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Megaface

exposing.ai

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Re: Megaface

#101

Post by zowie_vd »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #30
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…

> Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. I went through the post, and I am not sure whether I agree with the analysis of the examples. Diffusion models are conceptual parrots, and it is possible that "25% images contain a scribble in the bottom right corner, so the model will make a scribble in the corner" is what is being constr…

>I think a large part of outrage from the artists about diffusion model "stealing" art comes from a place of disbelief that machines can be this good without "stealing"

I think when you make machines that automate away some people's passion and purpose in life, of course they're going to be upset. When, on top of that, the machine automating their work is a "conceptual parrot" that is parroting the concepts they invented without their permission, of course they're going to be pissed off.

Besides, whilst AI image generators don't steal exact elements from the training data, they do basically steal the artstyles and subject matter of illustrators, which takes them many years to foster. Imagine an illustrator of fantasy book covers hardly being able to find work anymore because some publishers figured out that, instead of hiring him, they could cheaply hire an unskilled person from a third world country to type the illustrator's name into an AI image generator so that it imitates his works, along with a few keywords for the book in question, until eventually something good pops out. That is currently considered fair use in US copyright law, but in my opinion it is nonetheless so unjust that it justifies calling it "stealing".

Re: Megaface

#102

Post by devalidating »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #6
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…

> Stability AI is happy to follow copyright laws for their music model, because they know that music labels will hold them accountable. So this seems like a good time to point out to larger companies like @WaltDisneyCo that their copyrighted material is being stolen and used too I mean this is a pretty good point. If they're so sure this is legal, then train on copyrighted audio+video media as they already do with co…

Simply put, there is less information in music. Copyright infringement cases have been won on as little as a handful of notes. So the likelihood of a copyrightable element from the underlying showing up in the model's output is that much higher. A single melody represents a similar portion of all possible melodies as does a color all possible colors and certainly less than the fraction represented by a single color palette. Yet you cannot copyright a color palette but you can a melody.

Copyright law regarding audio media is entire different beast than visual media; the case law and fair use technicalities do not always line up as simply as "if its legal on visual media it must also be legal on audio."

Re: Megaface

#103

Post by Tepix »

I think many (if not most) people are opposed to their images being used for facial recognition related purposes (training, evaluation, services, …)

I hope creative commons will create a new license like that explicitly prohibits the use of the protected works for these purposes. Of course, in this particular case a university gathered the images (violating the citation requirement) and then companies used them commercially, violating another aspect of the license. I guess UWash is at fault for not stating that Megaface cannot be used for commercial purposes?

Are the researchers at UWash personally liable? Is the university? If we get a couple of deterring judgements there's a chance this will stop future violantions.

Re: Megaface

#104

Post by re-lre-l »

Tepix wrote: post #103

I think many (if not most) people are opposed to their images being used for facial recognition related purposes (training, evaluation, services, …) I hope creative commons will create a new license like that explicitly prohibits the use of the protected works for these purposes. Of course, in this particular case a university gathered the images (violating the citation requirement) and then companies used them comme…

I agree. But one has to understand that if something has been uploaded into internet it's going to be public by default - this is how I treat the internet. And no license will solve it.

Re: Megaface

#105

Post by bawolff »

I think that's part of the problem with non-commercial licenses. Its very confusing what it means.

It clearly means that you can't directly sell it. What about using non-commercial work on a page with ads? What about selling web hosting to someone using NC works?

The last one sounds rediculous, but what really is the difference from a strict logical perspective? You are making money off the non-comercial work after all as without it there would be no web hosting to sell.

Re: Megaface

#106

Post by bawolff »

smaudet wrote: post #90
p-e-w wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This datasets usage and creation violates Swiss law And drinking alcohol violates Saudi Arabian law. Unless the institutions involved are subject to Swiss jurisdiction (which doesn't appear to be the case), this doesn't mean much. If anything, the blame lies with the Swiss government, which allowed a foreign company (Flickr) to operate in Switzerland without adequate guarantees that this company would protect Swiss…

Can't agree, if an assassin illegaly enters a country and commits a crime, the blame falls on the miscreant for their behavior not the country for failing to notice the deceptive miscreant. You would have to demonstrate the Swiss govt was made aware of Flickr before they were a thing there and then failed to ban them, for this line of reasoning to make any sense...

I don't think that is comparable. Your example is literally happening on the countries soil.

I think a better physical analogy would be handling the sale of imported foreign products that dont meet safety standards.

Re: Megaface

#107

Post by voakbasda »

samwillis wrote: post #16
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…

You are quite right, forgot that one. Point is though, we need a test case to go through the courts to clarify all of this. There are companies betting billions on the outcome that they are ok to do what they are doing.

They are betting they can make billions of dollars while the courts screw around trying to decide the legality. They don’t care if it is legal; they only care about making money today. This is the standard playbook for big money these days: profit until the courts decide you can’t.

Re: Megaface

#108

Post by gwern »

int_19h wrote: post #81
gwern wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a lot of work on memorization, yes, and you can also do nearest-neighbor lookups in the original data to gutcheck 'memorization'. As usual, the answer is "it's complicated" but for most practical purposes, the answer is 'no': you will get the Mona Lisa if you ask for it, absolutely, but the odds of a randomly generated image being a doppelganger is near-zero. (If you've seen stuff on social media to the…

If there's a specific prompt that makes the model produce such an image (without img2img), why shouldn't it count? The question isn't whether the model produces such things randomly, but rather whether it's capable of producing them in principle, even if it requires a very elaborate prompt.

> If there's a specific prompt that makes the model produce such an image (without img2img), why shouldn't it count?

There's a specific prompt which makes a human artist produce such an image without img2img too: "Please draw the Mona Lisa". There - you just did it in your head while reading this comment!

Re: Megaface

#109

Post by gwern »

colesantiago wrote: post #66
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…

Nobody is complaining about William Shakespeare or public domain works that are out of copyright. The issue is that there is clearly copyrighted works in the model that living artists have not consented to being in the model. > SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use they do not distribute (ie copy) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so…

> Nobody is complaining about William Shakespeare or public domain works that are out of copyright.

They definitely are, and I deliberately chose a public domain writer for my example to get away from the narrow procedural grounds and focus on the issue: does generating a 'signature' or 'watermark' prove copying? No, of course not, and that's true whether you are in or out of the public domain.

> If this is irrelevant, why is Stability.AI creating an "opt out" system for artists?

What is prudent or nice or moral or good PR != legal. (And vice-versa, of course.)

Re: Megaface

#110

Post by kixiQu »

fleddr wrote: post #51
kixiQu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Model release is a good point but in many situations where people are photographed it does not apply. When you make photos of yourself or your family or even of people in public spaces, you do not require a model release. And I imagine this to be the main input of this training set. When you hire a model, photograph the person and then use these photos for promotion or commercial activities, you do require a model re…

I recommend https://ipo.blog.gov.uk/2019/06/11/copyright-and-gdpr-for-ph... and https://www.mondaq.com/germany/data-protection/714306/does-t... here for a sense of how the PII consent framework here is different than commercial licensing.
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