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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

#121

Post by actsasbuffoon »

jacquesm wrote: post #100
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cat is already out of the bag on that one. You can download several open source text to image AIs and run them on your own computer. You can train new styles and concepts on your own computer in about 20 minutes. You can throw up roadblocks for the big players, but it’s far too spread out to ever be contained again. Ditto for LLMs. Obviously GPT-4 is the best game in town, but I have several LLMs and the code req…

You can rob banks too... doesn't make it legal.

If I rob a bank then you can tell. If I make an AI model on my own computer and train it, how would you ever know? It won’t have a “signature” that can be detected by any kind of AI detection system because I’m the only person who knows it exists.

You can make it illegal if you like, but you’ll never be able to enforce it. And other countries are not obligated to follow suit, and will have significant competitive advantages as a result.

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

#122

Post by sdenton4 »

jrm4 wrote: post #91
sdenton4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: researchers were able to reproduce training images (and bad versions of them at that) 0.03 percent of the time. Not 3 percent, mind you, but 109 out of 350,000 images could be reproduced. And if you go back to the paper, these tended to be images which were heavily duplicated in the training set, so the failure modes should be easy to guard against...

Sure, but I strongly suspect that in court the visceral impact of "Look, there's the image, it was in there ," of even just ONE might just be enough to sway a judge or jury, percentages be darned.

Eh, there's a lot of space for argument and deliberation in a courtroom, moreso than a hacker news comment section... This is a rare issue with an obvious fix, so I wouldn't expect a ruling to hinge on it. (Additionally, the Lott image doesn't have any real harm; it's heavily reproduced already and freely enough licensed to appear on Wikipedia.)

My guess is that because there's a lot of these cases coming the courts are really going to want to come up with some tests for whether a model is ok or not. So even if they say SD did a bad thing with these few images, that's not going to be enough to rule out the broader class of algorithms - next week they'll have another Getty case against the algorithm with the technical mitigation for the rare copied images.

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

#123

Post by fireflymetavrse »

"“Stability AI has copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images,” Getty wrote in its lawsuit."

The hypocrisy of Getty Image is insane here, given it's dark past.

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

#124

Post by shinycode »

fauxpause_ wrote: post #95
shinycode wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not an artist so I have no problem with being able to generate almost free quality art on my own within minutes. Before those AI if I ever wanted something specific I had to go see an artist and ask (prompt) him for the art I want. If I ask him to draw Andy Warhol Marilyn with my face on it. Can he charge me for it without copyright infringement ? Maybe nobody cares and no one is going to do anything about it but…

> If I ask him to draw Andy Warhol Marilyn with my face on it. Can he charge me for it without copyright infringement ? Maybe nobody cares and no one is going to do anything about it but still, his style is specific right ? My face or my dog’s face makes the drawing completely different. You can generate whatever you want. If you want to sell it, then maybe it is a copyright violation. Maybe it isn’t. The point is th…

I do agree that AI is a great tool to generate whatever we want and I have no problem with that. My only concern is abuse in the case of copyrights. And a partial copy is still under copyright and IP. Because the services aren’t completely free they might be subject to IP.

Let’s say I generate a picture with the style of a famous artist and then use it in one of my marketing campaign. No one will be able to sue me ? You are 100% sure about it ? If so, then then could also sue the AI company also isn’t it ?

It seems like a total abolition of copyright otherwise

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

#125

Post by nonbirithm »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #59

> 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…

Sounds like a "color of bits" issue. In practice the courts would care about where the latent coordinates originated from, and if it were only possible to derive them from violation of copyright. Same issue with a copy of Titanic ripped from a decaying VHS and compressed into a bad quality AVI uploaded on a torrent tracker. At some point there's still an issue with unauthorized reproduction even if the bits don't match the master copy, because the "color" would still match. And "color" is not a thing that can be represented with data, it's abstract information.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

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

#126

Post by Ajedi32 »

redox99 wrote: post #45

It's pretty funny that most people that hate AI art and want it banned because of copyright violations, don't understand that the only difference that will make is that instead of having open models, you will only have closed models owned by Adobe who will license all the imagery from Getty, Disney, etc. AI art isn't going away, and it better be open instead of in full control of just 2 or 3 companies.

There's plenty of public domain material out there to train on. The problem is just that having to filter out copyrighted material from the training dataset would be prohibitively expensive.

These AIs do not need to learn from your work in order to function, they just need to learn from some work. All that extending copyright in this manner would do is create a bunch of unnecessary busywork and slow the progress of technological development. You're not going to get paid $5 for letting a proprietary AI train on your drawing, blog post, or GitHub repo when they could get the same benefit from paying someone else $0.05 to find a public domain image, blog post, or repo elsewhere.

Basically, the amount of value your individual work contributes to generative AI is minuscule, but the amount of effort the entire industry would need to expend in order to compensate you for that value is massive. Unless stifling progress is your explicit goal, it's not worth it.

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

#127

Post by redox99 »

wuqs wrote: post #89
redox99 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but having your IP ripped out of your own blog feels like being raped, by open-source software or not That's most likely an irrational feeling. "Adobe AI" will most likely work just as well without including your IP in their dataset, and be able to output something in your style with the right prompt (and other knobs we'll see in the future) without ever having seen your IP. Potentially you could even run some kind…

first of all, it is pretty prepotent to deny someone else feelings straight out of the box. i am an artist and if someone would came with the same art-style i do on Blender with an industrial scale speed; with some text input that took 15 seconds to type and MY data is on it, it would feel like a rape. and i do not think "i am too insignificant to make an impactful change in society" ... if everyone think(ed) like th…

I'm not denying your feelings. Just pointing out that your art being or not being in their dataset probably makes no difference.

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

#128

Post by shagie »

seydor wrote: post #90
redox99 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can they even license those works to train a model? Adobe is already creating such AI with these kinds of partners, so yes > And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI. No because a single image of Darth Vader alone won't work. You need a pretrained base model, trained with millions of images. Only then you ca…

> Adobe is already creating such AI with these kinds of partners, so yes So, nobody has contested them yet. I smell a class-action lawsuit for them from the original makers of their clipart library. The base model can be trained on open source images. Or people may use adobe's software for that. From just a few images of Darth you can make basically anything, so yes it's quite doable already. It seems to me there is…

Darth Vader falls under copyright for fictional characters ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti... - I learned about this as part of the Eleanor set of lawsuits which entangled a YouTube car vlogger B is for Build - the most recent bit on the lawsuits - (not B is for Build lawsuit in particular as that was settled) https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42233053/shelby-estate-wi... ).

Anyways, use of Darth Vader in any work would be a derivative work.

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

#129

Post by nonbirithm »

"Napster copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for peer-to-peer file sharing"

I think the only effective way of slowing down AI isn't copyright enforcement, but trade secrets. If Midjourney can control who has access to its service and what kinds of content its users can generate, democratized models/piracy can do nothing to change that.

The reason why there's so much more interest in AI art than AI voice cloning is that there's not yet a publicly available AI voice model with good enough performance. When that model is released or leaked there will be a similar panic around the effectiveness of modern AI voice tools, because anyone good or bad can get their hands on them without being forced to go through the company's content filter.

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

#130

Post by Turing_Machine »

pwinnski wrote: post #57
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compression with extra steps is still compression. Most people don't understand the math involved in LZF-encoding, and lossy audio encoding seems even more strange, so "diffusion" just sounds like a somewhat-lossier form of compression if described in a certain way. I was very dismissive of the anti-AI-image crowd until I saw that Anne Graham Lotz pic. Only a single known source image of her exists, although many cop…

> I was very dismissive of the anti-AI-image crowd until I saw that Anne Graham Lotz pic. Only a single known source image of her exists, although many copies of it are distributed far and wide across the internet

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Anne+Graham+Lotz&t=brave&iax=image...

I see dozens of images of this woman (who is apparently some kind of minister). Okay, I'm clearly missing something here. Can you explain further?

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