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Just compare the comments on any AI art story with the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418760
Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
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Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#52It's pretty funny that most people that hate AI art and want it banned because of copyright violations, don't understand that the only difference that will make is that instead of having open models, you will only have closed models owned by Adobe who will license all the imagery from Getty, Disney, etc. AI art isn't going away, and it better be open instead of in full control of just 2 or 3 companies.
Can they even license those works to train a model?
And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI.
Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#53Fair use would work if we could find an artist for a given generated picture - but we can't. Generate a picture and there is no artist for it closer than the ones who made the pictures in the training set. I really hope these lawyers wont mess that up, it's an easy win.
The strartup up Chroma is working on solving attribution.
Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#54I downloaded the Llama model using a torrent. That is, I think, enough of a counterexample to show that lawsuits will not stop this. Raw economics are at play here and the legal system usually loses to economic realities. 1) We just need 1 jurisdiction that allows model training. 2) There is no mechanism to stop model distribution short of banning general purpose computing and the internet. That would cause more harm…
I think copyright is a real world counter example to this kind of argument (that raw economics will override the legal protection). If you are selling anything, you have to respect copyright. So if training on copyrighted images becomes illegal, it doesn’t mean that people won’t be able to create stable diffusion models (they will do it regardless). But it does mean that businesses won’t be able to use them, which re…
Proof both ways is difficult. How will a company prove that an image was generated with an illegally-trained model? Unless there becomes some requirement that models be kept around for a century.
Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#55It's pretty funny that most people that hate AI art and want it banned because of copyright violations, don't understand that the only difference that will make is that instead of having open models, you will only have closed models owned by Adobe who will license all the imagery from Getty, Disney, etc. AI art isn't going away, and it better be open instead of in full control of just 2 or 3 companies.
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Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI is a tool that can be produce copies of work. So is paint. Should we ban paint? Also I doubt your claim is true. There’s no way there’s a copyright claim on “paintings that feel like Picasso style”.
Which came first, copyright or the printing press? Was the printing press banned because of copyright? But yes, the claim about an artist owning an entire style sounds pretty off to me. There's no way Picasso has a copyright claim on every cubist painting ever made, nor does Van Gogh own every painting containing a sunflower.
> Which came first, copyright or the printing press? Was the printing press banned because of copyright?
I feel like you’re making the same argument as me, with the same rhetoric, but a different example. No, I do not think the printing press, paint, or generative tools are bannable by copyright. I do think all 3 could be used to produce a work that is in violation of copyright. And no, I don’t think a novel work produced by any of them are in violation of copyright.
Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see why you're saying what you are about the "facts," but I'm not at all convinced that it's so clear-cut that the plaintiffs are all that wrong. Which is to say, compare these models to e.g. simple image compression. If compressed images can violate, the argument that "this is merely VERY GOOD and VERSATILE image compression" probably has enough legal legs to do something with.
It is a bit like saying a random number generator is a form of image compression since it is a small program the output of which contains every copyrightable image. Compression has the property that almost all inputs are reconstructable. Generative models have the property that almost all inputs are not reconstructable.
Compression with extra steps is still compression. Most people don't understand the math involved in LZF-encoding, and lossy audio encoding seems even more strange, so "diffusion" just sounds like a somewhat-lossier form of compression if described in a certain way.
I was very dismissive of the anti-AI-image crowd until I saw that Anne Graham Lotz pic. Only a single known source image of her exists, although many copies of it are distributed far and wide across the internet, and using her name in a prompt results in an image that seems very much like a lossy reproduction of the "original." It's an edge case, to be sure, but that demonstration looks like lossy compression, even though it's not.
Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#58In France, an artist owns its art for life, even if it’s sold. So let’s say an artist creates a new style, like Picasso did and an other artist creates art that is really close to Picasso. He will lose in court because of IP. Now an AI does the same thing and suddenly no copyright ? What should be done maybe is explicitly asking for every art generated to ask to pay for it and this money goes for the copyrights. But…
Artists own the art they created, they don't own the style that they might have invented.
Not necessarily under moral rights.
Moral rights are... at best a mess. They can be very wide, very up to interpretation and vary depending on the country. They're essentially meant as the ultimate stop button for an artist if their works get used in a way the artist deeply disapproves of[0]. Actual interpretation can vary a lot and cloning an artists style as specifically as SD allows you to do (with "...in the style of X" prompts) could easily be an easy moral rights argument in most jurisdictions, doubly so if economic exploitation is a component. (Which a lot of the hype surrounding SD et al. is also build on.)
For this reason they mostly exist in civil law systems (where a judges ruling sets no precedent for future interpretation), while they barely exist in common law systems (like the US) since it's really difficult to point at consistency with previous cases when it comes to moral rights.
Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#59> Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had “technical inaccuracies” and was “stretching the truth a lot.” Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images.
>In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a user’s prompt into a latent representation: a list of numbers summarizing the contents of the image. Just as you can identify a point on the Earth’s surface based on its latitude and longitude, Stable Diffusion characterizes images based on their “coordinates” in the “picture space.” It then converts this latent representation into an image.
Regardless of the lawsuit, this seems like a quite spurious, self-serving argument in and of itself. If the “coordinates” of the image were not equivalent to the image, how would it be possible to fine tune the model on a set of images and recreate their style? This is setting aside the myriad examples where SD regurgitates fairly close copies of individual works.
This is a bit like training a model on the works of Shakespeare, but then claiming that the tensors resulting from ingesting the data are not actually Shakespeare’s writing. Oh really, where’d they come from then? Thin air?
Re: Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI
#60Shouldn't it be decided on an image-by-image basis? If the resulting image doesn't infringe copyright, what's the relevance of how it was made? That's how it's worked up until this point. I mean, maybe because the impact is so severe we should HAVE new laws affording more protections to artists, but that's a different argument right?
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