Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

stablediffusionlitigation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 473 posts

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#431

Post by mlsu »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #359
derangedHorse wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re acting like the “computer” has a will of it’s own. Generating a perfect copy of an image would be a completely separate task from training a model for image generation. There are no models I know of with the ability to generate an exact copy of an image from its training set unless it was solely trained on that image to the point it could. In that case I could argue the model’s purpose was to copy that image r…

> There are no models I know of with the ability to generate an exact copy of an image from its training set Is it "the model cannot possibly recreate an image from its training set perfectly" or is it "the model is extremely unlikely to recreate an image from its training set perfectly, but it could in theory"? Because I am willing to bet it's the latter. > You’re acting like the “computer” has a will of it’s own. G…

In theory, you can:

- Open Microsoft Paint

- Make a blank 400 x 400 image

- Select a pixel and input an R,G,B value

- Repeat the last two steps

To reproduce a copyrighted work. I'm sure people have done this with e.g. pixel art images of copyrighted IP of Mario or Link. At 400x400, it would take 160,000 pixels to do this. At 1 second per pixel, a human being could do this in about a week.

Because people have the capability of doing this, and in fact we have proof that people have done so using tools such as MS paint, AND because it is unlikely but possible that someone could reproduce protected IP using such a method, should we ban Microsoft Paint, or the paint tool, or the ability to input raw RGB inputs?

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#432

Post by angusturner »

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…

Stable diffusion (or any likelihood-based generative model) is a learned compression algorithm. It is not the "container of compressed bytes". You can use a trained generative model to compress images, by combining it with some kind of entropy coding / arithmetic coding.

In this sense, stable diffusion is more analogous to the JPEG algorithm than it is to a specific collection of JPEG files. As it stands, the originals trainng data is not stored, even in a compressed way.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#433

Post by rlt »

b3morales wrote: post #338
ghaff wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the handwringing about generative AI brings to mind the aphorism about genies returning to bottles. There can be lawsuits and laws--and there may even be cases where an output by chance or by tickling the input sufficiently looks very close to something in the training set. But anyone who thinks this technology will be banned in some manner is... mistaken.

So as a code author I am pretty upset about Copilot specifically, and it seems like SD is similar (hadn't heard before about DeviantArt doing the same as what GitHub did). But I agree with this take: the tech is here, it's going to be used, and it's not going to be shut down by a lawsuit. Nor should it, frankly. What I object to is not the AI itself, or even that my code has been used to train it. It's the copyright…

I seriously doubt Microsoft / GitHub would care if Copilot or a similar model were trained on their proprietary source code. An advanced code completion tool does pose any significant risk of someone building a competitive product to GitHub or any other Microsoft products.

This is an intelligence augmentation tool. It’s effectively like I’m really good at reading billions of lines of code and incorporating the learnings into my own code. If you don’t want people learning from your code, don’t publish it.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#434

Post by rvz »

puppydups wrote: post #417
ImprobableTruth wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they also give you the means to just do it yourself? Imo something like dall-e or midjourney is much worse.

They are all horrible, including the open source one (SD). I would never wish MY OWN work to be stolen and used, so why would I ever use a tool that stole someone else's work? I try not to be hypocritical.

It is like someone breaking into your house, taking all of your furniture, works, and assets without your permission and then selling it back to you or to the highest bidder.

It seems almost everyone here in this thread is fine with such a grift on digital artists but when it is Copilot or ChatGPT; two years ago it was: 'Hardly going to compete against developers', with ChatGPT it became 'But juniors are only affected, not us seniors' and with GPT-4 + Copilot it will be: 'Please stop using AI code and sue GitHub now!'

Obviously this wasn't the case with Dance Diffusion (music version of Stable Diffusion) and that was trained on public domain music or the permission of musicians. It is almost as if that they knew if they did train it on copyrighted music and released it as open source, Stability AI would be out of business before they could counter the lawsuit. [0]

It is indeed a grift and the legal system will catch up on both Copilot and Stable Diffusion on using for copyrighted content in the training set of their AI models.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-d...

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#435

Post by angusturner »

Imnimo wrote: post #339

They've got a copy of a figure from the original diffusion paper, showing a diffusion process on a spiral dataset. They seem to completely misunderstand it. The figure does not show image diffusion, rather it shows a diffusion process in which each data item is a 2D point. The figure is showing diffusion on an entire dataset and demonstrating that it can approximately reconstruct the spiral-shaped distribution. I'm s…

Oh my god, I'm glad someone else noticed this because it was driving me nuts. Deeply troubling that their case hinges on such a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.

I bet a proper analysis of that toy experiment would conclude that none of the original data points are perfectly recovered: Only the underlying distribution / manifold is recovered, which really doesn't lend well to their argument at all.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#436

Post by rlt »

Aerroon wrote: post #375
smusamashah wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think stable Diffusion can reproduce any single image its trained on, not matter what prompts you use. It does have Mona lisa because of over fitting. But that's because there is too much Mona lisa on internet. These artist taking part in suit won't be able to recreat any of their work.

I think there's a chance they might be able to recreate some simpler work if they make the prompts specific enough. When you set up a prompt you're essentially telling the system what you want it to generate - if you prompt it with enough specificity you might be able to just recreate the image you had. Kind of like recreating your image one object at a time. It might not be exact, but close enough.

> if you prompt it with enough specificity you might be able to just recreate the image you had

At some point the input must be considered part of the work. At the limit you could just describe every pixel, but that certainly wouldn’t mean the model contained the work.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#437

Post by eurleif »

ouid wrote: post #430
williamcotton wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pedantically, yes, lossy compression is not 100 percent reversible. Practically, the usefulness of compression is that it does return the original content with as little loss as possible… so lossy compression is mostly reversible. All of my other points remain unchanged by this pedantry.

You can't rip something and compress it badly enough to not violate copyright when you sell it. The point of compression is to throw away information about the original in ascending order of importance.

>You can't rip something and compress it badly enough to not violate copyright when you sell it.

While I doubt that specific case has been tested in court, arguably you could. If you created glitch art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_art) via compression artifacts, and your work was sufficiently distinct from the original work, I think you would have a reasonable case for transformative use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use).

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#438

Post by angusturner »

jeroenhd wrote: post #311
Ephil012 wrote: post #104

“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 recom­bined to derive other images.” This seems like it’s not an accurate description of what diffusion is doing. A diffusion model is not the same as compression. They’re implying t…

If you can put a bunch of large things together into a small file and then later (lossily) extract the large thing out of that smaller file, I'd argue that's compression, yeah. It doesn't really matter if it was intended to be art up as a compression algorithm or not in my opinion. If anything, this approach can be considered a revolution in lossy image compression, even though there's no real market for that at the…

There is a strong, well-understood connection between deep-latent variable models (e.g. VAEs, diffusion models), and compression.

Many state-of-the-art compression algorithms are in fact based on generative models. But the thing is, the model weights themselves are not the compressed representation.

The trained model is the compression algorithm (or more technically, a component of it... as it needs to be combined with some kind of entropy coding).

You could use Stable Diffusion to compress and store the training data if you wanted, but nobody is doing that.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#439

Post by Aerroon »

codeflo wrote: post #399
Aerroon wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop can also recreate existing paintings if you just "prompt it with the correct input", no?

So you're saying "if I put the made-up straw man argument that I intend to knock down in quotation marks, it's less obvious that it's not actually what the other person wrote"?

I'm pointing out that the model has a piece missing - the input from the user. You can't just flippantly dismiss it, because input from the user is a crucial part of recreating the works the model is supposedly copying. It's an important factor to consider, because any digital painting program will let you recreate any art work with the correct user input.

It's not sufficient to just consider whether it can reproduce an image, but also how much user input was required to do so.

Re: We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

#440

Post by manholio »

bobbruno wrote: post #414
manholio wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is not true. The dataset is needed, the same way that examples are used by a person learning to draw. But the dataset alone is not capable of producing images not derived from any part of it (and there are many examples of SD results that seem so far to be wholly original), so you can’t reduce stable diffusion to being only derived from the dataset. It may “remember” and generate parts of images in the dataset -…

The model can generate original images, yes, and those images might be fair use. But it can also generate near verbatim copies of the source works or substantial parts thereof, so the model itself is not fair use, it's a wholly derivative work.

For example, if a publish a music remix tool with a massive database of existing music, creators might use to create collages that are original and fall under fair use. But the tool itself is not and requires permission from the rights owners.

Post reply on HN