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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

#201

Post by klabb3 »

dymk wrote: post #46
klabb3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? If you want to distribute a commercial non-research model, simply train it on data sets where people have given consent. I doubt that research would be affected. At most, I’d expect copyright legislation around training to slightly delay commercial mass-deployment. Given the huge socio-technical transition that is ahead of us, it’s probably a good thing to let people have a chance to form an opinion before openi…

Every professional artist trained their own brains on some number copyrighted images, without the consent of the original creator.

I’m aware of that argument, but it's not a silver bullet. Scale matters. There’s, for instance, a difference between looking at your neighbors house vs recording hi-res video. Human attention is an incredibly scarce resource, and arguably even sacred.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#202

Post by yazaddaruvala »

visarga wrote: post #42
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 90%ish of a single input image Oh, one image is enough to apply copyright as if it were a patent, to ban a process that makes original works most of the time? The article authors say it works as a "collage tool" trying to minimise the composition and layout of the image as unimportant elements. At the same time forgetting that SD is changing textures as well, so it's a collage minus textures and composition? Is the…

> Oh, one image is enough to apply copyright as if it were a patent, to ban a process that makes original works most of the time?

The law can do whatever its writers want. The law is mutable, so the answer to your question is “maybe”.

Maybe SD will get outlawed for copyright reasons on a single image. The law and the courts have done sillier things.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#203

Post by Lerc »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #130
realusername wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite way, the training images are there to support the model to generalize features. Reproducing parts of existing images in the dataset is called overfitting and is considered a failure of the model.

how do you measure success? i wrote an OCR program in college. we split the data set in half. you train it on one half then test it against the other half. you can train stable diffusion on half the images, but then what? you use the image descriptions of the other half and measure how similar they are? in essence, attempting to reproduce exact replicas. but i guess even then it wouldn't be copyright if those images…

You would not need have of the images to perform that test. No more than a handful of images to prove that the text representation will not produce a identical image to a given image that has had a description described.

They don't even produce the same image twice from the same description and a different random seed.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#204

Post by mijamo »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #131

It seems to me the communal voice of HN varies widely on copyright issues depending on who is getting sued and who is getting potentially hurt by violations. People who generally make less money than programmers - writers, artists, musicians - should stop their whining and their unfair uses of copyright to control their creative output. Programmers who are getting shafted by big corporations using their code to build…

Copyright does not exist in every country. You have intellectual rights and commercial rights but those are different from the US concept of copyright.

In France for instance an artist cannot transfer the moral rights over its art, but can transfer the commercial rights, and there is no copyright concept (which makes is funny when sites copy the US have have a copyright mention at the bottom)

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#207

Post by visarga »

headsoup wrote: post #23
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.

It is indeed a more complex scenario than it first appears. I think the lawsuits have a case if they can prove copyrighted images were taken and used directly in the commercial product. The moral arguments about AI and it's use and abuse are broad and difficult, because they rely on the intent of the end user rather than the developer of the tool to prove an argument has merit. I personally don't like AI art, but I c…

> It cheapens the artform.

Everyone make their own artistic judgements, nobody's ideas are better. If people prefer this https://lexica.art/ (scroll down) then that's their right.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#208

Post by cf141q5325 »

visarga wrote: post #88
synu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make the same argument that as long as you are using lossy compression you are unable to infringe on copyright.

That's a huge understatement. 5 billion images to a model of 5GB. 1 byte per image. Let's see if one byte per image would constitute a copyright violation in other fields than neural networks.

Another thing worth referencing in this context might be hashing. If a few bytes per image are copyright infringement, then likely so is publishing checksums.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#209

Post by astrange »

synu wrote: post #179
astrange wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lossy compressor isn't just like a lossless compressor. Especially not one that has ~2 bytes for each input image.

How many bytes make it an original work vs a compressed copy?

Usually judges would care more about whether the bytes came from than how many of them there are.

Since SD is trained by gradient updating against several different images at the same time, it of course never copies any image bits straight into it. Since it's a latent-diffusion model, actual "image"ness is limited to the image encoder (VAE), so any fractional bits would be in there if you want to look.

The text encoder (LAION OpenCLIP) does have bits from elsewhere copied straight into it to build the tokens list.

https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-2-1/raw/...

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