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Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

forbes.com

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Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#111

Post by __loam »

ben_w wrote: post #104
__loam wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a neural network. It works similar to our brains work, but more consistent. Irrelevant and incorrect. > It's doesn't seem like piracy to me. It's pretty indisputably piracy, whether or not it's legal/fair use/whatever. Many of the training sets included material like the books3 corpus which was downloaded to a server somewhere. That is simply piracy, doesn't matter why they downloaded it. I believe many artist…

> It's pretty indisputably piracy, whether or not it's legal/fair use/whatever. Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'indisputably' that I wasn't previously aware of. > I believe many artists rightly refuse to accept this threat to their livelihoods because it was built on their labor . This model is trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 and copyright images with specific permission for us…

https://huggingface.co/datasets/P1ayer-1/books-3/discussions...

It seems incredible to me to suggest that piracy wasn't involved in the collection of training data, regardless of your view on the morality or legality of it. Datasets like books 3 indisputably contained copyrighted content that was being distributed without permission from the rightsholder. That's just the definition of piracy. If we can't agree on that then I'm not sure what we're doing here.

More materially to this discussion, yes, it would absolutely make a difference if the AI was only trained on licensed content. I wouldn't use it but I wouldn't have a problem with it. The issue is specifically that much of the work being used without permission is being used to replace the people who made that work, and is being used without permission. If the model is based on ethically acquired data, it would be less able to reproduce the style of specific artists. Imo, there would be more room for both kinds of art in this case.

I'm also aware that it's not a clear cut case legally but I think AI advocates and tech enthusiasts think it's a lot more likely that AI will win in court than the actual chances. Napster took years to litigate and was eventually shutdown. There's a really good discussion about this on the decoder podcast between actual lawyers.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#112

Post by wyldfire »

api wrote: post #63
wyldfire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's just it - if we believe that what the model learns from the training material is abstract enough, they shouldn't license the content at all. Humans learn from and are inspired by art all the time. They create new works that are not considered derived works, despite there being obvious influence. Could we conceive of the same circumstance being possible with machine learning?

If we go down this road right now, we are allowing superintelligent AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us. It's not about theory of mind stuff. It's about just compensation of living human beings.

Well, with the status quo, there's no license required to train on the greatest works of art from centuries past.

I recognize some of the concerns about AI but I don't think pinning hopes on copyright law will deliver anything remotely resembling a remedy to the problems you bring up.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#113

Post by __loam »

artninja1988 wrote: post #102
__loam wrote: post #2

Stability always seemed like a dark horse thanks to the reputation of their founder and their open source business model. I do get some schadenfreude from seeing them like this considering the damage many feel they've done to the art community. E: -4 in 10 minutes. Stay classy hackernews. I hope this company and OpenAI choke on the algorithmic disgorgement when the law catches up.

[flagged]

I’m sure you as the 331st user (surely we're under counting here?) will be able to realize your vision and rise above the sea of people making statistically average, derivative noise, using the same models as everyone else.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#114

Post by Hoasi »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #62
clbrmbr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO models trained on not-properly-licensed (pirated) data should at the very least not be copyrightable and should be public domain. My understanding is that ML model weights cannot be copyrighted as an original creative work. They are trade-secrets and protected through contracts but once leaked to third parties it’s not a copyright violation to use/distribute. Whether the model is actually a derivative work of…

The main argument I have seen (which is also OpenAI's in their legal briefs) is that it is fair use. The idea of "fair use" is that you are conceding that you are infringing by creating a derivative work, but it's still okay. Implied in the fair use argument is that it is a derivative work.

> Implied in the fair use argument is that it is a derivative work.

You can get all LLMs to spit out almost exact copies of known IP visuals from movies and games. For instance, with Dalle-E and Midjourney, it's relatively easy to get similar pictures from film and game studios. Those are copies with minor changes. It would be hard to argue otherwise in court. The same happens with ChatGPT spitting out verbatim passages from New York Times articles.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#115

Post by int_19h »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #23
__loam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's obviously problematic that these companies are deriving value from millions of people without compensating them, while creating a product that competes with those masses.

If you are selling something, and no one is buying it, the value you have generated is zero. If you put something online and you did not bother to understand this material can potentially be used by a third-party on account of its loose licensing, then who's to blame?

But the licensing isn't loose in many (most?) cases we're aware of. Merely making an image publicly available online doesn't give the viewers rights to do whatever they want with it under our copyright laws.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#116

Post by __loam »

cdata wrote: post #109
SkyBelow wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no matter the medium, or means or relative notoriety of the artist - shall be candidate training data Why is this a special case? When people were viewing it, reposting it, using it to learn... those were all accepted uses. Passing it off as your own wasn't allowed, but outright plagiarism has pretty consistently been unaccepted. The problem seems to stim from using it in a way that directly competes with the artist…

The tricky part is that the ongoing training of ever-more-interesting generative AI *depends* on the ongoing labor of artists. Proponents of the current economic model like to frame the artist rejection of AI as an obvious case of Luddism. Of course the artists reject this, it threatens their economic station! And: it's not even wrong. But, it is a high modernist foible: at some point the raw resource is fully exploi…

Yeah one thing that's often missed in these discussions is that the AI companies still need the artists! When you overexploit the commons, there will be consequences. We'll see if the synthetic data is good enough or not for future models I guess.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#117

Post by artninja1988 »

__loam wrote: post #113
artninja1988 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m sure you as the 331st user (surely we're under counting here?) will be able to realize your vision and rise above the sea of people making statistically average, derivative noise, using the same models as everyone else.

[flagged]

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#118

Post by __loam »

wyldfire wrote: post #112
api wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we go down this road right now, we are allowing superintelligent AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us. It's not about theory of mind stuff. It's about just compensation of living human beings.

Well, with the status quo, there's no license required to train on the greatest works of art from centuries past. I recognize some of the concerns about AI but I don't think pinning hopes on copyright law will deliver anything remotely resembling a remedy to the problems you bring up.

Are you talking about training a human or training an artist?

Downloading copyrighted data at huge scales to use in your commercial software product is pretty substantially different than an art student studying a reference.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#119

Post by uaserussia »

swyx wrote: post #59
itsoktocry wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting paywalled links should be, as well. It's borderline marketing. If I pay for the source, I don't need to find it on HN.

not true. hn surfaces quality and adds discussion. and the people who wrote the content need acknowledgement/attribution, and some conversion to paying, or they'll eventually stop. do you think good reporting/writing just falls from the sky?

It comes from imputing the facts into GPT 3.5 and asking it to write an article.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#120

Post by uaserussia »

cdata wrote: post #109
SkyBelow wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no matter the medium, or means or relative notoriety of the artist - shall be candidate training data Why is this a special case? When people were viewing it, reposting it, using it to learn... those were all accepted uses. Passing it off as your own wasn't allowed, but outright plagiarism has pretty consistently been unaccepted. The problem seems to stim from using it in a way that directly competes with the artist…

The tricky part is that the ongoing training of ever-more-interesting generative AI *depends* on the ongoing labor of artists. Proponents of the current economic model like to frame the artist rejection of AI as an obvious case of Luddism. Of course the artists reject this, it threatens their economic station! And: it's not even wrong. But, it is a high modernist foible: at some point the raw resource is fully exploi…

>ongoing training of even-more-interesting generative AI depends on the ongoing labor of artists. What does that mean? That you need artist to produce "even-more-interesting" art to train new iterations of generative AI? Could you point out some of these superfresh new art artist are doing that are completely different than things already done to exhaustion in the 1970s (other than anime)?

I don't think you need artists for that anymore. Certainly you don't need them for commercial purposes. If they are going to survive as an artist professionally, it will be because of the people that refuse to use AI art for whatever reason, but I don't see how that won't be short lived in the market.

Artists will survive, not professionally, but because they are doing it for the arts sake, even if that doesn't offer them any financial reward.

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