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Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

arstechnica.com

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Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#11

Post by roenxi »

I downloaded the Llama model using a torrent. That is, I think, enough of a counterexample to show that lawsuits will not stop this. Raw economics are at play here and the legal system usually loses to economic realities.

1) We just need 1 jurisdiction that allows model training.

2) There is no mechanism to stop model distribution short of banning general purpose computing and the internet. That would cause more harm than good.

3) It is already hard and going to get harder to prove these models were trained on any particular piece of art.

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#12

Post by stuckinhell »

hospitalJail wrote: post #6
stuckinhell wrote: post #2

This weekend I've played around in depth with Stable Diffusion with Controlnet, negative prompts, and inpainting. It didn't take long to convince me that this AI is "learning" art, in some kind of very similar way a Human is. Controlnet + SD was really mind blowing all around. I understand why artists are depressed now, but people are already training hypermodels, textual inversions, and loras. Who knows what the fut…

>This genie isn't going back into the bottle. I don't think that impacts legal things, however you are correct, AI art can never go away. If the legal hammer falls on the bad side of this, corporations/people with decent sized assets are unable to use these tools without paying some sort of royalty. >I understand why artists are depressed now As someone who isnt an artist, I wish I could sketch something quickly, use…

have you tried inpainting ?

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#13

Post by inopinatus »

is_true wrote: post #5
labrador wrote: post #4

"legal earthquake" Why is everyone talking in apocalyptic terms about AI? A new legal framework will have to be constructed around this, just like with any new technology. Copyright holders will get relief or we don't have a legal system that works. Have we lost faith in our system so much that we think we live in a disaster movie?

I think it's accurate. The foundations of those models are prior material which might be copyrighted.

The premise is rejected reductio ad absurdum, since it inescapably also implies that artists shouldn’t study art.

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#14

Post by GaggiX »

>Building cutting-edge generative AI would require getting licenses from thousands—perhaps even millions—of copyright holders. The process would likely be so slow and expensive that only a handful of large companies could afford to do it. Even then, the resulting models likely wouldn’t be as good. And smaller companies might be locked out of the industry altogether.

Isn't this what Adobe has done? The results are actually really good.

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#15

Post by quadcore »

jrm4 wrote: post #8
quadcore wrote: post #3

Fair use would work if we could find an artist for a given generated picture - but we can't. Generate a picture and there is no artist for it closer than the ones who made the pictures in the training set. I really hope these lawyers wont mess that up, it's an easy win.

I mean, a big problem is that "fair use" is pretty broken already. It's just a really sloppy legal test that ends up bowing to trends, non-expert opinions and utter randomness as much as it does legal rigor.

Lawyers just need to keep pounding on the fact there is no artist for a given generated picture - closer than the training set.

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#16

Post by endisneigh »

It doesn't really matter if you can't put the AI back in the bottle so to speak. If (in the USA) it's found that AI generated images (based on copyrighted materials) are not fair use, then effectively it will be poisonous to use in your (USA-based) company. This will definitely prevent it from being mainstream.

That being said, nothing is stopping Getty images, for example, from releasing their own image generator, trained from images they own copyright to.

Or creative common work, etc.

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#17

Post by AbrahamParangi »

jrm4 wrote: post #10
mdorazio wrote: post #7

This is a pretty good summary of the complexity of the issue legally (worth reading the whole thing). The plaintiffs pretty clearly either don’t know how ML works or are deliberately misconstruing the facts. But the real question is how a judge and/or jury will look at this given how tricky the debate is (as evidenced by comments in the many posts about GPT-like models right here on HN). There are a lot of emotions a…

I see why you're saying what you are about the "facts," but I'm not at all convinced that it's so clear-cut that the plaintiffs are all that wrong. Which is to say, compare these models to e.g. simple image compression. If compressed images can violate, the argument that "this is merely VERY GOOD and VERSATILE image compression" probably has enough legal legs to do something with.

It is a bit like saying a random number generator is a form of image compression since it is a small program the output of which contains every copyrightable image.

Compression has the property that almost all inputs are reconstructable. Generative models have the property that almost all inputs are not reconstructable.

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#18

Post by ltbarcly3 »

Title is incorrect, it could be an earthquake for companies trying to make money by using AI to create derivative works, however.

Probably a headline in 2001: "Copyright lawsuits are a legal earthquake for the mp3 music format and the algorithms used to decompress it"

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#19

Post by shinycode »

In France, an artist owns its art for life, even if it’s sold. So let’s say an artist creates a new style, like Picasso did and an other artist creates art that is really close to Picasso. He will lose in court because of IP.

Now an AI does the same thing and suddenly no copyright ?

What should be done maybe is explicitly asking for every art generated to ask to pay for it and this money goes for the copyrights.

But unlimited free art without restrictions nor credit to the original author is stealing IP.

Or you remove everything with IP from the training set because it’s cheating.

Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

#20

Post by sebstefan »

endisneigh wrote: post #16

It doesn't really matter if you can't put the AI back in the bottle so to speak. If (in the USA) it's found that AI generated images (based on copyrighted materials) are not fair use, then effectively it will be poisonous to use in your (USA-based) company. This will definitely prevent it from being mainstream. That being said, nothing is stopping Getty images, for example, from releasing their own image generator, t…

That's what Adobe Firefly is already doing, it's trained on Adobe Stock photos along with copyright-free content

https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html

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