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An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

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Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#121

Post by mcbuilder »

anigbrowl wrote: post #94
sebstefan wrote: post #37

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.

There's a big difference between 'rework my drawing to look like it was painted by Goya' and 'render this drawing in the style of Lisa Frank' or any living visual artist famed for a specific identifiable style as opposed to a particular image. Comics are one example of an area where individual artists might develop a large body of work in a very distinctive style. You probably know what a Tintin comic (by Belgian art…

I don't even think it extends to this, it's simply because it's automated. I have no talent in the area, but I know that artists can copy one another's styles. You see it in talented art student master copies, and hell I'd bet most professional cartoonists could draw a page what looks pretty damn close to a series of Tintin panels when you squint.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#122

Post by counttheforks »

dns_snek wrote: post #49

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts…

The models are already released. They can't retroactively censor released models.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#123

Post by shanebellone »

haswell wrote: post #104
shanebellone wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the closest thing to a precedent. Hip-hop originally recorded and transformed vocals, instruments, and beats to create something new from pieces of something old. The practice occurred without permission and obviously ended up in court. Now sampling requires a licensing agreement. The additional cost has fundamentally changed the genre (over the last 40 years). Hip-hop and tech both ignored IP rights because nei…

That's helpful. I wasn't aware of the eventual licensing enforcement. If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules). I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefo…

"you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules"

The systems are similar too despite having completely different internal processes. Both transformed existing IP without permission, to produce sufficiently remixed art as an output. A sufficiently generic abstraction would look very similar despite the disparity of domain.

The primary difference between hip-hop and Stable Diffusion is that AI cannot rationalize, explain, or attribute inspiration to a final product.

There was no aha moment and thus no creativity. It has no vested interest in its work.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#124

Post by dns_snek »

thereisnospork wrote: post #108
dns_snek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright? > All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck This is not a given. It's up to us a…

> Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright? Yes, much in the same way that I am glad I live in a future where scribes aren't required to put text on paper: There is a massiv…

I'm not against efficiency improvements, but the value created by these improvements has to flow back towards the society at large in one way or another. I'm not anti-AI, I'm just arguing that artists and other creative professionals should be compensated for their work before their work is included in a for-profit ML model. That's hardly radical.

Current proposals don't have any intention of addressing that, they just silently kick the can down the road. What happens when nearly everything is automated there are no new profitable jobs that people can take on?

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#125

Post by haswell »

stickfigure wrote: post #119
haswell wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that . This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and im…

Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.

The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics.

Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord.

And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#126

Post by nickthegreek »

troyvit wrote: post #44
Karunamon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the exact opposite. AI, including AGI if we ever get there, cannot be allowed to be strangled in its crib by artificially limiting the information it can learn from in the name of IP maximalism. IP law already goes way too far, the line should be drawn here.

If you want new art you probably want some form of IP. What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?

Many people create art with the only incentive is that they want to. 3.3 million guitars were sold in the US in 2021. Many of those will never be used outside of a bedroom.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#127

Post by verdverm »

counttheforks wrote: post #118
xeyownt wrote: post #101

I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the s…

> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it) This doesn't mean anything. If an unsecured SSH server is connected to the internet that lets anyone who connects to it in and gives them a root shell, it is still illegal to 'hack' that machine. The law cares about intent, not technicalities. edit: Since HN decided to break with "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." again, banning me from re…

Copyright and intrusion are different areas of the legal code and have different interpretation and allowances. For example, copyright typically has a fair use exclusion for infringement

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#128

Post by cma »

acomjean wrote: post #18

>"The output represents the model’s understanding of what is useful, aesthetic, pleasing, etc. and that, together with data filtering and cleaning that general image generating AI companies do,2 is what the companies consider most valuable, not the training data.3" This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models? No matter what, putting images into your mach…

> No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.

What about a company where you submit images and it tells you which faces are in them?

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#129

Post by benlivengood »

dns_snek wrote: post #49

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts…

The LAION-5B dataset is metadata and URI pairs; all the images are publicly accessible on the Internet.

Stable Diffusion's U-Net is trained to remove noise from images in latent space, which the variational autoencoder (VAE) converts to and from pixel space. CLIP embeddings are used to improve the denoising step of the U-Net by using the correlations between human language descriptions of the pixel image to reduce latent noise. Neither the U-Net nor the VAR are trained to interpolate or reproduce images from the training set; if that happened the model would be overfitted and loss would be terrible on the validation set. The VAE is trained to produce a latent space that can accurately encode and decode any pixel image, and the U-Net is trained to remove gaussian noise from the latent space.

Stable Diffusion v2 16-bit is ~3GB of data. It was trained on hundreds of millions of images (minimum of 170M in the 512x512 step alone). That leaves a maximum of ~20 bytes per image that could conceivably be a copy, which is certainly not enough to directly reproduce either the style or contents of any individual image.

There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion. There is a semantic representation of how images are composed of varied subjects represented in the latent space and what pixel probabilities over those subjects relate to human language phrases during decoding, and finally a method to remove noise from the semantic representation, e.g. starting with a blank or random canvas and interpreting what may be there, iteratively guided by CLIP embeddings. If you give Stable Diffusion an empty CLIP embedding you get a random human-interpretable image obeying the distribution of the learned latent space.

Re: An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

#130

Post by sandworm101 »

xeyownt wrote: post #101

I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the s…

>> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights?

If I read Harry Potter, then turn around a write a book about a wizard with a z-shaped scar? Who works at a school for wizards? With a pet owl? Who is an orphan? At some point I have started to violate intellectual property rules. (Ignoring all the Harry Potter material that was itself lifted from prior public domain art.)

AI systems aren't just reading, they are generating material based on the stuff they have read. They and the people controlling them have to abide the copyright rules just like any other "author".

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