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We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

stablediffusionlitigation.com

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Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#71

Post by ipsum2 »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #13

Sometimes I have to wonder about the hypocrisy you can see on HN threads. When its software development, many here seem to understand the merits of a similar lawsuit against Copilot[1], but as soon as its a different group such as artists, then it's "no, that's not how a NN works" or "the NN model works just the same way as a human would understand art and style." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326

It's only hypocrisy if you think that HN is made up of a single person commenting under multiple accounts and not a diverse group of people with varying opinions.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#72

Post by vkou »

chrischen wrote: post #22

“It is a par­a­site that, if allowed to pro­lif­er­ate, will make artists extinct.” This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement. Imagine if the medical tricorder (a device from Star Trek that does maybe 99% of what modern doctors do) is suddenly invented today. Doctors could use this argument to defend their livelihoods, bu…

> This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement.

No, this is the only fundamentally correct way to view this. Before the existence of the printing press, we didn't need copyright law. Yet all that the printing press did was make transcribing books by hand faster.

Quantitative changes enabled by technology are qualitative changes. And not every form that a qualitative change takes is one that leaves the world better off than we found it.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#73

Post by visarga »

Salgat wrote: post #26
akjetma wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have to reproduce an entire original work to demonstrate copyright violation. Think about sampling in hip hop for example. A 2 second sample, distorted, re-pitched, etc. can be grounds for a copyright violation.

The difference here is that the images aren't stored, but rather an extremely abstract description of the image was used to very slightly adjust a network of millions of nodes in a tiny direction. No semblance of the original image even remotely exists in the model.

Not to mention that it works by inverting noise. Different noise, different result. Let's recognise the important contribution of noise here.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#74

Post by throwaway675309 »

dmitriid wrote: post #4

I'm on the fence about this. On the one hand, using works without consent or attribution is bad. On the other hand... This is exactly how humans train to become artists: by studying and remixing the art of others.

Isn't this exactly how language translator applications work, through ingesting a huge amount of training data?

Automatic machine language translation puts translators out of work and would not be possible without huge amounts of ostensibly unlicensed training data.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#76

Post by riversflow »

TheMiddleMan wrote: post #40
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #13

Sometimes I have to wonder about the hypocrisy you can see on HN threads. When its software development, many here seem to understand the merits of a similar lawsuit against Copilot[1], but as soon as its a different group such as artists, then it's "no, that's not how a NN works" or "the NN model works just the same way as a human would understand art and style." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326

I believe Copilot was giving exact copies of large parts open source projects, without the license. Are image generators giving exact (or very similar) copies of existing works? I feel like this is the main distinction.

> Are image generators giving exact (or very similar) copies of existing works?

um, yes.[1][2] What else would they be trained on?

According to the model card:

[1] https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/main/Stable...

it was trained on this data set(which has hyperlinks to images, so feel free to peruse):

[2] https://huggingface.co/datasets/laion/laion2B-en

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#77

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

TheMiddleMan wrote: post #31

An artist can look at images for reference, and draw something new inspired by them. Why does it matter if a software tool can do this much faster? If the artist makes the image very similar to one of the reference photos, it may be a copyright violation. It doesn't matter if the artist used a pencil or software to create the new work. Current AI image generation does, however, make it easy to unknowingly violate cop…

I don't know if you're right or wrong, but it seems plausible that we could create a database of copyrighted images to check against.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#78

Post by WA »

andybak wrote: post #45
akjetma wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are some artists with very strong, recognizable styles. if you provide one of these artists' name in your prompt and get a result back that employs their strong, recognizable style, i think that demonstrates that the network has a latent representation of the artists work stored inside of it.

I was with you right up until the final sentence. How did "style" become "work"?

Because in some cases, adding a style prompt gives almost the original image: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wby0ob/it_...

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#79

Post by kristopolous »

kstenerud wrote: post #37

This sounds so much like how albums and radio threatened artists because there would be no more demand for live performances when you can just record it once and play it back a million times. Or recordable tape, or VCRs, or art reprints. And then there were the endless lawsuits over the "theft" from sampling and remixes. The medium evolves. Some artists evolve with them, while others are left behind.

The sampling problem is still real. There's a difference in say the cutup of the amen break into 40 parts and painstakingly re-orchestrating it and taking the strings from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir, playing it in a loop for 4:55 and rapping over it (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_Some_Kill). To be hyper specific, that's why say, Tyree's Acid Overture, which samples the same song and was released the same year and recorded in the same city, didn't see any push back (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJeFIBhZTBE) - it's used more like a paintbrush in that one.

There's very much an arbitrary judgment call here. Bob James probably had a case with Run DMC Peter Piper (which is take me to the Mardi gras) but he's always been really chill about it. They lucked out.

Same thing here. There's this amorphous "creative effort" that creates an abstract distance between the works. Unless the engineers can show an effort to respect and police this distance, I think things might get dicey

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#80

Post by anothernewdude »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #2

“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.” That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? “Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bine…

It's going to be very hard to them to argue against Stable Diffusion and not reach the conclusion that people looking at art are doing exactly what training the AI did.

You looked at my art, now I can use copyright against the copies in your brain.

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