Live data from Hacker News

Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

arstechnica.com

101–110 of 166 posts

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

#101
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How dare someone look at content you post publically! If you don't want people to see and learn from your art, maybe don't make it public?

That's a disingenuous comment and you probably already know that.

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

#102
post #27
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 believe that a further restriction of fair use to what is produced by a generative AI would also give a lot of tools for large copyright holders (e.g. Disney) for suing and removing fan art for anything that "is in the style of" or "makes use of the same characters" including uses that would previously be considered beneath their notice and thus not worth their time (the amount the lawyers would cost combined with…

Making styles copyrightable would be insane.

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

#103
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artists own the art they created, they don't own the style that they might have invented.

Not necessarily under moral rights. Moral rights are... at best a mess. They can be very wide, very up to interpretation and vary depending on the country. They're essentially meant as the ultimate stop button for an artist if their works get used in a way the artist deeply disapproves of[0]. Actual interpretation can vary a lot and cloning an artists style as specifically as SD allows you to do (with "...in the styl…

[deleted]

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

#104

> Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had “technical inaccuracies” and was “stretching the truth a lot.” Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images. >In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a use…

> Regardless of the lawsuit, this seems like a quite spurious, self-serving argument in and of itself. If the “coordinates” of the image were not equivalent to the image, how would it be possible to fine tune the model on a set of images and recreate their style? This is setting aside the myriad examples where SD regurgitates fairly close copies of individual works.

This argument confuses an image and the style. The former is copyrightable, the latter is not.

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

#105
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which came first, copyright or the printing press? Was the printing press banned because of copyright? I feel like you’re making the same argument as me, with the same rhetoric, but a different example. No, I do not think the printing press, paint, or generative tools are bannable by copyright. I do think all 3 could be used to produce a work that is in violation of copyright. And no, I don’t think a novel work pro…

I think it's just not clear what argument you're actually making. When you say "a novel work produced by any of them", are you equating the works produced by paint with the works produced by AI? Are you saying that if I throw a can of white paint against a Jackson Pollock painting, the paint itself is producing a novel work? That if a million printing presses print out a million dictionaries, one of them is bound to…

My point is that copyright does not care about the means by which a work is generated. It is merely whether the output is substantially similar.

If a printing press randomly produces Hamlet, you cannot sell it. That does not mean you cannot generate something that is sellable without violating copyright by printing random words.

There is a small amount of attention paid to whether an artist knew of a work that someone claims was copied. Especially in the literary world with hacks who try to steal from successful authors with pathetic claims.

But they tend not to hold a lot of weight. It just makes it easier to dismiss trolls.

AI is a tool. It is not sentient. It is paint.

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

#106
post #72

> Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had “technical inaccuracies” and was “stretching the truth a lot.” Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images. >In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a use…

If trained correctly the model could easily reproduce any arbitrary image if you know its coordinate in the latent space (and you use deterministic sampler), regardless of whether the image is present in the dataset or not, it's also easy to imagine as the coordinates are as big as the samples generated by the diffusion model. You can take an image and use DDIM inversion to find the coordinates.

You can use SD models to draw portraits of people (or anime characters, say) based on their description.

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

#107
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How dare someone look at content you post publically! If you don't want people to see and learn from your art, maybe don't make it public?

Computers aren’t human. Software isn’t people.

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

#108

> Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had “technical inaccuracies” and was “stretching the truth a lot.” Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images. >In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a use…

Finding a new form of data compression wouldn't suddenly abolish copyright.

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

#109

> Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had “technical inaccuracies” and was “stretching the truth a lot.” Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images. >In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a use…

Yes but an alternate view of the copyright is that a person get a degree in English literature and carefully reads all of Shakespeare's writing, and then goes onto write a screenplay which thematically derives from Hamlet. Obviously you get the Shakespeare influence, but the bar on copyright infringement is very high for a reason — we don't want to sue artists for being influenced by another writer.

I don’t really care about the copyright argument as it relates to human learning because I think this is all a Napster-style false flag by capital owners to enclose ALL data on the internet. The intent isn’t to argue about these models from first principles such that we all have IP-restriction free access from them. It’s to make them do enough legally gray things at scale that they get restricted to only a few power players.

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

#110
post #88
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, nothing is stopping Getty images, for example, from releasing their own image generator, trained from images they own copyright to. which is fine, if it's theirs they're free to do what they want with it however I didn't give Microsoft permission to sell people code derived from my works without attribution

Funny because getty will steal public domain images and charge you 200$ for it

That's a different discussion. Getty is clearly in the wrong there, but it has nothing to do with AI.
Post reply on HN