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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

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Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#81

Post by zppln »

zzo38computer wrote: post #44

Having seen some of the pictures of AI art (I don't know if they use the same or different programs or models), my opinion is that the pictures are not good enough, although sometimes they are almost good enough. (I think there might still be a use for it, despite this. Some other comments mention some possible ideas, although there may also be others.)

While I agree that they usually look pretty bad (and that the resolution is too low), some of them have been on par of what I've seen in video games. Stellaris in particular comes to mind (my memory might not serve right, haven't played the game since release). So I think what we're already have is good enough for some use cases.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#82

Post by kergonath »

throwaway1851 wrote: post #21
klipt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Defendant built an algorithm that memorized features of Plaintiff’s IP. Defendant’s algorithm recombines parts of those features in order to produce works in the same domain that compete with Plaintiff’s work, all without Plaintiff’s consent.” The fun part is, this is how human artists learn too.

They absolutely do. What they don’t do is mechanistically clone compressed mathematical representations of input data. The human part of the creative process could very well be a distinguishing feature, legally.

They can (and do) clone compressed electrical representations of everything they see. Everything is just stored in memories in their brains instead of memory on the cloud. In the case of these complex AI, you cannot really extract the initial works, right? They have all been atomised, mashed together, and very imperfectly encoded as weights and parameters.

Yeah I am sure a lot of lawyers are going to have a lot of fun arguing every way imaginable.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#83

Post by astrange »

trention wrote: post #79
astrange wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is forbidding it won’t do much. - It appears people can train AIs from scratch or at least fine-tune them at home. - Even if your art isn’t in “the training set”, that does not prevent the AI from learning its style. (Someone can decode it to CLIP embeddings. It could have a really good text model trained on vivid art museum descriptions of your art.) - The ability of an image model to generate your art m…

If you forbid it, the investment in developing those models disappears. They will be stuck at ~what we have now at best. You can also require cloud providers to enforce a ban on training (and deploying) such models, it's doable. Good luck training it in your basement, it will probably take you a decade. If this is banned, it will become a lot like piracy - yes, it's available, no, most people (at least in the West) d…

Training these models is much much cheaper than you think it is, and there’s good data for it already.

Either use a CC0 set like Wikimedia/Flickr and throw in some dead artists like Brueghel, or train on data from a country we don’t respect the IP of. Lots of Taobao product photos out there. It’s enough.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#84

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #3
thot_experiment wrote: post #2

Maybe this current explosion in the relevance and visibility of this kind of AI model will finally lead us to rethink how insanely nonsensical our IP systems are. I'm not holding my breath, but there's hope that this sort of thing will (combined with situations like the HBO debacle) clarify the need for massive IP reform in the cultural zeitgeist. The problem here isn't that the model was trained on copyrighted works…

Why do people keep bringing up copyright anyway? It seems pretty clear that the images being generated by StableDiffusion are transformative so it's protected under Fair Use. Am I missing something here?

I think that's wishful thinking. It's objectively a mechanical derivation based on many copyrighted works. In many cases it's going to reproduce some works with not that much transformation.

What's a similar thing that has come before this? I can't think of any, this is very novel. You'd want to wait for some rulings before you jump to conclusions.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#85

Post by [deleted] »

trention wrote: post #79
astrange wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is forbidding it won’t do much. - It appears people can train AIs from scratch or at least fine-tune them at home. - Even if your art isn’t in “the training set”, that does not prevent the AI from learning its style. (Someone can decode it to CLIP embeddings. It could have a really good text model trained on vivid art museum descriptions of your art.) - The ability of an image model to generate your art m…

If you forbid it, the investment in developing those models disappears. They will be stuck at ~what we have now at best. You can also require cloud providers to enforce a ban on training (and deploying) such models, it's doable. Good luck training it in your basement, it will probably take you a decade. If this is banned, it will become a lot like piracy - yes, it's available, no, most people (at least in the West) d…

[deleted]

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#86

Post by trention »

astrange wrote: post #83
trention wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you forbid it, the investment in developing those models disappears. They will be stuck at ~what we have now at best. You can also require cloud providers to enforce a ban on training (and deploying) such models, it's doable. Good luck training it in your basement, it will probably take you a decade. If this is banned, it will become a lot like piracy - yes, it's available, no, most people (at least in the West) d…

Training these models is much much cheaper than you think it is, and there’s good data for it already. Either use a CC0 set like Wikimedia/Flickr and throw in some dead artists like Brueghel, or train on data from a country we don’t respect the IP of. Lots of Taobao product photos out there. It’s enough.

You are getting ridiculous now. Training this on "Taobao product photos" will lead to a useless model that is unable to produce practically all of the "cool" demos posted here in the last week.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#87

Post by phillipcarter »

I'm not really sure I know how to use these tools. I tried the following prompt:

"elon musk giving donald trump a massage using pizza sauce instead of oil, in a majestic room filled with flowers and golden toilets"

...and the result was a crappy AI-generated picture of not-quite donald trump holding a terrible rendering of a pizza, and some hands sticking out of random places. There were some red flowers in the picture at least.

I realize this isn't a "serious" use case, but clearly the tech isn't doing what I'm hoping it does.

I tried "coffee beans with cartoon mouths" and it's just a picture of some coffee beans. I don't get it.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#88

Post by mellavora »

t-3 wrote: post #70
throwaway1851 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely do. What they don’t do is mechanistically clone compressed mathematical representations of input data. The human part of the creative process could very well be a distinguishing feature, legally.

Tracing and collage both mechanistically clone elements of the input. Trendfollowing, mimicry, and copying others is standard in any creative area. I don't think computer-generated works will be easily distinguishable from human unless they're desired to be or shipped with metadata. It's already hard enough to distinguish human artists from other human artists without having names attached up front.

> Tracing and collage both mechanistically clone elements of the input.

Yes, and tracing counts as art fraud.

Collage is a bit different, because you are mixing many clones of many other objects such that you create a new object; additionally the way you assemble the clones may transform them (a photo of the mona lisa has different surface texture than a painted version, even more different if it is clipped from newsprint), but while the borders of this are not clear, it is clear when people are far enough over the border. Think of hip-hop, sampling, and remixing music, and some of the legal battles which have come out of that.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#89

Post by mellavora »

throwaway1851 wrote: post #8
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep bringing up copyright anyway? It seems pretty clear that the images being generated by StableDiffusion are transformative so it's protected under Fair Use. Am I missing something here?

There are really significant, novel copyright issues implicated by these large generative models trained on other people’s IP. If you take a step back, you can see that there are different ways to frame what is happening. One frame is: “Defendant built an algorithm that memorized features of Plaintiff’s IP. Defendant’s algorithm recombines parts of those features in order to produce works in the same domain that comp…

How about if I use Stable Diffusion, running 24/7 on a massive set of parallel clusters, and file for IP protection on all of the resulting images?

What potentially human-creatable images have I just taken ownership of?

Let's extend: what if I claim IP ownership of every image which StableDiffusion could produce?

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