We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

Well, there was a copyright case in Europe recently where an artist had taken a photograph, flipped it horizontally, and painted it.

It was deemed an original work by the court.

I can’t see how, with such a precedent, they could rule that SD doesn’t produce original works.

https://www.rangefinderonline.com/news-features/industry-new...

> because you have to argue that the intent is to steal the copyright by copying already existing artworks

Copyright infringement can happen without intending to infringe copyright.

Various music copyright cases start with "Artist X sampled some music from artist Y, thinking it was transformative and fair use". The court, in some of these cases, have found something the artist _intended_ to be transformative to in fact be copyright infringement.

> You can't copyright artistic style, only actual output

You copyright outputs, and then works that are derived from those outputs are potentially copyrighted. Stable Diffusion's outputs are clearly defined from the training set, basically by definition of what neural networks are.

It's less clear they're definitely copyright-infringing derivative works, but it's far less clearcut than how you're phrasing it.

At the point that a program that could instantly copy the style of your favorite artist within half an hour was invented, a lawsuit being filed against its creators was inevitable. And I'm not sure what humanity can do to just not invent Stable Diffusion. The math is impeccable, and the results speak for themselves, and it's convinced a lot of people. It's angered many others for understandable reasons, and has the potential to cause harm. Financially yes, but also (and I think more importantly) in a spiritual sense - setting the standards of millions of people that art can be created better and faster by a non-human entity, and that humans are meant to be preempted at their passions if something more cost-efficient comes along.

So how could this situation have been reasonably avoided? Was it meant to be avoided? Even supposing this lawsuit succeeds and Stability AI is dissolved, it's not going to change the fact that people are going to keep using Stable Diffusion anyway, even if people stop themselves from talking about it in the open.

Another thing I've been mulling about is the negative effects of new technologies could be amplified if those technologies can be completely controlled by an independent person. As an example, 3D-printed gun are considered less dangerous than traditionally manufactured guns, but there was the incident where Shinzo Abe was assassinated using a homemade gun in spite of the extremely strict gun control measures in Japan. I think the conversation about that kind of danger would be intensely revisited if just anyone has the ability to manufacture a more efficient weapon using only things they can buy themselves.

Giving away the 8 gigabytes of Stable Diffusion for free with the means to run it on anyone's computer means that the harms that many people perceive about AI-generated art are going to exist forever. There is no solution to the problem now, only ideological differences to be repeated forever. To those that are against it, art style appropriation is now a mathematically defined fact, published as replicable research.

If the progress in generative art today breaks the spirits of artists, the small hope for me is that at least it was a technology that's unlikely to cause mass deaths or destruction. I have to wonder if humanity will be ready when that time does come for a different breakthrough. AI art at this stage can already cause mass die-offs of motivation and attention spans.

Whether we like it or not, technology will always make it worse for some people.

And it's not a new phenomenon. The printing press made scribes nearly obsolete, cars led to a mass slaughter of horses (and all related professions), and so on wherever you look. Invention of photography nearly killed whole genres of art (and gave rise to impressionism, abstractionism etc.)

Unfortunately, we can only judge the outcome of these changes only decades (or even centuries) after they happen.

> I think the lawsuits have a case if they can prove copyrighted images were taken and used directly in the commercial product.

This is what I think would be the easiest thing to prove.

Other people's work was used to create a product that is sold for a quite a bit of profit. No attribution, no compensation. To me it sounds like a pretty clear copyright violation, even if you don't consider what the product does.

DeviantArt probably violated their own TOS.

It'll be interesting to see how the courts view this.