because of greed and fear that society allows someone to
| become homeless.
|
| Not only should we provide housing and food for the
| artists. We should do it for everyone. And then they can
| spend time doing what they want, and earn more money that
| way but never have to worry about housing or basic food
| for survival.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I guess you first should do your revolution, establish
| your new order where food and housing is a given right
| and later go after the work of the artist.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > do your revolution, establish your new order [...] and
| later go after the work of the artist
|
| I don't think that's what's going to happen.
|
| But if things get as bad as you guys are saying, maybe
| after enough people lose their jobs to AI society will
| change somehow to take care of the less fortunate among
| us in better ways, providing housing, food and healthcare
| to the people.
| cataphract wrote:
| If you want to reason under the current legal framework
| that makes the works they create "their" work for
| economic purposes... then you also need to accept that
| under that same framework they are not deemed to be the
| authors.
| couchand wrote:
| And medical care! Nobody should have to worry about food,
| housing, or medical care.
|
| Our greatest failing as a society is viewing those three
| things as individual problems. It was not an accident, it
| is a very profitable social failure.
| yosame wrote:
| Or they can do a different job?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sure, right after being compensated for the work they
| already did and value they created.
| [deleted]
| mikeg8 wrote:
| I never thought of it from that perspective before, thanks
| for sparking that thought experiment.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Sounds like fair use to me, unless I'm mistaken... what could
| be wrong with replicating a style that someone else
| introduced? It's entirely possible someone else came up with
| the same style hundreds of years before and it just never
| became well known. People copy various anime styles all the
| time, why can't they use a computer program to help them do
| it?
|
| Clearly the argument can't just be "because they should hire
| someone to do it", heck what if that person is totally
| booked? It's not taking away from them in the slightest to
| produce additional artwork using a similar style if they
| weren't available to take the job, so that seems irrelevant.
|
| As long as you're not taking their work and saying it's yours
| or selling it I don't see why you can't mimic the style.
| mrtksn wrote:
| IMHO the current laws and concepts don't work anymore, at
| all. Copyright laws were already very problematic and
| caused all kinds of troubles but what's happening now is
| well beyond all that.
|
| I also think that the use of AI is a fair game, the problem
| is that the thing itself is made possible by the hard work
| of thousands of people. By hard work, I mean years or even
| decades of development. They didn't learn to draw perfect
| photorealistic paintings, they developed styles and methods
| that capture something about humans and the machine took it
| from them.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I never learned a ton of math but I use computer chips
| that were designed by people with years of experience in
| engineering to do math for me.
| mrtksn wrote:
| True, also they all got a salary and royalties for their
| work. They were well compensated and they continue being
| compensated. Have you heard of ARM Holdings? Its the
| British CPU design firm that designed all the CPUs in
| your phone and now in your macbooks. Apple and others
| continue paying them for their work they did in the 80s.
| 8note wrote:
| How much is the estate of von Neumann making off each Mac
| sale though? Knr for each rust program?
| mrtksn wrote:
| I guess you should Google it.
| ForestCritter wrote:
| If you have the skill to physically mimic my art, I see no
| problem. I am not a huge fan of copyright. AI does not have
| the physical skill to make art. It is entirely directed by
| human input and programming and relies on such to generate
| images that correlate to a human directed request.
| Computers are directed by code written for them by humans
| and rely on humans to input data. In this instance,
| programmers have written a program that feeds off of
| physically made art and generates statistical reiterations
| of the data that has been entered. Learning requires
| concious intellect. Actual physical art is being used,
| however much diluted, and capitalized on without the
| consent of the artist making the physical effort to create
| it.
| [deleted]
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I use computers to do things I don't have the innate
| ability to do all the time, that's what tools are for. If
| someone can present that an artifact I used in a
| commercial product is an asset directly taken from their
| portfolio then I'd graciously remove it.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| This is no different than professional calligraphers losing
| their jobs because of the printing press and then later due
| to customizable fonts on printers.
|
| I have a ton of respect for calligraphers and believe they
| are artists, but at the same time I don't think that the
| millions of people who create custom fonts or use custom
| fonts are doing a bad thing.
| friedman23 wrote:
| It's completely different. The customizable fonts did not
| violate copyright.
| hansihe wrote:
| We have no idea if images by Stable Diffusion violates
| copyright, there is no legal precedent.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Technically we do have examples of stable diffusion
| violating copyright, it will generate some exact clone
| images if you give it the right prompt and that image
| exists a few hundred times in the training data.
| yosame wrote:
| Just because stable diffusion _can_ be used to violate
| copyright doesn 't mean it _only_ does.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| For something like 11 images which were accidentally
| repeated hundreds of times in the training data this is
| true. They're more the exception that proves the rule.
| coastermug wrote:
| Incidentally, copyright law etc on fonts is very
| interesting. Many places license their fonts via in-page
| JavaScript. However, I believe that such a protection
| against the font designer doesn't necessarily apply if
| for instance you use the font to create a logo. ( I'm
| sure I've missed some nuance here.)
| josephg wrote:
| That's a sloppy answer. Right and wrong isn't defined by
| how copyright law is written right now.
|
| That's kind of the whole point of this debate. Should we
| change the laws and if so, how?
| avereveard wrote:
| Copyright already cover characters and stories. Just
| because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted
| character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not
| copyrighted
|
| Style itself is not copyrighted, and that's a good thing.
|
| I can create copyrighted content privately. I cannot
| share it. Law doesn't forbid imagination, wether human or
| ai and that's a good thing. But I cannot distribute these
| private rendition already without violating the content
| owner copyright.
|
| Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.
|
| Are there cases where an ai and a human can generate the
| same media but which result in the media having different
| legality?
| josephg wrote:
| > Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.
|
| I don't think lawyers would agree with you at all.
|
| > Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a
| copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean
| it's not copyrighted
|
| My understanding is that there isn't a legal consensus on
| whether or not thats true. Copyright law wasn't written
| with AI generated art in mind. For a work to be
| copyrightable, my understanding is that it requires that
| you can make a "sweat off my brow" argument. Ie, you had
| to work to create something.
|
| Does an AI count? We don't know. Or to put it in other
| terms, we haven't (collectively) decided as a society
| whether it should be copyrightable.
|
| On the other side, "fair use" arguments are also at play
| here. If I train a 1bn parameter model on 5bn images, I
| could probably make an argument that 1/5th of a f16
| probably constitutes fair use of copyrighted work. If
| that argument holds, I can train my model with impunity
| on any amount of copyrighted work so long as my model is
| small and the number of training examples is large.
|
| Will that argument sway a court room? I have no idea. Is
| that fair? I don't know!
|
| The law is decided by people. And we haven't had AIs like
| stable diffusion and ChatGPT before, so the laws haven't
| been written with this stuff in mind. There isn't even a
| legal precedent yet for how the current laws should apply
| to AI art. Speculating is fun, but speculating on how a
| judge will apply old laws to a totally novel problem is a
| fool's errand.
|
| If you want to read about fun edge cases to copyright
| law, look up the history of copyright law for maps (can
| facts be copyrighted?) and how that interacts with trap
| streets.
|
| This stuff is hairy and complicated even for lawyers. As
| an outsider, boldly claiming that copyright law is simple
| only demonstrates that you don't understand law. It'd be
| like a lawyer boldly arguing (with no knowledge) that
| compilers are simple.
| avereveard wrote:
| Training method and recall are of no consequences because
| copyright law doesn't deal with technology for the most
| part. There is a test to wether the image is stored or
| not which is interesting here for the topic at hand, but
| it's always in the context of distribution.
|
| The worst is that weight may be considered storage, but
| the point is... Law already covers that. Because it
| doesn't concern with technology, but with results of
| actions.
|
| That is the whole problem with the argumentation, law is
| technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection
| doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and
| the output not what happens in between.
| josephg wrote:
| > law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of
| redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the
| input and the output not what happens in between.
|
| What makes you think that?
|
| The law cares about whatever lawyers decide to care
| about. There was a case a few years ago where (if memory
| serves) a black woman sued an insurance company for
| discrimination after the insurance company refused to
| provide her cover. The company was using a neural net to
| decide whether to cover someone. The court demanded they
| explain the neural networks' decision - and of course,
| they couldn't. The insurance company lost the case.
|
| In the aftermath they moved from a neural net to a
| decision tree based ML system. The decision tree made
| slightly worse decisions, but they figured if it lowered
| their legal exposure, it was worth it. With a decision
| tree, they can print out the decision tree if they were
| ever sued again and hand it to a judge.
|
| > law is technology agnostic
|
| Clearly not in this case.
|
| There's plenty of other examples if you go looking. In
| criminal law, they care a great deal about the technology
| used in forensic analysis - both in its strengths and
| weaknesses.
|
| If you don't know much about law, being humble and wrong
| will serve you better than being confident and wrong.
| couchand wrote:
| It's worth noting that "worse decisions" is from the
| point of view of the insurance company, which would
| prefer to act racist if only that pesky law didn't stop
| them, and will continue to do so to the extent they can
| get away with it.
| josephg wrote:
| Curious that you assume the insurance company was racist
| / malicious in this case. There's nothing to suggest that
| reading in the story I gave.
| couchand wrote:
| As you said, they were sued for discrimination and lost.
|
| Also, differential insurance coverage tends to be one of
| the worst ways that systemic racism is perpetuated.
| avereveard wrote:
| Insurance is not copyright and the case is not even the
| same subject matter.
|
| And again that case is technology agnostic,
| discrimination law requires you to be able to provide
| proof that results are non discriminatory, law itself
| doesn't care that it was specifically a neural network,
| it only cares about the end result, the firm lost because
| it failed to provide required data about their decision
| process, not because it was using neural networks, that
| they used a neural network was irrelevant on its own, and
| it could have been fine if they baked explainability in
| it.
| sam345 wrote:
| This doesn't seem too complicated to me. An AI trained on
| images that produces a new image even if in same style as
| the source database is not violating copyright. It sucks
| for artists but that's not an argument that current law
| bans it. If current law banned it, every artist who was
| inspired in their work by other styles or image would be
| violating copyright. E.g, all comic book artists study
| and are inspired by other comic book artists. I don't
| doubt there will be attempts by courts and/or
| legislatures hostile to AI to make up new law to impose
| some sort of penalty/license fee on AI generated images.
| One approach would be make an artists style a trademark
| (for all I know that is already established law but I
| doubt it). I doubt the effort will be successful as there
| will be a gazillion ways around it or it will result in a
| relatively small number of monopolies of protected styles
| which would seem even a worse outcome than a flood of AI
| generated art. Ultimately I think artists will need to be
| even more careful about branding and probably will insist
| on prominent displays of their signatures and promoting
| the idea that a premium should be placed on human
| generated art probably through some sort of "certified
| human art" label. It definitely will increase the supply
| of art and likely decrease the number of artists that can
| survive financially off their work.
| josephg wrote:
| > This doesn't seem too complicated to me. An AI trained
| on images that produces a new image even if in same style
| as the source database is not violating copyright
|
| Yeah, software "doesn't seem too complicated" to non-
| programmers too.
|
| No offense, but if you aren't a lawyer then your opinion
| on legal matters has about as much veracity as a dentist
| explaining how software is made.
|
| I have a certain amount of scorn for non-engineers
| telling me how their app idea is a weekend job and I
| should do it for free. I'm sure lawyers feel the same way
| about us when we claim there are easy answers around
| stable diffusion and copyright law.
|
| The AI was trained without permission on copyrighted
| data. If it was as cut and dry as you claim then why do
| both parties think its worth going to court?
|
| I don't know much about the law, but I know enough to
| recognise when its a job for the lawyers to figure out.
| fastball wrote:
| Stable Diffusion isn't violating copyright for the same
| reason artists aren't violating copyright when they look
| at a bunch of images and make something similar.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Artist function is not limited to the act of producing the
| creation. Their value comes from creating the methods of
| exploring ideas or feelings and not from the output itself.
| Guernica is not invaluable because no one else can draw it
| and Picasso is not infamous because drew the best lines.
|
| Just to be clear, I think art made with AI also can have
| value because it's a tool after all. My concern is, it
| breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's
| not OK.
| bioemerl wrote:
| > My concern is, it breaks the business for the people
| that feeds on and that's not OK.
|
| Why not? This is a website that's filled with
| programmers, almost all of our wealth is built on the
| skulls of jobs that once existed, and those programs were
| built without the consent of the people whose jobs were
| automated away, often through observing and rewriting the
| processes they used to do.
|
| The standard, this has been going on for decades, the
| only reason it's getting backlash is because this is a
| group of people who never expected to have this happen to
| them.
| mrtksn wrote:
| We automate people's jobs, not taking their intellectual
| properties and build machines that can churn endless
| versions of it. The people put out of work by computers
| no longer work and they were paid in full for the work
| they did, unlike the people who developed intellectual
| property on their own dime hoping to be compensated later
| only to find out that their work was copied and
| distributed by the computer people.
| bioemerl wrote:
| What do you guys think Excel spreadsheets did? Back in
| the day people had pages with lots of boxes and did the
| calculations manually. The processes, terms, techniques,
| were all human inventions and shamelessly replicated by
| machines.
|
| Almost everything computers do was once done by a person,
| and the people who did those jobs laid the framework for
| which the processes were automated through.
|
| This has happened dozens of times. My entire job is
| writing software that was written in the 80s, which
| replaced customer service reps who are needed in the
| '70s, and the computer does what they used to do. It took
| what they invented, their processes, and made the
| computer do it.
|
| This is what automation is. It's always built on top of,
| and replaced, human beings who used to do those jobs.
| ForestCritter wrote:
| Automated jobs do the physical work. Here the computer is
| redistributing the physical work made by the artists,
| however much diluted. AI cannot make art on its own, it
| needs to be fed physical art and then be told what it is
| and what to do with it. It is not automation, it is
| simply a data manipulating tool.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| to me it's less about the process and jobs lost and more
| about some feeling loss related to the excitement about
| removing expression and experience from a domain for
| honestly very little real benefit
|
| continuing to transform things which in part centered
| around exploration, discovery and experimentation into
| something cold and kind of dumb
|
| like we will make some interesting things but it's the
| general trend of modern society that upsets people
| everything just getting easier/worse faster
| 8note wrote:
| On the other hand, paints and canvases are very very
| expensive, making art a domain of the rich. You can use
| the ai tools at the library, making art more proletarian.
|
| I think the pushback is around status and elitism, and
| that people with certain backgrounds are societally
| expected to be not making art.
| ForestCritter wrote:
| That is also my feeling. There is nothing like having a
| pile of raw materials, or a set of new inks or water
| color pencils, etc. and to explore the boundaries of what
| you can do with them. Art being made from a menu seems
| rather sad.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Ironically... Picasso was notorious for idea theft and
| other artists banned him from their studios.
| intrasight wrote:
| Won't this be self-correcting as all artists start to add
| visible and invisible fingerprints to their work with a
| license that says, in effect, "this image may only be viewed
| with human eyeballs. Any other consumption is forbidden. "
| josephcsible wrote:
| Copyright doesn't let you forbid consumption. It only lets
| you forbid redistribution of copies and derivative works.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Don't worry about it too much. From now on, nobody will
| release their art for public access anymore. Even portfolios
| will be paywalled to prevent copyright theft being laundered
| through "AI".
|
| Which means there will not ever be a Stable Diffusion 2.0
| with new art styles. In a year or two the instantly
| recognizable style of Stable Diffusion will be seen as
| extremely lame and crass.
| tantalor wrote:
| [flagged]
| th3h4mm3r wrote:
| A little bit luddist imho
| dymk wrote:
| What's a camera to you?
| imgabe wrote:
| Who is making the art, the camera or the human operating
| it?
|
| Does a paintbrush also make art? A chisel? These are tools
| that humans use.
|
| So is the AI. It doesn't act of it's own accord. A human
| has to give it a prompt and often refine the output.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| [dead]
| davidgaw wrote:
| Exactly. The tool is incomplete, in a sense, as while it shows
| the work of original art produced by the AI and the human
| images it was trained on, it has no way to show the imagery on
| which the human artists were trained to produce their images.
| (The model behind a human mind is vastly more complex than that
| of a deep learning model, but the principle is analogous.)
| esperent wrote:
| > Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is
| clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art.
|
| You're jumping to a conclusion that the data doesn't warrant, I
| suspect because it's a conclusion that suits you.
|
| They're doing something like a "reverse image search" from an
| AI generated image over the original dataset and returning a
| few examples that have a high degree of similarity. There's no
| guarantee that the images they return are actually the ones
| combined to create the AI image. In fact their results are
| dubious - see Saurik's comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34671149
|
| I don't have an opinion regarding the question of whether SD
| creates art or not. To be honest, as someone who enjoys art or
| kind-of-art in many forms, it's not important to me (although,
| of course, I can see why it is important to someone who makes a
| living from art or AI generated images).
|
| However, this website doesn't add anything except noise to
| either side of the debate, from what I can see.
| bioemerl wrote:
| I have to be correcting you here, stable diffusion does not
| combine images.
| semicolon_storm wrote:
| Until somebody comes out with a better way to trace back
| output images to training data, this is the best "data" we
| have so far.
|
| Before this, there were anecdotal examples of SD outputting
| an image with some Shutterstock watermark or very similar to
| some artist's work, but the prompts also seemed highly
| specific or were asking for something in that artist's style.
|
| This tool at least lets us start to trace back the average
| image, and so far it does seem SD is adding something novel
| to its outputs.
| goldemerald wrote:
| Using pixel-space or latent-space distances to measure if a
| generative model has simply memorized the training data is a
| common evaluation metric in ML literature. If the website is
| using the full training set of LAION 5-B used to train Stable
| Diffusion, then I find it extremely convincing that SD has
| generalized to the data distribution it was trained on, and
| does not simply regurgitate other people's artwork. If there
| is a way to find more similar images, I have yet to see it.
|
| I think this website is evidence SD is a novel image
| generator, and rarely creates infringing images (at least in
| the way we thought of infringing before these kinds of AI).
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Im sure its very random, but why is it that 99% of the time
| someone says this about some AI artwork its an image of a
| beautiful woman?
|
| I am pretty convinced at this point that in a lot people's
| heads, the fight to claim pictures like this as "real" or novel
| art is unconsciously just an urge to claim the beautiful woman
| as their own! Just thousands of men every day, generating
| beautiful ladies, yelling at people on the internet that they
| are real and they need to be protected...
|
| Maybe its all just coincidental or something, but if you just
| step back and look at it, its very... interesting.
| Lockal wrote:
| > Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is
| clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art
|
| Fiasco of a tool to detect the source of plagiarism does not
| mean that Stable Diffusion creates novel art. When you need a
| character with dyed hair tips, SD will occasionally spit out
| copyrighted Harley Quinn portrait from DC Comics, Stable
| Attribution won't mention Paul Dini and Bruce Timm as character
| authors, but tool may show you some other pictures of people
| with colored head. Good luck with lawyers, what I can say.
| steponlego wrote:
| This thing is running scripts from 30+ domains, I would classify
| it spyware at best. All my fans fired up, Canvas inspection, you
| name it.
| [deleted]
| alphatozeta wrote:
| basically an advert for chroma, the vector db company, since this
| is essentially running a semantic similarity search. wouldn't be
| surprised if they're running something like clip-interrogator or
| just clip itself and then an approximate vector similarity search
| over the database of image, vector pairs in their dataset.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The company is not a vector db company (it's unclear _what_
| Chroma is going from their Twitter other than "data engines
| for every machine learning system in the world"), otherwise
| attacking one of the best developments for vectors would be a
| weird business move.
|
| https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1594809321606770690
| nickvincent wrote:
| Yes, this doesn't use attribution techniques like influence
| functions or Shapley values that are popular in machine learning
| research, but I am pretty convinced that even a nearest neighbors
| search is better than the current baseline offered by "AI art
| systems": shrug our shoulders and say nothing about the role of
| human-created training data in producing the outputs.
|
| As far as I know, nobody is even thinking about doing the very
| expensive experiments needed to get ground truth data for formal
| attribution techniques in the generative AI context (for a given
| prompt, retrain your model so you can see how the output changes
| when a particular training example or group of examples is
| omitted or added), so we're nowhere near building true
| attribution systems for these very large models. Centering the
| training data will be net good for public discourse on the topic.
|
| That said, I see why people want to push back on some of the
| language used here.
| xyproto wrote:
| Should human artists also strive to attribute every other artist
| they have been inspired by when publishing an image? No.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Am I the only person who looks at this and thinks, "So what?"
|
| I mean it's technically impressive, I guess. But why would anyone
| care or pay for this product?
| scotty79 wrote:
| It's a nice way to find human artists that create images in the
| donain you are interested in. To commission some work ... or
| just to refine your prompts.
| cocacola1 wrote:
| I suppose it depends on how much you care about attribution for
| art.
| dymk wrote:
| "We" (as in the internet at large) already didn't care about
| attribution. Half of Instagram/Youtube/Tik-Tok and
| approximately 99% of Reddit was already reposted content with
| no attribution or backlinking.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Calling the nearest neighbors of the CLIP embeddings of an image
| "attribution" feels really misleading, the model has been
| influenced by the entire dataset it was trained on, just by
| finding the most semantically similar images does not mean the AI
| is just using that speficific group of images as references, they
| probably have almost no influence compared to the entire size of
| the dataset.
|
| P.S. I'm having fun uploading actual photos and art just to see
| what the site tell me with confidence "These human-made source
| images were used by AI to generate this image".
|
| Edit: https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval, this site has
| always been there to explore the LAION dataset using CLIP
| image/text embeddings and without the need to mislead the user.
|
| Edit 2: As it's showed in this tweet:
| https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824, they are
| just using CLIP-L/14 and find the most semantically similar
| images.
| __forward__ wrote:
| Yeah this needs to be higher up, very misleading! To be fair
| though, they do point it out in their FAQ: "Version 1 of Stable
| Attribution's algorithm decodes an image generated by an AI
| model into the most similar examples from the data that the
| model was trained with."
|
| To me it actually seems like this language intentionally
| obscures that they are 'only' using similarity search.
|
| Imo this does a huge disservice to AI communication, providing
| fake explanations where even cutting edge research has poor
| insight into these models.
| ausbah wrote:
| I don't think this is right. it's possible to fine tune these
| models with a few pieces from a select artist such that when
| you say "[art] is the style of [new artist]" you will get new
| pieces in the style of that artist. those few select pieces
| have clearly had disproportionate influence on the generated
| images, even if just via conditioning in the prompt
| GaggiX wrote:
| Okay but here we're are talking about the standard SD 1/2
| model trained on the LAION dataset, the site only do CLIP
| retrieval on the LAION dataset, the only thing that makes
| this website different from Google/Yandex/etc image reverse
| search.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| I wish there is similar tool for the text-based generative models
| such as GTP-3.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| [flagged]
| minimaxir wrote:
| Pushing back against a deliberately misleading presentation
| isn't emotional.
| mattbee wrote:
| I like this because they are trying to show how AI is a copyright
| laundry.
|
| I can see other commenters picking apart its method of
| heuristically guessing at source images from training data. That
| obviously won't be accurate, or a full picture, but I wonder if
| it would convince a judge.
|
| An interesting challenge for these heuristics would be to take
| the picture under test along with its prompt, retrain the model
| without the training pictures it identifies, and regenerate using
| the same prompt to see whether the output is remotely similar.
|
| Obviously that would be hilariously expensive and slow for a
| casual web service like this, but not beyond the realms of
| possibility for a wealthy copyright-holder.
|
| e.g. if an prompt for an image includes "in the style of
| Kincade", and you could subtract all of Kinkade's copyrighted
| images from the training data, would the model still be able to
| produce anything like his work? If not, Thomas Kinkade might have
| a copyright case against people who publish AI art "in the style
| of Kincade", because he could show that his input was the major
| contributor to any lucrative output, even if nobody could pin
| down the cause & effect.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Unless there are imitation Kincades in the training set labeled
| with the name Kincade, I would expect the model to fail to
| produce anything relevant.
|
| It's a strange situation. Certainly a human painter is free to
| study copywritten works closely and then produce art in the
| style of the other artist, provided the resulting work is "in
| the style of" but does not copy a specific painting. So why is
| a human SD-artist not allowed to do the same with their
| preferred tool? Perhaps because we can draw a causal line (a
| very fuzzy one) between the original and the knock off? But
| wait... in the human painter case the same fuzzy line exists,
| it's just through wet-ware not hardware.
|
| Perhaps passing first into a LLM trained to generate good
| prompts but never output specific artists' names could get
| close? Has someone tried this?
| mattbee wrote:
| If there were a legally sound way to trace inspiration from a
| copyrighted work through the brain into another work, lawyers
| would be all over it! They try often enough with music.
|
| The line will surely get a lot less fuzzy with AI models.
| renonce wrote:
| Without retraining the model, you can often get a different
| image by generating it again or modifying the prompt slightly.
| Makes people wonder if changing the training set would have any
| bigger impact.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| Causal attribution would indeed be cost prohibitive. But what
| about comparing neural activations for pairs or sets of
| input/output images? It might shed some light on how much
| "extra" knowledge SD pulls in beyond the memorized features of
| the suspected source images.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Kind of a sidebar, but interesting you chose Thomas Kinkade,
| who has been dead 10 years, and yet new "Thomas Kinkade
| Studios" work with his signature (i.e. "in the style of Thomas
| Kinade") is still being produced by by his family, who are
| probably stoked to be able to use an AI to quickly create "new"
| works.
| mattbee wrote:
| Haha, OK, not greatly in touch with the visual arts me, was
| just grasping for a monumentally successful modern painter.
| But I don't think it changes my point - I'm sure his estate
| would like to use copyright law to keep the _exclusive_ right
| to produce works in his style.
| tough wrote:
| The point is they will want a moat around that and probably
| won't be so happy anyone with a GPU or 1$ can do it too
| [deleted]
| convexfunction wrote:
| It's not quite the same, and might not be possible to make
| rigorous enough that it really proves anything, but something
| sort of similar would actually be practical to at least attempt
| in many cases. Stable Diffusion checkpoints of the same major
| version, along with other families of model weights, have the
| IMO fascinating property that you can do element-wise
| arithmetic with them, and the resulting model will actually
| sort of function like you'd naively expect. Recent paper on the
| topic (in LLMs, not diffusion models) here:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04089
|
| So, if you take a Stable Diffusion checkpoint (call it "A")
| which is only lightly trained on some subset of an artist's
| work, then fine tune it on the full corpus of that artist's
| work to a point where it's still coherent/"good" and just shy
| of actually memorizing the fine tuning data (call the resulting
| model "B"), then define model "C" as 2A-B (i.e. A + (A-B),
| where A-B is the artist's task vector multiplied by -1), can
| you still produce qualitatively similar images with model C?
| Whether with the exact same prompt, or the same prompt with "in
| the style of Kinkade" removed (which doesn't mean as much if
| Kinkade's task vector was subtracted), or with any prompt
| whatsoever?
|
| Lots of issues with this as laid out -- it's definitely not
| quite the same as "forgetting" Kinkade from the training data,
| and "any prompt whatsoever" introduces tons of leeway, and most
| good AI-assisted art is not just an unmodified single text-to-
| image output anyway -- but it might be a promising direction to
| explore.
|
| (Strongly disagree with the "copyright laundry"
| characterization, by the way.)
| Hellmitioksldf wrote:
| Apparently A.I. has a double standard?
|
| Have not seen Artists doing the same thing before very much.
| Perhaps an inspipred by but not all the images they have seen
| which lead them to be able to draw a new enough image.
| fwlr wrote:
| Uploading works by real human artists gives you a batch of
| results that resemble a reference board (mood board, inspiration
| board, etc) the artist could have been looking at while creating
| their original work of art. Obviously it's not the actual
| reference board, the only way to get that is to ask the artist
| yourself, but it sure looks like what you'd expect their
| reference board to look like.
|
| This site is grift, of course, and I doubt its creators expect it
| to sway anyone who knows it's just doing a nearest neighbor
| search of image embedding vectors. But it's oddly humanizing to
| see that the AI uses reference boards too.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The AI does NOT build or use reference boards for specific
| prompts. The only reference it has is the prompt itself, which
| gets distilled down into a list of 512 numbers, each one of
| which the AI associates with a particular image feature (or set
| of features).
|
| The only reference material it has is the training set. Most
| images are not actually retained in the model; but certain
| statistically significant or repeated images will be. So if the
| model _is_ regurgitating a training set image, this will alert
| you to that fact. But you are correct that it is not strictly
| speaking "attribution". You still need a human to say whether
| or not the images are just "in the same style" or close enough
| to actually be a straight copy.
|
| This is also only talking about the "type prompt, insert bacon"
| kind of AI art. There are plenty of people who are feeding
| other people's work into an AI as a sort of automated tracing
| tool, and this won't catch them if they're not tracing images
| that were in the training set. Unfortunately these are also the
| most egregious and awful abuses of AI art generators.
| fwlr wrote:
| In a literal sense, no, it does not use reference boards. I
| was being glib, perhaps too glib. A less objectionable
| rephrasing might be "the AI is composing a bunch of visual
| features together into a coherent image; it's cool that this
| tool can show you images in the training set where the AI
| might have learned those visual features from." It may still
| be inaccurate to say "reference boards" at all, because the
| temporality is reversed: human artist has a reference board,
| then does some black box process in their brain to draw
| inspiration from them, then outputs the final art piece. The
| AI draws on all the training data to produce the final image
| and it's only by analyzing the final image that you can
| reconstruct which images in the training set were important.
|
| Mostly I was just tickled by the fact that you can now get
| something that looks like a reference board for the generated
| image. There are some parallels to the human process, but
| maybe there are not enough parallels or the parallels don't
| run deep enough to make it sensible to call this "the AI is
| using a reference board".
| minimaxir wrote:
| > The AI does NOT build or use reference boards for specific
| prompts. The only reference it has is the prompt itself,
| which gets distilled down into a list of 512 numbers, each
| one of which the AI associates with a particular image
| feature (or set of features).
|
| Minor technical clarification:
|
| For SD 1.X, CLIPText encodes a prompt and passes a (77, 768)
| [edit: up to 77] matrix to the core UNet. For SD 2.X,
| OpenCLIP passes a (77, 1024) matrix.
|
| The black-box interaction between the text-encoded matrices
| and the UNet is how Stable Diffusion "learns" text
| associations.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Huh. I thought those got projected into the (512) shared
| CLIP space before getting passed to the conditional blocks.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Only the text portion is included, otherwise that would
| be big.
|
| Also, I am slightly wrong in that the first dimension
| will many not always be 77, since apparently there is no
| padding in the tokenizer. Test notebook here: https://col
| ab.research.google.com/drive/192PDIbc2XiI1HgJQSdN...
| HammadB wrote:
| Nope, this is why you cannot use images as prompts
| without some workarounds! SD doesn't use the shared CLIP
| space but the text encoded before projection
| astrange wrote:
| > Most images are not actually retained in the model; but
| certain statistically significant or repeated images will be.
|
| This isn't true. The distribution of images seen by the model
| is not the distribution of images in LAION; the base models
| were trained with deduplication (or tried to) and custom ones
| could've been forcibly overfitted. So "repeated" as seen in
| clip-front doesn't prove anything.
| throwaway-blaze wrote:
| I was taught to paint by instructors, and then refined my
| abilities by studying paintings of the old masters, right down to
| their brushwork and core techniques visible in the paintings to
| all who see them.
|
| Now I go and create a painting called Sunflowers. Does Van Gogh's
| estate own some of my work?
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Basic answer is no because Mr Van Gogh is long dead and any
| copyright he ever had is now expired. But let's say he only
| died a few weeks ago.
|
| Otherwise, it depends what the sunflowers you painted look
| like. You've seen the work that it is alleged you copied, so
| stuff that looks a lot like copying is assumed to be copying,
| roughly speaking. If you produced a work that reproduces
| substantial elements that were original in Van Gogh's work,
| then Van Gogh has a case in copyright infringement. That can
| include the overall composition of the painting, some
| particular brushwork, etc. Techniques are not protected by
| copyright (that is generally the domain of patents, but afaik
| there are no extant patents on how to use a brush), so you can
| copy the techniques as much as you like, as long as you are not
| copying actual brushstrokes to reproduce the painting.
|
| Copyright is concerned fundamentally with the degree to which
| you are stealing the market for the original work. It was
| created to allow authors etc to profit off their hard work,
| rather than labour for years writing a book only for someone
| else to make all the money from selling it. The existence of
| copyright makes it possible to make money despite the fact that
| copying someone else's work has always been easier and cheaper
| than making something new. You could spend ten years writing a
| book, and it would take someone a day to print a copy, and
| twenty other printers could do it and none of them would pay
| you... so why would you write a book in the first place unless
| it were a political/religious pamphlet? To guide your
| interpretation of copyright, think about the degree to which
| you are stealing a market for Van Gogh paintings. If you
| produce a very close replica, then yeah, you are stealing some
| of the market. Photographing the painting and selling prints
| does the same thing. Producing something close from scratch
| without reference to the original is absolutely fine, if there
| is no copying then there is no infringement. The copyright
| statute just doesn't want you stealing Van Gogh's market for
| his own works using the crutch of copying his stuff, and
| through no original effort of your own.
|
| Obviously AI art is a huge problem for this fundamental goal,
| because it hides the copying that it does. Someone selling a
| copy of your book without a license is easy to identify. AI art
| lets you take some art you like, launder it a bit, and then use
| it in your marketing materials without the original artists
| being able to notice the infringement and sue you for it.
| Fundamentally it is like money laundering, the same way AI data
| analysis has often been used for laundering human biases.
| That's a huge problem and really subverts the entire intention
| of copyright. It steals the market and hides it at the same
| time.
|
| You can also see how using an AI tool to launder images is just
| copying with a small amount of original human labour curating
| the input works. You can have some credit for your labour
| picking them, but you can't really pretend the source images'
| copyrights just disappear. The only issue is which humans are
| owed royalties. There's a lot of debate going on about whether
| computers doing art is just like painters studying, just like
| you said, but if you analyse it as the laws do only in terms of
| the humans involved, you have a bunch of artists, and someone
| operating a lever labelled "mix these paintings so nobody can
| recognise my IP theft" that will vastly outpace their
| production and steal 99% of the market very quickly. It's the
| invention of the printing press all over again.
|
| If the copyright laws are too difficult to apply (eg an AI
| painting is such that it has laundered away any ability to pick
| out which bits infringe a human's original painting used as
| input) then rather than everyone throwing up their hands and
| admitting defeat, the laws will probably change to better serve
| their original purpose. For example, AI paintings may have to
| pay royalties to every single artist used as input regardless
| of whether individually identifiable instances of copying are
| visible in the output.
| achr2 wrote:
| I think the issue is around intent, and it is not an easy issue
| to resolve, either morally or legally. There are many legal
| precedents in music - for instance Tom Waits won a case against
| an ad agency who, after he refused their request to use his
| song in an ad spot, used a "sound-alike" song in their ad. When
| an AI is being used to knowingly circumvent paying a creator
| for their work, that does seem problematic - but likely
| unenforceable except in clear-cut extremes.
| jxf wrote:
| No one is necessarily saying that you owe Van Gogh a cut. What
| they _are_ saying is not to claim that you didn't train on Van
| Gogh or to pretend that you don't know what you practiced on.
| timmaxw wrote:
| > No one is necessarily saying that you owe Van Gogh a cut.
|
| But the controversy over Stable Diffusion is whether they owe
| the human artists a cut or not, right?
|
| > What they _are_ saying is not to claim that you didn't
| train on Van Gogh
|
| Stable Diffusion is definitely not claiming that it didn't
| train on human artists.
| wilimitis wrote:
| > But the controversy over Stable Diffusion is whether they
| owe the human artists a cut or not, right?
|
| The controversy of Stable Diffusion is attribution. I could
| not care less about receiving a cut. Rather, I want my
| life's work in pushing particular style further than anyone
| has before to be recognized primarily so the next artist
| can trace the lineage and improve upon it.
|
| > Stable Diffusion is definitely not claiming that it
| didn't train on human artists.
|
| Stable diffusion claims that attribution is not important
| because "all artists copy each other".
| timmaxw wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see human
| artists doing the form of attribution you're describing.
| When people post artwork online, or when artwork is
| displayed in museums, it's normal to credit the artist
| who did the work, but not the artists who inspired them.
| (Unless the artist is directly copying another artist's
| work, or drawing fanart of a character from another
| work.) Can you clarify what this kind of attribution
| looks like when human artists do it?
| Swizec wrote:
| As an author, often I don't even remember where I got some
| fragment of an idea. The good stuff just gets embedded in my
| subconsciousness and turns into the way I think.
|
| Should every HN comment I write include a full list of
| everything I've ever read? What about a commercial work like
| a book, should _that_ include a list of everything I 've read
| or heard in the past 35 years of my life? That's a lot of
| attribution to keep track of ...
|
| edit: I guess my question is where does derivativity end and
| creativity begin?
| jxf wrote:
| I think you're applying the wrong standard. If you think
| your work has been clearly influenced by something, you
| might call that out in the acknowledgements of your work,
| for example.
|
| What Stable Diffusion does is effectively say "it doesn't
| matter how this was made" for every single artifact it
| creates, providing neither attribution nor acknowledgement.
| This happens even when it's clearly been influenced by, and
| in some cases is directly copying, elements or a whole of a
| very small set of highly influential inputs.
|
| If a human author did that, people would probably be upset,
| if not outright accuse them of plagiarism.
| [deleted]
| nannal wrote:
| No, they should clearly own all your work because you used
| something learned from them.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I doubt even then you could make a work that would be
| worthwhile enough that any lawyer could care, but just because
| you are doing it for the wrong reasons (to prove a point). You
| need to live a full life and have passion to make art like Van
| Gogh.
|
| Its not simply that he had good technique. Its that he felt
| something deep down. He felt it ever since he was a child, and
| made constant and frustrating (to him) attempts to then
| manifest that feeling. He would sometimes linger by a roadside
| too long and become his own little philosopher, seeing a new
| treatise in the ebb and flow of landscape from the sky. He had
| loves and heartbreak and fantasies, and found no other place to
| recover from those things than in patient work with the canvas.
| His whole life was a sacrifice, a sacred devotion to the spirit
| of humanity only art can capture so thoroughly and universally.
| You can't just _do_ that.
| convexfunction wrote:
| Yes, whenever I spend hours refining a prompt in my stable
| diffusion UI and select one of hundreds or thousands of
| outputs and spend even more hours refining it with inpainting
| and other non-AI tools, I've felt nothing whatsoever, and my
| choices aren't informed in any way by anything interesting
| going on in my inner life.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| If you struggle with it, if you are always wrestling with
| something not quite right, if it makes you nervous to share
| it, you are on the right track for sure!
|
| I'm just saying, a guy like Van Gogh comes around just a
| few times a century, he is not somebody you can simply
| encode into a lot of different matrices, it takes a certain
| human life to make art like him, or even more simply, to
| simply see the world like him. Its not just about the way
| the sunflowers look, its about the choice in the first
| place to paint them, and making that choice in the
| particular context he was in, at the particular time in
| history he did. Its important that it was _this_ painting
| that was painted after all the other paintings that had
| come before, both in particular for Van Gogh and for the
| world. And you can 't ever recreate it, because its already
| done, and you can never step in the same river twice.
|
| In general, and no offense to you in particular, but you
| will be forgotten as an artist. If this wasn't a certainty
| before, it is one now with all art generation and such. But
| don't take that as a bad thing, it is more than anything
| liberating. Try to remove all expectation and ego from what
| you are trying to make, and that will bring you closer to
| Van Gogh's work than any particular technique he used--your
| artwork should be completely personal, entirely internal,
| right up to the point that someone else see's it for the
| first time. It should only be judged on a sui generis
| rubric, more like a dream than a product. Stop, in general,
| trying to prove yourself on the basis of the tools you use.
| You could use sticks-and-twine or a million-GPU-DALL-E
| thing, whatever, its all orthogonal to the effect the final
| product might have, and that effect itself is only
| influenced by your attitude, your sincerity, and your
| vulnerability, as it is applied to the work.
|
| (That is my maybe my main issue with the AI art bots, do
| the artists who work with them even feel vulnerable about
| their work? Can artistic sincerity and enthusiasm exist in
| AI art? Do AI artists feel the literally metaphysical
| stakes of what they are doing like Van Gogh did? Or is it
| all so constantly folded back into the idea of AI art
| itself? Is it all just different campaign posters for the
| cause of legitimizing itself as "real" art? Maybe just some
| time needs to pass, but I hope artists can still get
| nervous in the future, can still struggle at all to bring
| something out. I worry that people using this technology
| are too worried about proving themselves, they are not
| opening themselves up the possibility of failure that all
| artists need. They are not in a silent enough room to be
| able to hear what there brain is actually saying, only
| trying to respond respond respond. It is usually the
| struggle the artist has with _themselves_ that is
| transmuted into the work such that it makes us cry or feel
| profound joy or sadness or whatever, we still need that
| psychic energy in the world, it doesn 't need to be
| solved.)
|
| To be like Van Gogh, you need to make art as if you would
| die and go to literal hell if you didn't, or go there if
| you made the "wrong" art. If you feel something like that,
| you are on the right track, but you still have 0.001%
| chance of dealing with that illness as productively as Van
| Gogh did.
|
| The next Van Gogh, or the next Francis Bacon, or Rothko, or
| Cezanne, or whoever, will probably not have the machine-
| capturable-"style" of any of those people, but she will
| share in the particular mental complex they had, the same
| spiritual curse which drives one to reach past a scientific
| or practical world, to tap into something pure, almost
| completely formal, that cannot simply be taught or
| transmitted, much less encoded.
| convexfunction wrote:
| > That is my maybe my main issue with the AI art bots, do
| the artists who work with them even feel vulnerable about
| their work?
|
| Sometimes, yes. John Q Nerd playing around with it might
| not, but the "good AI artists" I follow on Twitter
| certainly do.
|
| > Can artistic sincerity and enthusiasm exist in AI art?
|
| Unequivocally yes.
|
| > Do AI artists feel the literally metaphysical stakes of
| what they are doing like Van Gogh did?
|
| Some of them seem to, though I dunno precisely what Van
| Gogh felt so I guess I'm not sure.
|
| > Is it all just different campaign posters for the cause
| of legitimizing itself as "real" art?
|
| Not sure where you find this stuff, but it sounds really
| boring. Certainly not all of it is.
|
| Your unsolicited advice falls flat (to me), sorry. My
| unsolicited advice to you would be to psychologize less.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Sorry as well! Thanks for answering all my parenthetical
| rhetorical questions, definitely shows your not too
| defensive or anything about this stuff we are all,
| honestly, still navigating.
|
| But I really really do wish you the best with this stuff,
| the future is bright and interesting either way for art!
| mLuby wrote:
| Does your work eclipse the master you studied? That's too bad
| for that one master but often they share in your fame. And each
| artist eventually fades, passing the torch to the next
| generation.
|
| Have you studied _all_ masters and eclipsed them, without
| acknowledging them so they can share in your fame? Will you use
| your untiring, undying skill to flood the market with your work
| so "artist" ceases to be a profession?
|
| That's categorically new, and worth preventing.
| timmaxw wrote:
| In a world where Stable Diffusion wins the copyright
| lawsuits, I don't think "artist" would cease to be a
| profession. Rather, I think the equilibrium would be artists
| using Stable Diffusion as a tool to automate the labor-
| intensive parts of making art (putting the brush strokes on
| the page) while the human artist provides high-level creative
| direction.
|
| This would be bad for present-day artists who've invested
| their lives in developing the skills of putting brush strokes
| on the page; those skills would become worthless. But the
| flip side is that Stable Diffusion lets anyone make art
| easily, generating whatever image they can dream up, without
| having to spend years developing the skills first.
|
| So even though Stable Diffusion is bad for present-day
| _artists_, I suspect it's actually good for _art_ in the long
| term. "Anyone can easily create an endless supply of art,
| based on any idea they can dream up" seems like a good thing
| to me.
| mLuby wrote:
| I think you're right. However an implied yet crucial belief
| is that the loss of manual artists (vs creative directors)
| will not rob us of potential advances in art.
|
| Put another way, it is the belief that the 2020s are the
| peak of manual human art.
|
| Imagine if we'd felt that way a thousand years ago, or even
| a hundred. Is it worth being wrong?
| timmaxw wrote:
| I agree it makes it less likely that people will create
| novel manual art techniques. By analogy -- when cameras
| were invented, artists stopped focusing as much on
| realism. But I don't think that was any great loss. Also,
| there are some artists today who still make
| photorealistic paintings, despite the existence of
| cameras; so I don't think Stable Diffusion will make it
| impossible to have advances in manual art techniques.
|
| Also, I think we have to weigh that tradeoff against all
| the new things that will be created if art becomes
| accessible to 100x as many people. On net, I think Stable
| Diffusion opens many more doors for art than it closes.
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| To actually accomplish something like this purports to be (the
| linked tool only searches for similar images and doesn't tell you
| anything about how information ended up inside the model), you
| could try removing individual images or sets of images from the
| same artist from the training dataset to see what outputs the
| resulting model would lose the ability to create. It would be
| expensive to do that for more than a few images, but given how
| helpful it would be for the debate about copyright and AI, I
| think it would be great if some researchers could try it.
| version_five wrote:
| Your idea is the gold standard in explaining the influence of
| training data. People may be interested in this paper and more
| modern variations: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04730
|
| It attempts to do as you suggest in a tractable way, to
| understand which training data is most influential.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Has the output of this tool been measured against the gold
| standard so that we can tell whether or not it is working?
| version_five wrote:
| No, this tool (Stable Attribution) doesn't actually do
| training sample attribution. See my other comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483
| paconbork wrote:
| Sounds a bit like differential privacy
| cypress66 wrote:
| Are these models actually "stable" (heh)? Or would changing
| anything in the dataset result in a butterfly effect so to
| speak, thus a completely different output for the same prompt?
| nickvincent wrote:
| It's an open challenge, this preprint proposes a solution for
| robust data valuation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15466
|
| However, I'm not aware of anyone actively trying to adapt
| these techniques for large generative AI models (though would
| be great to see).
| strangescript wrote:
| I am influenced by everything I have ever seen, read, or heard.
| No one is asking me to attribute where my influences came from
| when I create something.
|
| Yes, AI is still a bit crude now, but in 10 years this is going
| to like an old man yelling at the wind.
|
| https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-unrestrai...
| convexfunction wrote:
| Yeah, it's bullshit, but digging into a specific point from their
| FAQ:
|
| > Usually, the image the model creates doesn't exist in its
| training data - it's new - but because of the training process,
| the most influential images are the most visually similar ones,
| especially in the details.
|
| Would be cool if this were true, but I don't think it is, because
| the prompt you used and the captions on the training images are
| being completely ignored. If two different words tend to be used
| in captions for very visually similar images, and you use just
| one of those words in your inference prompt, I'm pretty sure the
| images that were captioned with the word you used are much more
| "influential" on your output than the images that were captioned
| with the word you didn't use. (Like, "equestrian" vs "mountie" or
| "cowboy" or something.)
| convexfunction wrote:
| Not to mention that the totality of all other images is in most
| cases probably more "influential" than the few most visually
| similar images! Consider the thought experiment:
|
| 1. Take the prompt you used, and use it with a model checkpoint
| that was trained identically to whatever model you're using,
| except that the top 21 images this website shows you are
| removed. In most cases, while your outputs won't be identical
| (I assume), you can probably get something pretty similar.
|
| 2. Now, take that same prompt, and use it with a model
| checkpoint that was _only_ trained on the top 21 images this
| website shows you. (AFAIK you can 't really do this because
| Stability hasn't released a "completely untrained" version of
| any of their models... though maybe they have and nobody cares
| because it's useless for most purposes.) I'm not completely
| sure what you'd get, but my bet would be that you get either
| nonsense or a memorized replica of one of the training images,
| not the same output image you got previously.
| okamiueru wrote:
| So, this is just a reverse image search, or does do anything more
| clever, like finding stronger matches in the latent space? For
| example the "style" could match, but a composition is completely
| different, etc.
|
| So, even if it fails at correctly attributing source data. I'm
| wondering if it doesn't also fail at the concept of attribution.
| So far it just shows you some pictures with no attribution, and
| saying that whoever made _those_ , made _that_.
|
| Am I missing something? Why doesn't it know who the "human made
| sources" were made by?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| From what I can tell, it's just using the latent space to find
| similar images. Which is interesting, and potentially useful,
| but the fact that they are claiming that this is about
| 'attribution' puts it into scam territory IMO.
| gfodor wrote:
| Ah, a nice visual proof that these AI systems are actually
| synthesizing images with a degree of inspiration from prior art
| similar to the way humans do.
| heliumcraft wrote:
| Actually no it isn't proof of anything, the site is highly
| misleading, it's just searching for similar images using CLIP
| image embeddings and then claiming those must be the source.
| https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824
|
| Ironically they don't give attribution to where this technique
| comes from https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Until you upload a human created image...
| fromtheabyss wrote:
| Hip hop, rap, and dj mixes are derivatives of art. Each is
| legally allowed without attribution. AI will be legally permitted
| to do the same.
| mnming wrote:
| Off topic, I really like the scrolling animation on the site, I
| wonder what tools did they use to make it.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Rather than retroactively tell the community to self police,
| maybe we could ask our lawmakers to implement attribution
| legislation
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| This is a company that allows you to search for images from a
| training dataset that have a high cosine similarity with a given
| image. It appears to be the same as the open source software
| published by LAION.
|
| https://github.com/rom1504/clip-retrieval
|
| It does not appear to actually show you how images were used to
| train a generative AI.
| [deleted]
| geuis wrote:
| I agree with several other commenters on this. I went through
| maybe 20 different images, and in every case there were no
| clearly identifiable ties back to the "sources". If anything, I'm
| more impressed at what SD is able to do.
|
| However, I have definitely found at least a handful of generated
| images over the last few months that were almost 100% the same as
| the training image. I don't have the references handy, but it
| shouldn't be too hard to replicate. I was looking at different
| artists I liked on Artstation but that had few examples of their
| work. I then used a fairly standard prompt and only changed
| references to the artists I was testing out. In several of those
| instances, the generated images in SD were near 1-1 with one of
| the source images the AI was trained on.
| version_five wrote:
| This appears to be just looking for the nearest neighbors of the
| image in embedding space and calling those the source data. This
| by definition would find similar looking images, but it's not
| strictly correct to call it attribution. To some extent all of
| the training data is responsible for the result - as an example,
| the model is also learning from negative examples. The result
| here may feel satisfying, but it's overly simplistic and it's
| misrepresenting what it is to call it attribution.
|
| (The silly story they have on the site doesn't really score any
| points either, it reminds me of RIAA et al)
| azeemba wrote:
| Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is
| genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would be
| valuable.
|
| I don't think such a solution can work just based on the
| resulting image though. It probably needs to input prompt to
| have any chance of working.
| csomar wrote:
| > Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is
| genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would
| be valuable.
|
| Wouldn't the attribution be basically all the dataset with
| various attribution probabilities? It's kind of like a
| reverse neural network.
| ilyt wrote:
| I'd like to say AI trained on say patent database would
| prevent many patents that shoudn't be granted in the first
| place but my guess is that lawyers would quickly adapt to
| writing them in a way that doesn't trigger AI
| vintermann wrote:
| So it is the opposite of attribution. It just makes up a
| plausible-looking story of attribution and passes it off as the
| truth. If you passed it a hand-painted image from 1850 which
| was not in SD's training dataset, it can happily declare that
| it was inspired by someone's piece from 2019. There's no actual
| causal inference going on.
|
| It has more in common with using an AI language model as a
| "bullshit generator" than it has with human attribution. Which
| isn't a coincidence, since nearest neighbour similarity
| searches ARE a type of machine learning, just a much simpler
| one than SD.
|
| Anti AI people who are upset about attribution, should learn
| the technology and try to create an actual attribution model:
| one that has a notion of causality, which could say who
| influenced who.
|
| Causal model requires causal assumptions, but you can probably
| get far with the simple assumption that "works from the future
| do not influence works from the past".
| jfoster wrote:
| You can literally take a photo right now, upload it, and it
| will find similar photos from the SD dataset.
| Aransentin wrote:
| As an obvious example, I uploaded a photograph I took of a
| painting I have by Julie Hagen-Schwarz* that's been in
| private possession since 1882 and never put online:
| https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=7730efac-
| bf52-4077-...
|
| It still finds ostensible "source images" for the art. So,
| yes, it's clear this service is pretty much bogus.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Wilhelmine_Hagen-
| Schwarz
| wilimitis wrote:
| Why do you close the space for people who are pro-ai AND pro-
| attribution? The entire ai space wreaks of this divisiveness,
| and is likely why it will continue to die out as another
| "art-fad". There is seemingly little willingness to integrate
| into the existing art world in good faith.
| ertian wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like it'll just as happily 'attribute' human-
| made images as well, which calls the whole thing into question.
| If it's really showing the images that stable diffusion has
| 'stolen from', and it'll do the same for humans, does that not
| mean people are equally guilty?
| fastball wrote:
| Maybe Stability AI is playing 4D chess and made this website
| themselves as a sorta "false flag" to help demonstrate that
| what SD is doing is no different than what humans do, to help
| them win any legal battles.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| How is what any of these image generators are doing any
| different from myself when I (try to) make art? I draw on
| my experiences and senses and try to reproduce a picture
| and those experiences include natural things I've seen as
| well as art others have made.
|
| More so how are these image generators any different from
| text generators like ChatGTP? I feel like if first tool out
| from these AI gates was a bot that wrote good-enough-to-use
| code, no one would have batted an eye. Everyone would just
| go "yeah we told you that those pesky programmers would
| eventually automate themselves out of jobs", but since it
| is rendering pictures which most of the populace can
| appreciate and it is a skill that is easy enough for
| literally any child to pick up, but requires a lot of
| dedication to master all of a sudden this is theft and
| should be illegal.
|
| I really hope this lawsuit or whatever doesn't go anywhere,
| because it will not change anything. The genie is already
| out of the bottle as far as image generators are concerned
| - however it means that we the people won't get whatever
| comes next. Whatever comes next will be tightly held by big
| corporations and they alone will reap the benefits,
| whatever they may be.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > More so how are these image generators any different
| from text generators like ChatGTP?
|
| I've spotted this pattern a couple of times and this sort
| of circular reasoning seems concerning. Whenever one of
| (Stable diffusion, Copilot, ChatGPT) comes up in a
| discussion, their legitimacy seems to be swiftly
| justified by existence of the other two, even though
| they're all uniquely problematic in how they wash away
| attribution and licensing.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| The thing is that no one seems to have these concerns
| with ChatGPT. When DALL-E came out it was touted as end
| of artists since now everyone could "just make their own
| art", but most people just see ChatGPT as a toy.
|
| This is not circular reasoning, more observation of what
| people value. Since everyone can "Google and gather
| information" ChatGPT isn't valued enough, but since most
| people don't know how to draw DALL-E and Stable Diffusion
| are seen as industry destroyers.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| It's interesting to read your perspective. I feel like
| I've seen more doom-saying about co-pilot and ChatGPT
| than I have about DALL-E and friends. But that may be
| selection bias.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Well, yeah, copilot had bunch of clueless people yell how
| it would make programming so much easier, but it was
| pretty obvious for anyone who used it that it was no
| where near ready do replace anyone. It was more like a
| good generic LSP
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think there's plenty of doom saying with both. LLMs and
| diffusion models are both highly disruptive technologies,
| and I think it's fair to speculate on what the impact of
| that will be.
|
| The difference is I don't see book authors and news
| writers trying to sue OpenAI for "stealing" their
| articles and not providing attribution, or creating
| websites that try to divine which specific book chapters
| or news articles ChatGPT used to generate any particular
| response (as if that's at all representative of how GPT
| works).
| XorNot wrote:
| Yep straight up just uploaded a picture from my camera phone
| and it confidently found a bunch of strikingly similar
| images.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| That in itself isn't an indictment of the website. The tool
| is built on the assumption of being provided an image
| generated from Stable Diffusion. If you violate that
| assumption, it isn't surprising that the tool fails your
| "test."
|
| By comparison, a "dog vs. cat" classifier that has 100%
| accuracy on the dog/cat task will, nonetheless, tell you
| that a slice of pizza is a dog... or a cat.
|
| (You could possibly interpret the results as "if SD had
| generated this image, it would have drawn most from these
| sources in doing so".)
| scarmig wrote:
| It's an image similarity search engine, slapping on the
| tag SD attribution for marketing purposes.
|
| Note that just because an image is similar (to human
| eyes) doesn't mean that it played a more significant role
| than a seemingly more dissimilar image. It could even
| return similar images that SD wasn't trained on at all.
| Even conditioned on providing an SD-generated image, it
| fails.
|
| (Something doing what it claims to do, as opposed to
| naive image similarity, would actually be pretty cool and
| useful.)
| fortyseven wrote:
| I fed it several very different images and yeah, that was my
| experience as well. There were many, many details that weren't
| present in the 'evidence' it provided.
| simonw wrote:
| Upload a photo you took to prove to yourself that this tool is
| misleading (if not straight up fraudulent), then downvote and
| move on.
|
| You can already run exactly this kind of image similarity search
| against the Stable Diffusion training set using existing tools -
| https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2...
| for example
| astrange wrote:
| But you can't downvote stories.
| consumer451 wrote:
| You can flag though, and this fraud (or near fraud) deserves
| it.
| pjgalbraith wrote:
| It's actually just the exact same tool rebranded with a fancy
| landing page. The worst part is this "attribution tool" didn't
| even give attribution to the original author
| https://twitter.com/rom1504/status/1622381709424558081?s=20&...
| Thorentis wrote:
| So now we have to address the issue of whether or not all art is
| derivative. If I go to art school, and learn from the masters, do
| I need to be giving attribution to all the artists whose work I
| studied before creating my own masterpieces?
|
| Underlying this whole push to give attribution via AIs, there
| seems to be the general understanding that these AIs like SD are
| doing something very different to "creating" art, but are merely
| "combining art". I agree with this view, but it doesn't seem to
| be explicitly said very much.
| martopix wrote:
| Oops, the random image it chose as an example to show me was
| pretty nsfw :D
| pdntspa wrote:
| Interesting... I get zero results for every image I give it, all
| made with SD 1.4/1.5
| m00x wrote:
| Because the website is a grift and fraudulent on the what it
| claims to do. Anyone with a slight expertise in AI would
| immediately know that none of this is accurate.
| braingenious wrote:
| I wonder how this Super Altruistic Startup is going to monetize
| outside of becoming the art equivalent of patent trolls, wildly
| throwing out lawsuits at anything that their algorithm pegs as
| AI-generated along with a positive "similar" outcome from a
| reverse image search.
|
| I have yet to hear firsthand from any professional artist a
| single incident of Stable Diffusion causing them harm or lost
| revenue, but I have heard from a _lot_ of armchair lawyers
| salivating about the idea of demonizing /criminalizing anybody
| that uses a piece of novel software.
| EGreg wrote:
| How would it know?
| jfoster wrote:
| This seems to be a similar image finder applied to the dataset
| used to train Stable Diffusion, I think? I uploaded a photo I
| took a few minutes earlier and it showed me similar photos.
|
| My point is that it doesn't seem to prove that any of the images
| it finds are actually the source images.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Attribution is half of the problem. I'm not happy at all with
| people putting my code behind the closed wall of AI to
| regurgitate some other code inspired from it...
|
| I say : my code as in "the text of my program", not "the idea of
| my code" (I have no problem with people re-using my ideas as they
| are mostly ideas that I have learnt from someone else).
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| spullara wrote:
| This is a great way to show that Stable Diffusion doesn't copy.
| m00x wrote:
| It doesn't show anything, it's all a lie.
| granularity wrote:
| I like the concept, but if you upload a photo you took, the page
| will tell you: "These human-made source images
| were used by AI ... to generate this image."
|
| Where "this image" is your photo.
| version_five wrote:
| Exactly, because it's not actually probing attribution, it's
| just finding the most similar images in the training data. You
| can just go to https://rom1504.github.io/clip-
| retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2... and do this yourself without
| the hyperbole
| patientplatypus wrote:
| [dead]
| HenriTEL wrote:
| > people who saw it knew who made it
|
| Yeah for a small subset of insiders to a small subset of
| creators. Really that was already a fiction prior to stable
| diffusion.
|
| And then why human-made artwork would not need attribution of
| prior work that influenced it but AI made work would require
| some. We could extend the right to cite there and if we can't
| make it obvious that more than 10% of a given image was from
| another one, attribution makes no sense.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| That's not how the AI works. It also ignores all the work from
| the Language model that goes into the art. The language model can
| fill massive gaps in the image generation.
|
| All the negative examples are also instructing the AI how to make
| an image, not just the most similar images.
|
| This is a bad joke that reinforces poor understanding of how
| image generation works.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| Everything is a remix.
|
| I don't know what it's trying to achieve other than to waste
| everyone's time.
|
| Those human artists saw art from other artists who saw art from
| other artists who saw art from other artists etc.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| This is a really great approach and much better than "ban all AI-
| generated content because we can't find out who made what it was
| derived from".
|
| Even if it only finds similar matches and not true attribution, I
| actually think that is better. Say I come up with a neat design
| but I'm not very famous, and later someone more famous comes up
| with the same design on their own. I don't deserve _attribution_
| , but I would argue I deserve _recognition_. Regardless of
| whether or not the popular design was _inspired by_ or _derived
| from_ the original; having a model like this match the popular
| design with original, see that the original was created earlier,
| and give it recognition would be vindicating.
|
| In fact, what if we create a neural network like this one to
| trace out huge DAGs linking every media with its similar-but-
| earlier and similar-but-later counterparts? It would show the
| evolution of culture on a large scale, how various memes and
| pieces of culture get created, where "artistic geniuses" likely
| get their inspirations from; and it would function as a great
| recommendation engine.
|
| As for copyright and royalties - the site's intro never mentioned
| them, just "attribution" and "people's identities". And honestly,
| I don't think people deserve a cut from art generated from AI
| using their art unless the art is _extremely_ similar. Because
| most of the time they are not that similar: the AI takes one
| artist 's work (which would not be enough training data on its
| own) and mixes it with many others, like humans do, and I don't
| believe the two are different in a way that makes the AI mixer
| preserve copyright.
| benatkin wrote:
| It isn't nearly a viable solution to the problem. It's a cool
| app with a manifesto on the front page.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Haha, I just uploaded a photo of mine to test and SA promptly
| reported a dozens supposedly human-made "sources" for my photo! I
| find it hilarious! No, that's not how attribution should work.
| dzink wrote:
| From the beginning of using Stable Diffusion in local and cloud
| instances, I've been promoting SD to generate objects I know
| nobody has ever drawn before. "Airplane by Tesla", "Taylor Swift
| flying in the clouds", "Little girl riding on an ira descent
| unicorn and chasing butterflies in the clouds", "Turkey as a
| Judge" etc. I highly encourage everyone to try doing that. The
| results are absolutely atrocious in the beginning and it takes
| many many runs short and long, with seeds guiding the model to
| get closer and closer to what I ask. It took a long time to get
| one instance of SD to make the invention look plausible, and then
| trying on a new model copy/instance takes the results back to
| crap. That makes me suspect your guidance trains the instance you
| are using and your prompts and feedback create the work
| substantially. The model truly generates novel content based on
| input of the generator and it takes effort to replicate a work it
| was trained on, likely by using multiple keywords the original
| was captioned with in many places. So you can get replicas if you
| try, but you can also draw replicas with brushes if you have
| enough skill as well. To reiterate: try to generate content you
| know nobody has ever drawn before (and google to verify it is
| truly original) and see how much effort it takes to get an
| actually good result. Now sub-trained models can be steered in
| different directions, so it's possible that Midjourney or a
| heavily sub-trained cloud instance overfit to the originals, so
| this is not universal, but every copy of the model is likely
| different and molded by the prompts and feedback it's been given.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| > The results are absolutely atrocious in the beginning and it
| takes many many runs short and long, with seeds guiding the
| model to get closer and closer to what I ask. It took a long
| time to get one instance of SD to make the invention look
| plausible, and then trying on a new model copy/instance takes
| the results back to crap.
|
| This is simply not how any of this works and is only your
| imagination. Stable Diffusion is deterministic and has no
| instance memory. The seeds are random and length of session or
| starting a new instance has no effect on the randomness of
| seeds. Every seed is as random as the last, regardless of how
| long an instance has been running.
| convexfunction wrote:
| Sorry, but you're reading into noise. Anyone can reproduce an
| image anyone else made by only knowing the model checkpoint,
| positive and negative prompt, seed, sampler and sampling steps,
| &c &c they used. (Well, in principle, and _usually_ in practice
| too. Interfaces might give different results now compared to a
| version from a few months ago because implementations of
| certain things changed, or if you use xformers then all your
| outputs are slightly non-deterministic, other exceptions that
| prove the rule like that.)
|
| Some prompts I've come up with generate excellent and
| definitely novel results (without necessarily much work put
| into refining the prompt), others are extremely hard to get
| working well with hours of work even if I know it's something
| that _isn 't_ novel.
| puppycodes wrote:
| I think we need to rethink the concept of attribution and how we
| can collectivize participation rather than define absolute
| owners. It feels like theres a lot of old ideas that we force on
| new systems. Sometimes they really just dont work that way. When
| art or design is generated, copied, or remixed it gains new
| contexts that often are just as meaningful as the original. In my
| opinion at least, its what makes the internet beautiful.
| sogen wrote:
| Isn't AI art derivative work? If yes, they are infringing on
| copyrighted work.
| waterproof wrote:
| This site don't even provide actual attribution to the original
| artists? And yet they encourage you to share those same images
| without attribution. Wild.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I gave it a photo I took of my dog. It gave me a bunch of images
| that had nothing to do with my dog. It's interesting, but not all
| that useful.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I would like to be able to take my 300,000 photos and throw them
| at something like at the embedded latent space behind
| StableDiffusion, to have it rate them, add keywords, etc. This
| would allow me to them put the top 1000 on Flickr.
| minimaxir wrote:
| That is more for CLIP than Stable Diffusion.
| hayley-patton wrote:
| Here's a fixed point of Cliff Click's Twitter picture:
| https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1e52d4cc-6ad4-4ac2-...
|
| Download the first input picture, search for it, and somehow the
| picture is AI generated ripping off itself, and somehow
| influenced by other images despite the first input and the output
| being bit-identical.
| 0xrisk wrote:
| we built https://haveibeentrained.com that does the same CLIP
| retrieval process, and arranged for artists to be able to opt out
| of future trainings with Stability and LAION.
|
| If this is just CLIP retrieval, that raises some ethical problems
| with the pretense of this site. It could make artists look silly
| for depending on an overstated claim of provenance, or worse
| still have artists pursue AI artists because an image looked kind
| of like their own artwork, with nothing more behind it.
| can16358p wrote:
| How does it even work? AFAIK SD works in a "convoluted" latent
| space that is a result of all the training data, it's not like it
| takes a few images and smashes them together to create a new one.
| dqpb wrote:
| It doesn't work. It's bullshit.
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