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Megaface

exposing.ai

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Re: Megaface

#41

Post by JumpCrisscross »

samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

Beyond copyright, how would these requirements work with Illinois’ biometrics law?

Re: Megaface

#42

Post by sacrosancty »

sschueller wrote: post #31

This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law [1]. Any person in Switzerland has the right to their face in any picture taken now and any time in the future even if taken by someone else. Without the explicit consent of a person, their face may not be used or published in anyway or form. There are only a few exceptions like for public figures and celebrities but even then they also have a right to privacy. SRF…

[dead]

Re: Megaface

#43

Post by tomrod »

fleddr wrote: post #39
gardenhedge wrote: post #7

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

I agree, but why would one share wedding photos using an open license like Creative Commons?

Because regulations are generally unknown to folks who don't spend their time solving tech problems.

People simply assumed they could share it easily with friends and family.

Re: Megaface

#44

Post by theptip »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #28
gwern wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is apples and oranges. SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use ): they do not distribute (ie copy ) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so the license of the original images is completely irrelevant. (Details like 'signatures' are also irrelevant: if I write a style parody of Willia…

>if I write a style parody of William Shakespeare and add a '--Willy Shakespeare' at the end to round it off, have I revealed that I have secretly copied his work? // I doubt you're suggesting SD, Dall-E, etc., are producing parodies so bringing in parody considerations muddies the water a lot. Also, Shakespeare's works are out of copyright. If you sell a painting signed with a [facsimile] signature of Dali then it's…

> a painting signed with a [facsimile] signature of Dali

That's not what's happening here though.

If you look at the original tweet (https://twitter.com/LaurynIpsum/status/1599953586699767808) it seems that the complaint is about the "mangled remains of an artist’s signature". I don't see any examples where it's actually copying the signature of a specific artist.

(Please do share an example of that if there is one.)

Re: Megaface

#45

Post by kixiQu »

fleddr wrote: post #35
the_duke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as easy as that. Pictures are clearly personally identifiable data, so storing them violates the GDPR if you don't have permission to do so. Some "data analysis company" got fined a hefty sum for doing so with EU citizens. I forgot the name, but they were recently in the news for helping Ukraine identify Russian soldiers by picture. Of course they were also aggregating other data including names, so just pic…

"Pictures are clearly personally identifiable data, so storing them violates the GDPR if you don't have permission to do so." Wouldn't a Creative Commons license express this permission?

IANAL, but I believe no; the CC license handles the rights that a photographer can hand out, but doesn't come with any kind of model release guarantees.

Re: Megaface

#46

Post by MuffinFlavored »

Slighty unrelated, how many "distinguishable/unique" faces/facial styles are there in terms of like "broad categories?"

Obviously hard to define but as somebody who moved around a lot growing up, I would catch my brain thinking I'd recognize somebody (quite often) only to remember I was in a totally different state than where the person I thought I was recognizing lived.

Re: Megaface

#47

Post by jefftk »

fleddr wrote: post #39
gardenhedge wrote: post #7

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

I agree, but why would one share wedding photos using an open license like Creative Commons?

In this case, because Flickr used to wave hosting fees for people who chose a Creative Commons license.

Re: Megaface

#48

Post by jefftk »

AlexandrB wrote: post #12
542458 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL. I don’t think you can prevent scraping or use in ML corpuses in this way. Copyright prevents the creation of non-transformative copies of a work other than some protected use cases (parody, education, etc). All OSS licenses do is provide a right to copy a work provided certain conditions (attribution, copy left) are met. But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold…

> But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold for being a new transformative work, so copyright doesn’t apply. Has this been tested in court yet?

It hasn't yet. I think this is the central claim of the GitHub co-pilot suit.

There's a prediction market on whether the suit will be successful, which is currently at 43%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

Re: Megaface

#49

Post by theptip »

gwern wrote: post #11
colesantiago wrote: post #2

"All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use." I wonder what the implications are for Stable Diffusion, DALLE and Midjourney since that art images on the internet are copyrighted by default. Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-ima…

This is apples and oranges. SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use ): they do not distribute (ie copy ) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so the license of the original images is completely irrelevant. (Details like 'signatures' are also irrelevant: if I write a style parody of Willia…

> distributing the original image violates the non-commercial clause of the original images because someone, somewhere, might somehow have made money

I agree with the rest of your post, but this point seems a bit uncharitable.

I think the claims would be:

1. It's a breach of copyright for Megaface to share the images in any case without attribution & replicating the CC-NC license. It would (presumably) be OK assuming Megaface were to correctly apply the CC-NC licenses to the dataset.

2. It's a breach of copyright for anyone consuming Megaface (e.g. Google) to use those images for commercial purposes.

And your argument for SD applies to 2. that regardless of license, it's OK to create a transformative work. But it still doesn't get Megaface off the hook for 1. - distributing those images without the license.

Re: Megaface

#50

Post by Imnimo »

If I understand correctly, this dataset isn't even being used to train commercial facial recognition models, it's just being used to benchmark them? The implication seems to be that it should be illegal to even apply an algorithm (of any sort) to an image that you don't have a commercial license for?
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