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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

#261

Post by jacquesm »

km3r wrote: post #260
ROTMetro wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posit that none of these works will be copyrightable because to be copyrightable you need at least an 'anonymous artist' to assign their copyright to a company, and there is no 'anonymous artist' in these scenarios (a prompt writer can not be considered an anonymous artist, at most I guess they could try to copyright the language in their prompt. But the output, nope. Doesn't meet the requirements for copyright).

I can put a similarly simple "prompt" into Ableton to create a simple drum loop, then copyright the resulting song. What makes AI significantly different then an audio rendering engine such that only one can be copyrightable?

That the one uses generic sounds as input and the other uses specific art as input.

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

#262

Post by km3r »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #224
jerf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, this is just something that has to be solved with legislation, not a court case. It's too novel a setup for a court case to deal with under existing frameworks. I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse . But proving tha…

Even in the strictest possible strengthening of IP law, where you need the artists written permission before feeding their data into a neural network, I think the market for artists is doomed. Disney can train a model from every frame of their video library as well as whatever they can find which is unambiguosly public domain. Then they could hire a few hundred artists to draw whatever the model is bad at by the end…

> I think the market for artists is doomed.

Art is the creative aspect not the skill in creating things. Art will be fine, those who just are scribes for painting are doomed.

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

#263

Post by williamcotton »

jacquesm wrote: post #259
williamcotton wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden is on the accuser. Whatever world you imagine where someone can wander around and force other people to have to “show their work” without evidence is absurd. Also, Stable Diffusion is already on my laptop so I don’t need an Internet connection, but I digress. You’re right, I can’t make the same art with Stable Diffusion as without. The same holds for the art I can make with DAW software like Logic Pro and…

This is an interesting discussion, sorry for editing my other comment extensively, I tend to 'think while writing' and that upsets the thread a bit. You can take that as proof that this isn't GPT-3 output. The burden is on the accuser but the accuser has been 'shredded' and that makes them all but anonymous. So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? There is a close equivalent to this in music sa…

> So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights?

Yes! Always and only! If you are a songwriter then your inputs are a certain ordering of words and sounds. If you dilute those inputs to the point where it indistinguishable you have created a new song!

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

#264

Post by km3r »

jacquesm wrote: post #261
km3r wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can put a similarly simple "prompt" into Ableton to create a simple drum loop, then copyright the resulting song. What makes AI significantly different then an audio rendering engine such that only one can be copyrightable?

That the one uses generic sounds as input and the other uses specific art as input.

No, the input for Ableton is a simple set of commands for how to control the synths to create the beat, the input for AI is text, the "specific art" maybe have created the model, but the model won't do anything without a prompt.

It is possible for a prompt to create a copyright violation, just like if I recreate an existing iconic drum loop it would be. But, just because a tool can infringe doesn't mean the tool itself is infringing.

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

#265

Post by wokwokwok »

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…

It’s deeply disingenuous to say the U-Net is not trained on the images because it’s trained on the latent representations.

Latents are a compressed representation of the source images that are fully recoverable.

If you train a model on a compressed jpg of an image, or on any deterministic transformation of it, you’re still training it on that image.

Any suggestion otherwise is only because someone is trying to put some spin on things.

> Stable Diffusion v2 16-bit is ~3GB of data. It was trained on hundreds of millions of images…

And yet! Remarkably! It can generate pictures of the Mona Lisa!

Here’s a question for you: if you encode the process of drawing an exact copy of an image, does the pure code that implements that mean you have a copy of the image in it?

Have you encoded pixels as code?

Does that mean there’s no copy of the image?

How about a zip file full of images? It’s just a high entropy binary blob right? Yet… remarkably!!! It can be transformed into images by applying an algorithm.

I don’t know the answer, but this handwavy “it couldn’t possibly encode them it’s too small” is…

Pure. Nonsense.

Of course some part of some images is embedded in the model in some form.

Stop trivialising the issue.

The issue here is: Does an algorithm that generates content infringe copyright?

Does a black box that takes the input “a picture of xxx” and a seed and outputs a copyrighted image infringe?

You know that’s possible. Don’t dodge. Technical details about oh “it couldn’t possibly have…” are pure rubbish.

Sure it could. It could have a full resolution copy of a photo of the image in that black box.

Of all the training data? Probably not. But of some of it? In compressed latent form? Most definitely.

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

#266

Post by haswell »

ok123456 wrote: post #252
haswell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense. These are orthogonal issues at this point. The one concern I do have is that the “lawyer nonsense” (read: AI companies playing fast and loose with current laws) will stack the regulatory deck against AI technology unnecessarily - essentially because o…

It's not 'playing fast and loose'. It's an area where there are no existing laws. We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.

Are the existing laws written in a way that is favorable to generative AI? No. But the laws do exist.

Whether or not one believes those laws apply to generative AI seems to be based on one's belief in how similar that AI software is to humans.

I'd argue that systematically ingesting 2.3 billion images is not remotely human (one of a myriad of reasons the comparisons break down), and that it is a long stretch to claim that this falls into the realm of fair use as originally envisioned.

It is this insistence that the software is human enough to be granted human-like status that is playing fast and loose with the definitions of things, ranging from consciousness, to learning, to the interpretation of those concepts relative to current laws.

I believe new laws will be written, and old laws will be updated. There's no question that the current legal system is not well equipped for various generative AI systems. But I don't think the current laws have nothing to say.

And I'd still argue that this conversation can be separated from the one about indiscriminately slurping up artist's content.

> We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.

Please don't argue against straw men. There are legitimate concerns from artists across disciplines and genres, and this isn't just isolated shrieking.

Artist backlash is frankly one of the most natural outcomes I could imagine from a system that uses their work without permission. Many of the people who are complaining loudly are not against AI, just against the use of their work without consent or attribution.

I'm both extremely excited about the possibilities the software unlocks and concerned about the implications. AI can exist without ignoring the rights of artists.

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

#267

Post by jacquesm »

km3r wrote: post #264
jacquesm wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the one uses generic sounds as input and the other uses specific art as input.

No, the input for Ableton is a simple set of commands for how to control the synths to create the beat, the input for AI is text, the "specific art" maybe have created the model, but the model won't do anything without a prompt. It is possible for a prompt to create a copyright violation, just like if I recreate an existing iconic drum loop it would be. But, just because a tool can infringe doesn't mean the tool itse…

> It is possible for a prompt to create a copyright violation, just like if I recreate an existing iconic drum loop it would be. But, just because a tool can infringe doesn't mean the tool itself is infringing.

That's fair. But if you would sample Phil Collins (just to name one famous drummer) to create a Phil Collins sample pack and you'd then create your own drum loop with it that wouldn't mean you can't expect some expensive mail incoming. And it will likely stick.

The easiest way to create original art without having this shadow hanging over you would be to make your own sounds, use licensed sounds or to attempt to license the sounds you want to use (but that are not available for public use). Any other path is likely going to be a legal minefield and may lead to you losing your rep and a bunch of $.

There are plenty of examples of people that did this, went to court and lost.

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

#268

Post by threeseed »

tadfisher wrote: post #223
threeseed wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the artist's work itself is copyrightable. Any use of that work without permission (and thus attribution/compensation) is the problem.

Fair use is a thing.

But when companies are solely profiting from it then it ceases being fair.

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

#269

Post by jacquesm »

williamcotton wrote: post #263
jacquesm wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting discussion, sorry for editing my other comment extensively, I tend to 'think while writing' and that upsets the thread a bit. You can take that as proof that this isn't GPT-3 output. The burden is on the accuser but the accuser has been 'shredded' and that makes them all but anonymous. So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? There is a close equivalent to this in music sa…

> So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? Yes! Always and only! If you are a songwriter then your inputs are a certain ordering of words and sounds. If you dilute those inputs to the point where it indistinguishable you have created a new song!

> If you dilute those inputs to the point where it indistinguishable you have created a new song!

No, that's not the right criterium. You can create a new song but it may (not will) be classified as a derived work.

Note that in audio it is fairly easy to prove that a part was sampled and unless your samples are pure noise you would most likely not get away with this. Plenty of artists are more than happy to give permission but they are also likely more than happy to sue if you don't ask for it.

And some don't care. But that should not be your assumption.

Using the same words to write a different book is emphatically not the same as using samples of spoken/sung words or played notes or riffs to create another song. These arguments have all been tried in court (see that article linked above) and failed.

And that's where sites like this:

https://www.whosampled.com/Us3/Cantaloop-(Flip-Fantasia)/sam...

come in handy, if you listen to those other songs you'll realize how brilliant this Cantaloop version really is, in spite of being made using a very high fraction of samples from other songs.

But they did credit them, and they did ask for permission.

Finally, it's good form: artists are usually part of the same eco system and you tend to not do to others what you don't want done to you. If you feel that having your artwork sampled for inclusion by SD is the way forward then that should be your right to decide. But not for SD to decide (in my opinion...).

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

#270

Post by williamcotton »

jacquesm wrote: post #259
williamcotton wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden is on the accuser. Whatever world you imagine where someone can wander around and force other people to have to “show their work” without evidence is absurd. Also, Stable Diffusion is already on my laptop so I don’t need an Internet connection, but I digress. You’re right, I can’t make the same art with Stable Diffusion as without. The same holds for the art I can make with DAW software like Logic Pro and…

This is an interesting discussion, sorry for editing my other comment extensively, I tend to 'think while writing' and that upsets the thread a bit. You can take that as proof that this isn't GPT-3 output. The burden is on the accuser but the accuser has been 'shredded' and that makes them all but anonymous. So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? There is a close equivalent to this in music sa…

> But the rules don't say anything about how long those samples are: even the tiniest sliver would have to be accounted for: you would need permission.

That’s just silly. If no one can hear the difference then who cares? Why would it even matter what song I was getting tiny snippets from? It’s like asking a specific poet for permission to use a certain word.

> Ok, so I have this little piece of software here, it allows me to extract the notes, durations and volumes of individual notes of a piano piece and then I can re-play those notes using any instrument from an enormous bank of synthesized sounds. Do you feel that this should count as original work because 'it has never existed before' or do you feel that this is a mechanical transformation and that the original creator should be able to sue me for creating a derived work? Does the mechanism of the derivation count?

Does it sound like the same song or not? You know, would someone listen to it and be able to recognize the melody? That’s what matters!

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