Lame. These are scared opportunists who are going to screw things up for everyone because they are afraid of the unknown. Seriously, do something new and creative if you are an artist. Design your way into relevance.
We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
401–410 of 473 posts
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
But in fairness, even a human could know how to violate copyright but cannot be sued until they do violate it. SD might know how to violate copyright but is that enough to sue it? Or can you only sue violations it helps create?
I would assert (with no legal backing, since this is the first suit that actually attempts to address the issue either way) that the trained model is a copyright infringement in itself. It is a novel kind of copyright infringement, to be sure, but I believe that use of copyrighted material in a neural net's training set without the creator's permission should be considered copyright infringement without any further a…
I think that is a very fair argument. It may win in court it may lose. I’m excited for the precedent either way.
That’s said, it does raise the question, “should this precedent be extended to humans?”
i.e. Can humans be taught something based on copyrighted materials in the training set/curriculum?
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? If you take that tack, I'll go one step further back in time and ask "Where is your agreement from the original author who owns the copyright that you could use this image in the way you did?" The fact that there is suddenly a new way to "use an image" (input to a computer algorithm) doesn't mean that copyright magically doesn't also apply to that usage. A can…
My assumption would be 'fair use'. Artists themselves make use of this extremely often, like when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common), fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common). The are often done for commission as well. AFAIK, downloading and learning from images, even copyrighted images, fall under fair use, this is how practically every artist today learns how to draw. Sta…
> My assumption would be 'fair use'.
Why? That's not obvious to me at all.
These algorithms take the entire image and feed it into their maw to generate their neural network. That doesn't really sound like "fair use".
If these GPT systems were only doing scholarly work, there might be an argument. However, the moment the outputs are destined somewhere other than scholarly publications that "fair use" also goes right out the window.
If these algorithms took a 1% chunk of the image, like a collage would, and fed it into their algorithm, they'd have a better argument for "fair use". But, then, you don't have crowdsourced labelling that you can harvest for your training set as the cut down image probably doesn't correspond to all the prompts that the large image does.
> Stable Diffusion does not create 1:1 copies of artwork it has been trained on
What people aren't getting is that what the output looks like doesn't matter. This is a "color of your bits" problem--intent matters.
This was covered when colorizing old black and white films: https://chart.copyrightdata.com/Colorization.html "The Office will register as derivative works those color versions that reveal a certain minimum amount of individual creative human authorship." (Edit: And note that they were colorizing public domain films to dodge the question of original copyright.)
The current algorithms injest entire images with the intent to generate new images from them. There is no "extra thing" being injected by a human--there is a direct correspondence and the same inputs always produce the same outputs. The output is deterministically derived from the input (input images/text prompt/any internal random number generators).
You don't get to claim a new copyright or fair use just because you bumped a red channel 1%. GPT is a bit more complicated than that, but not very different in spirit.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
My assumption would be 'fair use'. Artists themselves make use of this extremely often, like when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common), fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common). The are often done for commission as well. AFAIK, downloading and learning from images, even copyrighted images, fall under fair use, this is how practically every artist today learns how to draw. Sta…
> My assumption would be 'fair use'. Why? That's not obvious to me at all. These algorithms take the entire image and feed it into their maw to generate their neural network. That doesn't really sound like "fair use". If these GPT systems were only doing scholarly work, there might be an argument. However, the moment the outputs are destined somewhere other than scholarly publications that "fair use" also goes right…
The amount of the work taken is just one of the fair use factors. Courts often perform holistic analysis on all of them to decide if fair use applies.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
But they are not original works, they are wholly derived works of the training data set. Take that data set away and the algorithm is unable to produce a single original pixel. The fact that the derivation involves millions of works as opposed to a single one is immaterial for the copyright issue.
This argument's pedantic and problematic for artists; take away a human's "dataset" and processes and they are also unable to produce a single original "pixel".
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search engines do that.
good point, but didn't Google Image search lose some case and have to change their behavior?
If it's what I'm thinking about, I think they were forced to have decentralized image caching (i.e. the "user" is the one downloading images, Google just indexes).
LAION-5b is also just an indexer (in terms of images).
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#407“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 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…
I understood it less as transforming the images and more of deriving math formulas from the patterns in the image, closer to creating a bar graph to understand data than making a copy.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#408Where there is progress there are yuppity losers sueing it into oblivion
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would assert (with no legal backing, since this is the first suit that actually attempts to address the issue either way) that the trained model is a copyright infringement in itself. It is a novel kind of copyright infringement, to be sure, but I believe that use of copyrighted material in a neural net's training set without the creator's permission should be considered copyright infringement without any further a…
I think that is a very fair argument. It may win in court it may lose. I’m excited for the precedent either way. That’s said, it does raise the question, “should this precedent be extended to humans?” i.e. Can humans be taught something based on copyrighted materials in the training set/curriculum?
I think this is a reasonable question for the uninitiated—those for whom "training a neural network" seems like it would be a lot like "teaching a human"—but for those with deeper understanding (tbh, I would only describe my knowledge in both these areas as that of an interested amateur), it is a) a poor analogy, and b) already a settled question in law.
To address (b) first: Fair Use has long held that educational purposes are a valid reason for using copyrighted materials without express permission—for instance, showing a whole class a VHS or DVD, which would technically require a separate release otherwise.
For (a): I don't know anything about your background in ML, so pardon if this is all obvious, but at least current neural nets and other ML programs are not "AI" in anything like the kind of sense where "teaching" is an apt word to describe the process of creating the model. Certainly the reasoning behind the Fair Use exception for educating humans does not apply—there is no mind there to better; no person to improve the life, understanding, or skills of.
Re: We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My assumption would be 'fair use'. Why? That's not obvious to me at all. These algorithms take the entire image and feed it into their maw to generate their neural network. That doesn't really sound like "fair use". If these GPT systems were only doing scholarly work, there might be an argument. However, the moment the outputs are destined somewhere other than scholarly publications that "fair use" also goes right…
The amount of the work taken is just one of the fair use factors. Courts often perform holistic analysis on all of them to decide if fair use applies.
That is why I pointed out both the scholarly exemption as well as the collage exception.
There are arguments to be made for fair use--I'm just not sure the current crop of GPT falls under any of them.