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Stable Attribution

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Re: Stable Attribution

#151
post #65
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion over novelty is useless, all these legal structures like copyrights patents royalties and licenses are about creating business structures to allow artist or inventors be compensated. They were already imperfect in it and now suddenly a new technology drags their work into the wilderness with no stuctures for compensation. The images created by the AI are indeed novel but they feed on the work of people…

The core of your concern (& argument) seems to be the problem of existing business models becoming disrupted by this technology. But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model. If that were the case, we would have outlawed the loom because it displaced weavers, and the camera (sorry portrait painters) and the iPhone. (How many telegraph operators are left? None!) When an artist learns to dra…

> But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model.

Really? The Constitution specifically includes a bit about: "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". That was quickly followed by the first copyright act.

As I understand it, the copyright portion of this was exactly to protect the established business model for writers, which was publishing and selling copies of their work. In particular, protect it against other people publishing editions of their work.

Re: Stable Attribution

#152
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a sloppy answer. Right and wrong isn’t defined by how copyright law is written right now. That’s kind of the whole point of this debate. Should we change the laws and if so, how?

Copyright already cover characters and stories. Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted Style itself is not copyrighted, and that's a good thing. I can create copyrighted content privately. I cannot share it. Law doesn't forbid imagination, wether human or ai and that's a good thing. But I cannot distribute these private rendition al…

> Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.

I don't think lawyers would agree with you at all.

> Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted

My understanding is that there isn't a legal consensus on whether or not thats true. Copyright law wasn't written with AI generated art in mind. For a work to be copyrightable, my understanding is that it requires that you can make a "sweat off my brow" argument. Ie, you had to work to create something.

Does an AI count? We don't know. Or to put it in other terms, we haven't (collectively) decided as a society whether it should be copyrightable.

On the other side, "fair use" arguments are also at play here. If I train a 1bn parameter model on 5bn images, I could probably make an argument that 1/5th of a f16 probably constitutes fair use of copyrighted work. If that argument holds, I can train my model with impunity on any amount of copyrighted work so long as my model is small and the number of training examples is large.

Will that argument sway a court room? I have no idea. Is that fair? I don't know!

The law is decided by people. And we haven't had AIs like stable diffusion and ChatGPT before, so the laws haven't been written with this stuff in mind. There isn't even a legal precedent yet for how the current laws should apply to AI art. Speculating is fun, but speculating on how a judge will apply old laws to a totally novel problem is a fool's errand.

If you want to read about fun edge cases to copyright law, look up the history of copyright law for maps (can facts be copyrighted?) and how that interacts with trap streets.

This stuff is hairy and complicated even for lawyers. As an outsider, boldly claiming that copyright law is simple only demonstrates that you don't understand law. It'd be like a lawyer boldly arguing (with no knowledge) that compilers are simple.

Re: Stable Attribution

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI does NOT build or use reference boards for specific prompts. The only reference it has is the prompt itself, which gets distilled down into a list of 512 numbers, each one of which the AI associates with a particular image feature (or set of features). Minor technical clarification: For SD 1.X, CLIPText encodes a prompt and passes a (77, 768) [edit: up to 77] matrix to the core UNet. For SD 2.X, OpenCLIP pas…

Huh. I thought those got projected into the (512) shared CLIP space before getting passed to the conditional blocks.

Only the text portion is included, otherwise that would be big.

Also, I am slightly wrong in that the first dimension will many not always be 77, since apparently there is no padding in the tokenizer. Test notebook here: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/192PDIbc2XiI1HgJQSdN...

Re: Stable Attribution

#154
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's disruptive and that's fine. The problem is that there's no mechanism to compensate the people who enable your new disruptive machine. As I said, humans learn but the phase humans do it still allows for people be compensated. I'm not anti-AI at all, I think its great and I think the artist who can leverage it can hugely benefit from it but it is not fair to just take something from people away.

I don't get the assumption that there should be. The machine was trained on publicly available hard that was already free. Why do people think they need to be compensated for something they put up online for free? They don't have the right to not allow people to learn from it, that's just never been a part of copyright.

It is expected of any professional artist to have an online portfolio if they are serious about generating work. Scraping my portfolio that I put out because I want to generate revenue is a shitty thing to do. Also 'trained' is a complete misnomer. AI is fed images made by humans, labelled and tagged by humans, categorized by styles defined by humans, then plotted, copied, traced by a program written by humans. Along comes a human who inputs keywords and the AI uses statistics and algorythm programs also written by humans to amalgamate a resulting 'work of art' for the human with no physical art making effort. If you were to erase all tags and labelling from source images you would find zero learning happened. Art is made with physical motor skills, time and effort. AI is a human made program that uses human made imagery, classified by more humans to generate a shopping list written by another human who want art that requires no effort of aquiring the physical skill needed to make the art. With no physical product, there is no AI art and that art costs the maker. Public and free are not synonomous. If you want to physically copy my art, go for it, I will applaud your skill, but taking my art and shoving it in a program with a bunch of other art to dilute the provenance doesn't change that you are utilizing the effort and skill of artists for your own gain. If you can live with that, then I am very sad for you.

Re: Stable Attribution

#155
post #31

This appears to be just looking for the nearest neighbors of the image in embedding space and calling those the source data. This by definition would find similar looking images, but it's not strictly correct to call it attribution. To some extent all of the training data is responsible for the result - as an example, the model is also learning from negative examples. The result here may feel satisfying, but it's ove…

Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would be valuable. I don't think such a solution can work just based on the resulting image though. It probably needs to input prompt to have any chance of working.

> Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would be valuable.

Wouldn't the attribution be basically all the dataset with various attribution probabilities? It's kind of like a reverse neural network.

Re: Stable Attribution

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the parent post to yours said he’s taking piano lessons. Let’s suppose he becomes great. And let’s suppose he writes his own music. How is Taylor Swift supposed to get paid by him from his early lessons which have undoubtedly played a key role in not only his love for music but the song he writes today?

You are fundamentally not addressing the issue. Previously, someone was being paid to produce something. Now, they are no longer being paid and the business can get the same thing “for free”. You can argue the same issue about out sourcing programmers to south east Asia. Is it good or bad? “…but how do we compensate the programmers who lost their jobs?” It’s just economics right? …but saying that doesn’t address the…

> You are fundamentally not addressing the issue.

You are fundamentally not understanding the issue.

People don’t have an inherent right to be an artist just because they are an artist.

They can get upset, smash the machines in a Luddite frenzy or try to use the law to stifle competition but the simple fact is nobody owes them anything. Maybe they win a lawsuit or two but the AIs will just get trained on out of copyright work and art styles (for those who now pay for graphic artists and whatnot) will change like they do every generation.

I, for one, look forward to an AI generated animated Matisse dancer selling me milk.

Re: Stable Attribution

#158

Interesting... I get zero results for every image I give it, all made with SD 1.4/1.5

Because the website is a grift and fraudulent on the what it claims to do. Anyone with a slight expertise in AI would immediately know that none of this is accurate.

Re: Stable Attribution

#160
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put it online for free for human consumption. Because the tech is very new, old concepts and laws don't cover it and that's not the point. The assumption that there must be compensation comes from the capitalist society that we live in. Switching to Communism or something else can be a solution to not directly pay people who do works and still have them around.

The Google bot has been consuming their art for many years, even copying it verbatim into Google's site and yet they didn't complain. This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than about violation of copyright. And yes, that's scary, but unavoidable as tech progresses. I don't think anything good could come from trying to strickten copyright here. The AI is obviously not copying directly, at best it takes…

Artists shouldn’t have to compete against themselves. If these AI companies didn’t use the work of artists, the output would suck! I’m sure many artists would be happy to compete against the artistic talents of software developers. But they’re not, they’re having to compete against their own work.

I listened to an interview with an artist who referenced the “three C’s”:

Consent

Credit

Compensation

These seem reasonable to me. The request isn’t to eliminate the technology. It’s that artists should be able to consent to their work being used. Works derived from their work should include credit. And, they should be compensated.

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