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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

#111

Post by chii »

mbgerring wrote: post #100
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #27

Why do we keep posting the same arguments over and over with these stories. It's like how humans learn. It contains chunks of copywriter material. What about copilot. Hackers don't respect artists. Yadda yadda. It's boring. I don't know the answer, but after reading the same things over and over I don't know if I trust myself to even have a valid opinion about it.

There’s a pretty easy answer here actually: if you want to include data in a set of training data for an AI system, you need to have (formal, statutory) permission to use it.

why should a new right (the right to study the works) be granted without some compensation given back to society?

The existing set of rights granted under copyright does not include this.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#113

Post by dymk »

mbgerring wrote: post #82
TheDong wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if they exist as exact copies in my opinion. The law doesn't recognize a mathematical computer transformation as creating a new work with original copyright. If you give me an image, and I encrypt it with a randomly generated password, and then don't write down the password anywhere, the resulting file will be indistinguishable from random noise. No one can possibly derive the original image from it…

No. Humans decided to include artwork that they did not have any right to use as part of a training data set. This is about holding humans accountable for their actions.

“Did they have a right to use publicly posted images” is up for the courts to decide

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#114

Post by napier »

Until all this frenzied generative furore I believed the starving artist meme-trope and had no idea there were so many making a good living (while still alive) by selling art to the general public. Thought the industry such as it is was more of a money laundering angle for very rich tax evaders and a fortunate, well connected few artists with luck, clout and gallery relationships. And most of what seems fashionable in the trad/modern art world bears very little stylistic or textural resemblance to the sorts of AI image synthesis work that people seem to make popular.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#115

Post by lolinder »

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 not hypocrisy, it's diversity.

HN is not a person, it's a forum with lots of people with different opinions. Depending on dozens of factors (time of day, title of the article, who gets in first) different opinions will dominate.

I've seen threads on Copilot that overwhelmingly come down in favor of Microsoft and threads on Stable Diffusion that come down hard against it. Also, even in a thread that has a lot of one opinion, there are always those who express the opposite view.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#116

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

limitedsupply wrote: post #56
TheMiddleMan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These models produce a lot of “in the style of” content, which is different from an exact copy. Is that different enough? I guess that’s what this lawsuit is going to be about.

I've seen some overtrained models. they keep showing the same face over and over again. surely from the training data. i don't think you can argue against stable diffusion as a whole, but maybe specific models that haven't muddled the data enough to become something unique

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#117

Post by foundart »

voytec wrote: post #64

> Lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion filed against DeviantArt & others I find this title somewhat unclear. Is it filled by or against DeviantArt?

My initial impression as I read the story led me to the same confusion. However, the article soon enough shows the title is correct:

> we’ve filed a class-action law­suit against Sta­bil­ity AI, DeviantArt, and Mid­jour­ney for their use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool that remixes the copy­righted works of mil­lions of artists whose work was used as train­ing data.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#118

Post by charcircuit »

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…

>artists exist for their output for society

People will still be creative and make art even without society consuming their output. But society can create incentives to reward people for making art.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#119

Post by realusername »

dylan604 wrote: post #108
anothernewdude wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Now the defence shows an artist that can recreate an image. Cool, now people who look at images get copyright suits filed against them for encoding those images in their heads.

Just because I look at an image does not mean that I can recreate it. storing it in the training data means the AI can recreate it. There's a world of difference that you are just writing off.

> storing it in the training data means the AI can recreate it.

No it doesn't, it means that abstract facts related to this image might be stored.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#120

Post by vnorilo »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #28
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…

> That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? In fairness, Diffusion is arguably a very complex entropy coding similar to Arithmetic/Huffman coding. Given that copyright is protectable even on compressed/encrypted files, it seems fair that the “container of compressed bytes” (in this case the Diffusion model) does “contain” the original images no differently than a compressed folder of images contains the…

Storing copies of training data is pretty much the definition of overfitting, right?

The data must be encoded with various levels of feature abstraction for this stuff to work at all. Much like humans learning art, if devoid of the input that makes human art interesting (life experience).

I think a more promising avenue for litigating AI plagiarism is to identify that the model understands some narrow slice of the solution space that contains copyrighted works, but is much weaker when you try to deviate from it. Then you could argue that the model has probably used that distinct work rather than learned a style or a category.

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