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

Megaface

exposing.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 114 posts

Re: Megaface

#11

Post by gwern »

colesantiago wrote: post #2

"All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use." I wonder what the implications are for Stable Diffusion, DALLE and Midjourney since that art images on the internet are copyrighted by default. Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-ima…

This is apples and oranges. SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use): they do not distribute (ie copy) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so the license of the original images is completely irrelevant. (Details like 'signatures' are also irrelevant: if I write a style parody of William Shakespeare and add a '--Willy Shakespeare' at the end to round it off, have I revealed that I have secretly copied his work? Of course not. It's just plausible that there would be a name there, so I came up with a name.)

The criticism here is that distributing (copying) the original image violates the non-commercial clause of the original images because someone, somewhere, might somehow have made money in some way because the dataset exists; but as they somewhat lamely acknowledge later, what counts as 'commercial' has never been clearly defined, and it probably can't be defined (because for most people 'commercial' seems to be defined by 'ewww'), and this is why CC-NC licenses are heavily discouraged by WMF and other FLOSS groups and weren't part of FLOSS from the beginning even though Stallman was in large part attacking commercial exploitation.

Re: Megaface

#12

Post by AlexandrB »

542458 wrote: post #10
georgeglue1 wrote: post #4

Are there any licenses that are generally permissive, but prohibit certain programmatic, law enforcement, government, etc. usecases? It'd be interesting legal territory if someone has tried this already.

IANAL. I don’t think you can prevent scraping or use in ML corpuses in this way. Copyright prevents the creation of non-transformative copies of a work other than some protected use cases (parody, education, etc). All OSS licenses do is provide a right to copy a work provided certain conditions (attribution, copy left) are met. But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold…

> But the general legal consensus as far as I know is that most ML models meet the threshold for being a new transformative work, so copyright doesn’t apply.

Has this been tested in court yet?

Re: Megaface

#13

Post by ironmagma »

gardenhedge wrote: post #7

It strikes me as sad that people's photos have been taken a used to train a technology for a corporate profit. People just wanted to share their wedding photos.

It's no worry, someday that data will be so ubiquitous and well-studied that it won't even be profitable, it will just be trivial to construct or deconstruct any face.

Re: Megaface

#14

Post by pbhjpbhj »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #9
samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

You can do the scraping in a jurisdiction where it is legal.

Importing (in the geographical sense) the data would still be infringing, you've just scraped it in a convoluted way -- legal systems in my limited experience take account of such things.

Re: Megaface

#15

Post by the_duke »

samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

It's not as easy as that.

Pictures are clearly personally identifiable data, so storing them violates the GDPR if you don't have permission to do so.

Some "data analysis company" got fined a hefty sum for doing so with EU citizens.

I forgot the name, but they were recently in the news for helping Ukraine identify Russian soldiers by picture.

Of course they were also aggregating other data including names, so just pictures might be a more complicated case, but as a company with EU exposure I wouldn't do it. It's pretty clearly against the law.

Re: Megaface

#16

Post by samwillis »

the_duke wrote: post #15
samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

It's not as easy as that. Pictures are clearly personally identifiable data, so storing them violates the GDPR if you don't have permission to do so. Some "data analysis company" got fined a hefty sum for doing so with EU citizens. I forgot the name, but they were recently in the news for helping Ukraine identify Russian soldiers by picture. Of course they were also aggregating other data including names, so just pic…

You are quite right, forgot that one.

Point is though, we need a test case to go through the courts to clarify all of this. There are companies betting billions on the outcome that they are ok to do what they are doing.

Re: Megaface

#17

Post by pbhjpbhj »

samwillis wrote: post #8

One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means. What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis o…

>Or is it republishing of the original data?

If it's publishing _data_ then you're fine under regular copyright as it only protects artistic works and not things like data. You might fall shy of other IP legislation but not copyright.

YMMV, this is not legal advice and represents my personal opinion unrelated to my employment.

Re: Megaface

#19

Post by schemescape »

gwern wrote: post #11
colesantiago wrote: post #2

"All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use." I wonder what the implications are for Stable Diffusion, DALLE and Midjourney since that art images on the internet are copyrighted by default. Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-ima…

This is apples and oranges. SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use ): they do not distribute (ie copy ) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so the license of the original images is completely irrelevant. (Details like 'signatures' are also irrelevant: if I write a style parody of Willia…

Does anyone know if attempts have been made to trick these ML models into reproducing original copyrighted inputs verbatim (edit: or close enough)?

Edit: Asking about verbatim copies wasn't really a great question. I should have asked about producing things that are "close enough to cause legal trouble" (whether that be due to copyright, trademark, or something else).

Post reply on HN