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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

#161

Post by p0pcult »

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?

why does art have to be commercial at all? artmakers will art, with or without compensation.

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

#162

Post by anigbrowl »

nickthegreek wrote: post #117
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 thought many comics work with a team of artists to create their work. Largely by having 1 person create the style and other's learning to mimic it. Let alone having different people do the line work, shading, coloring, etc.

Right....which involves a fair amount of productive and administrative labor to assemble and operate. If I can take a collection of scans and feed them into my diffusion appliance and have it pop out and endless supply of new panels 24-7, the economics of the handcrafted original artwork factory start to look really bad.

Upside: the brilliant artist Rohan Kishibe falls under a bus, but while his loss is tragic his artistic legacy lives on - hooray!

Downside: up-and-coming artist Rohan Kishibe is on the verge of breaking through commercially, but the publishers of Shonen Lump, who invested heavily in AI, floods the market with work from Kohan Rishibe, and our hero is derided as a mere imitator.

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

#163

Post by williamcotton »

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?

> What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?

Because when I have access to these tools I will make better art than the technocrat with access to these tools?

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

#164

Post by troyvit »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #93
troyvit wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Who cares? Seriously. The technology is far more important than their little incentives. Copyright has already destroyed computer freedom and the internet. It can't be allowed to destroy yet another awesome innovation. I keep programming computers just because I like it. Maybe they'll keep creating too for the same reasons. Maybe they won't. It's irrelevant either way.

Really? I have little problem with computer freedom and if the internet was destroyed you wouldn't be able to leave comments on HN.

The nihilistic feeling that it's irrelevant whether new art is created kindof proves my point.

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

#165

Post by EamonnMR »

hehdhdhkf wrote: post #91
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…

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…

> Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data?

More pointedly, how do I keep my GPL'd code from spewing, license free, out of CodePilot?

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

#166

Post by EamonnMR »

wvenable wrote: post #87
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…

> Machines aren't people. There's no reason why that is the significant detail. Why does it matter? If you can look at millions of images over your lifetime and faithfully reproduce famous works of art by hand, aren't you just as wrong?

Humans can be trusted not to do that thing, and get in trouble if they get caught.

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

#167

Post by jacquesm »

williamcotton wrote: post #156
jacquesm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Of course there is. You can't infringe without publishing a work and to pass off the work of others as a new creation because it has been shredded and then sewn back together again .

Those cases hinged on republishing works or significant parts of works as themselves, they weren't trying to pass them off as new, original works in their own right.

And this is exactly what this court case is about, whether or not Stable Diffusion ultimately is just another - complex - form of mechanical transformation or whether it creates original work.

In my opinion the only things all of these companies get wrong is that they (1) failed to obtain consent from the suppliers of the inputs to their models and (2) that they themselves have not contributed even a little bit of the input data.

The ultimate laugh test is whether or not these companies themselves slap (C) signs on everything and are willing to litigate when they believe their rights are the ones that are infringed upon. I hope for an outcome where opt-in will become the norm, that would seem to be a reasonable middle ground.

Finally, note that copyright is not a local concept but a global one - and has been for a long time - and that anything that happens on that front will have to ratified in a different forum than some US court.

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

#168

Post by haswell »

stickfigure wrote: post #149
haswell wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I humbly suggest you are committing the fallacy of anthropomorphizing humans. What's your definition of consciousness? How do you know that a (sufficiently complex) biologically inspired computer program doesn't have it? What's special about meat?

> I humbly suggest you are committing the fallacy of anthropomorphizing humans.

Considering the definition of that word, may I ask what you're trying to say?

> What's your definition of consciousness?

I like Thomas Nagel's:

"A creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like” to be this creature; an event is consciously perceived if there is “something that it is like” to perceive it. Whatever else consciousness may or may not be in physical terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is first and foremost a matter of subjective experience. Either the lights are on, or they are not."

It is because of this subjectivity that I find it problematic to give weight to arguments that equate human consciousness with machine consciousness. Even if we achieve AGI tomorrow, and even if we know with certainty that it is conscious, it does not automatically follow that we would apply the same frameworks to a newly conscious entity on the basis of consciousness alone.

Consciousness and the implications of that consciousness can vary drastically, e.g. no one wants to be in the same room when the sleeping grizzly bear wakes up.

> How do you know that a (sufficiently complex) biologically inspired computer program doesn't have it?

I think we will eventually have to take this question seriously, but current systems do not seem to approach the levels of complexity required. But taking this seriously is not at odds with the belief that current AI programs are nowhere close to the level of complexity we associate with conscious creatures.

> What's special about meat?

I think this is the question that many scientists and researchers would love to answer.

There are some lines of thinking that consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex biological system with a sufficiently complex nexus of computation to make sense of those systems. In this line of thinking, the experiential aspect of consciousness - e.g. "what it's like to feel pain" - is just as critical to the overall experience as the raw computation capabilities in the brain.

Maybe meat isn't special at all, and consciousness springs from some other source or confluence. Even if it does, we then need to have a conversation about whether consciousness is the great equalizer, or if the "kind" of consciousness also plays a role.

Going back to that grizzly bear, no one wants to be there when it wakes up, but neither do we hold the bear to human standards of value. If the bear kills someone, we don't ascribe to it titles like "murderer".

But again, even if biology is not a key component, I still don't believe arguments about consciousness can be used as a basis for the ethics of the current generation of tools, which are far too primitive relatively speaking.

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

#169

Post by Ukv »

rafale wrote: post #35

I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.

I'd rather not risk stunting progress in areas like language translation, malware scanning, DDOS prevention, spam filtering, product defect detection, scientific data analysis, autonomous vehicles, voice dictation, narration/text-to-speech engines, drug discovery, protein folding, optimization in production lines/agriculture/logistics, detecting seizures and falls, weather forecasting and early-warning systems, etc. just to let Getty Images have what they feel entitled to.

Best outcome in my opinion would be for the output to be judged on a case-by-case basis, like human works are, not for machine learning on data without "proper authorization from the owner" to inherently count as infringement.

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

#170

Post by Timon3 »

quadcore wrote: post #160
mjhay wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can a human "generate anything" beyond what essentially equates to random noise if they have never had any sensory input? Comparing a "trained" human brain with a "newborn" model seems strange if we actually want to delineate between what is and isn't art.
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