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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

#151

Post by williamcotton »

dns_snek wrote: post #97
hehdhdhkf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties. These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work. If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing…

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?

My creative output per minute has probably increased threefold in the last few months from incorporating these tools into my workflow. What I've been making doesn't look or sound like anything that anyone else is making.

You're going to have a really hard time using Stable Diffusion to make quirky cartoon daily desk calendars in the style of plaintiff Sarah Anderson. You're going to have a much better time if you think more like a Creative Director and have less of an idea ahead of time of what the tool is going to give you... so you can iterate, much like a painter iterates while working.

These tools require the creative agency from the artist who is using them in order to produce things that people find interesting, entertaining, valuable or otherwise meaningful so I really don't see a "corporation goes brrrrrr" doing anything other than flooding the lowest-common denominator content feed pipes on the internet contrasted with the highest quality art using these tools in incredibly transformative ways.

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

#152

Post by anigbrowl »

mcbuilder wrote: post #121
anigbrowl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well yes, automation makes a massive difference because with a machine you can crank hundreds of panels in a particular style in the time it takes a human artist to do a single one.

In fact, I generated a bunch of Tintin panels between writing my earlier comment and this one, and they're bad but not terrible - mainly because I asked for 'Tintin riding a bicycle [...]' and it's having trouble with things like the bicycle spokes. Two out of the 4 'feel' right in terms of the line drawing style, color palette, foreground-background composition, level of background detail etc.

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

#153

Post by pessimizer »

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…

Sounds like an opt-out dark pattern. US law is unbelievably aggressive when it comes to issues of copyright, and makes copyright itself opt-out, i.e. everything you produce is copyrighted, and you have to license it in order to remove that automatic copyright. But when it comes to building these models to reproduce imitations of other people's work, suddenly copyright gets loosey-goosey.

Notice that it's a legal posture that implicitly condemns Copilot, which ignores explicitly formulated opt-outs in the form of licensing.

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

#154

Post by haswell »

l33tman wrote: post #132
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…

The processes seem pretty alike to me (as a neuroscientist and AI researcher). Things will only move on from here, the next generation of these tools won't use a training set of 5B images and complicated month long training procedures, they will allow the "ingestion" of a style by you showing it a single instance once of a target image and it will immediately know the style (just like a human artist would). I'm not p…

What I meant by the content/context of processes was that one is a biological process that includes all of the context and constraints of evolution, while the other is still ultimately a man-made machine, operating with an entirely different set of constraints, ultimately at the direction of other humans.

If we could develop literal eyeballs that could look at these images and translate the information the way humans do, the resulting capability is still no more human-like (in the sense that it should be afforded some human-like status) than any other program IMO.

If we achieved AGI tomorrow, we'd still need to have a conversation about what it is allowed to "see", because our current notions about humans seeing things are all based on the constraints of human capability. Most people understand that a surveillance camera seeing something and a human seeing something have very different implications.

In the short term, it's a conflation that I'd argue makes us see less clearly about what these systems are/are not, and leads to some questionable conclusions.

In the long term, it's a whole other ball of wax that will still require either new regulations or new ways of thinking.

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

#155

Post by pessimizer »

benlivengood wrote: post #129
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 la…

> There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion.

You might as well say that there's no artwork included in a .jpg, just data that can be used to recreate a piece of artwork using a carefully crafted interpreter.

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

#156

Post by williamcotton »

jacquesm wrote: post #145
williamcotton wrote: post #134

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? This isn't the kind of question that the lawyers of the defendants are going to ask the court. They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use. > It seems that violation wo…

> They'll more likely ask if it isn't clearly fair use similar to Sony v Universal and Authors Guild v Google and then present evidence of significant non-infringing commercial use. Those were not cases about 'generators' but about 'aggregators', a completely different class of application.

There's no existing legal doctrine around "generators" and "aggregators" but there is around "commercially significant non-infringing use". Something like what you're saying would need to be established by the higher courts.

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

#157

Post by astrange »

pessimizer wrote: post #155
benlivengood wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

> There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion. You might as well say that there's no artwork included in a .jpg, just data that can be used to recreate a piece of artwork using a carefully crafted interpreter.

Is there artwork included in libjpeg?

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

#158

Post by williamcotton »

pessimizer wrote: post #155
benlivengood wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

> There is no artwork included in Stable Diffusion. You might as well say that there's no artwork included in a .jpg, just data that can be used to recreate a piece of artwork using a carefully crafted interpreter.

There's no artwork in the 1s and 0s. There's an artwork when you render it to a screen.

It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG, convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s and not the image and not ascii art of the image, just like a printing press made up of just [1] and [0] character blocks, and sell that. Yes, the 1s and 0s are mathematically derived from the image but the image of 1s and 0s is not a visual derivative of the Disney image. That is, no one is going to buy a t-shirt of 1s and 0s instead of a Mickey t-shirt. Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.

Again, anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s, so this is not at all about access. This is about putting things on t-shirts and selling them.

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

#159

Post by astrange »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #142
scotty79 wrote: post #2

> 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. This is incredibly disheartening. Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrest…

Strongly disagree, IP law (despite it's misuse by a certain mouse mascot'd company) is extremely important and protecting artists work and their livelihood. The price floor on art commissions is already very low and AI effectively makes that cost zero, while providing zero compensation to the thousands of artists. Without their work, there's no Stability AI. From an ethical standpoint Stability is in the wrong, and f…

StableDiffusion is not based on art commissions. You can search https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ and see what kind of nonsense it usually has trained on.

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

#160

Post by quadcore »

mjhay wrote: post #136
sandworm101 wrote: post #130

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? 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 pri…

Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time. I really don't see how it is fundamentally different. Most of Harry Potter is derivative of previous fantasy work itself. Nothing is made in a vacuum. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool

Human artists/writers are influenced by each other all the time.

The flaw in this argument is the word "artist". If you remove all the pictures from the data source, the AI isnt capable of generating anything. Because it's not an artist.

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