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Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

forbes.com

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Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#61

Post by pclmulqdq »

SkyBelow wrote: post #41
ronsor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "art community" did most of the damage to itself.

To expand upon this, the majority of the complaints I see are coming from the online community where the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists. I've been part of multiple communities who have decided to ban AI art because of a moral clause against using other's peoples works without their permission, but yet which don't like having it pointed out that the IP holders h…

> the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists

What do you mean by this? Fan art is pretty well known to be fair use, particularly because it is transformative and it has no commercial intent. AI training is transformative alright, but the commercial intent part is a huge factor in the analysis. The fair use analysis is very much not clear at this point.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#62

Post by pclmulqdq »

clbrmbr wrote: post #22
api wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. Very little training data is properly licensed or compensated. It's just more obvious with open models because we can investigate them. Closed models are sausages and we don't know what went in. Download a movie and you can get sued or your Internet connection terminated, but pirate the entire collective output of humanity and sell it back to us from beh…

> IMHO models trained on not-properly-licensed (pirated) data should at the very least not be copyrightable and should be public domain. My understanding is that ML model weights cannot be copyrighted as an original creative work. They are trade-secrets and protected through contracts but once leaked to third parties it’s not a copyright violation to use/distribute. Whether the model is actually a derivative work of…

The main argument I have seen (which is also OpenAI's in their legal briefs) is that it is fair use. The idea of "fair use" is that you are conceding that you are infringing by creating a derivative work, but it's still okay. Implied in the fair use argument is that it is a derivative work.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#63

Post by api »

wyldfire wrote: post #12
api wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could at least make an effort to purchase licenses from all non-open content, comply with open licenses, and exclude content otherwise. They aren't making anything more than the most lame token effort because they don't care.

But that's just it - if we believe that what the model learns from the training material is abstract enough, they shouldn't license the content at all. Humans learn from and are inspired by art all the time. They create new works that are not considered derived works, despite there being obvious influence. Could we conceive of the same circumstance being possible with machine learning?

If we go down this road right now, we are allowing superintelligent AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us.

It's not about theory of mind stuff. It's about just compensation of living human beings.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#64

Post by pclmulqdq »

CaptainFever wrote: post #38
stale2002 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. Forget about AI. Instead it is almost the entire art industry, wholesale! The semi-professional online art commissioning market is almost entirely copyright infringing fan art works, being sold without permission of IP owner. Yes, fan art is infringing. Especially when it is sold. And if you go to a convention center, to the artists section, you will s…

I'm glad someone brought this up. Artists, especially fan artists, will only hurt themselves if they advocate for classifying transformative works as infringing. Fan art has been so normalised that people have forgotten that it used to be considered legally dubious. Better to advocate for reskilling and social safety nets; automation affects everyone, not just them.

Fair use has 4 factors. Transformative is one of them. Recently, courts have gotten much more interested in a different factor, the "commercial intent" factor. While fan art is less transformative than AI training, it's not commercial and it's not competing with the original work (if anything, it enhances the market for the original work). Generative AI models are both commercial products and very successful competitors with the original works they used for training.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#65

Post by pclmulqdq »

ronsor wrote: post #31
stale2002 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. Forget about AI. Instead it is almost the entire art industry, wholesale! The semi-professional online art commissioning market is almost entirely copyright infringing fan art works, being sold without permission of IP owner. Yes, fan art is infringing. Especially when it is sold. And if you go to a convention center, to the artists section, you will s…

I'm perfectly fine with getting rid of AI... if all fan artists paid the statutory and actual damages for their infringing activities.

What actual damages are there for fan art? Can you prove that work done by a fan artist would otherwise have been done by the original creator and that fan artists are costing sales of the original works they create fan art for?

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#66

Post by whywhywhywhy »

__loam wrote: post #2

Stability always seemed like a dark horse thanks to the reputation of their founder and their open source business model. I do get some schadenfreude from seeing them like this considering the damage many feel they've done to the art community. E: -4 in 10 minutes. Stay classy hackernews. I hope this company and OpenAI choke on the algorithmic disgorgement when the law catches up.

> damage many feel they've done to the art community

If the "art community" can't understand what an insane gift SD1.5 and SDXL was to them then I don't know what to tell them.

Without those open models we could have easily ended up in a world where this tech existed but was only in the hands of people who could pay OpenAI or Adobe a month to use it, and I mean with the power of it what should that cost be? I mean to have such an advantage the monthly cost could have easily been in the hundreds a month like high end CAD/3D/VFX software is and only viable for huge studios leaving normal people in the dirt.

Emad's decisions mean for the rest of eternity a tool that could have ended up entirely locked behind an Adobe paywall can now be run on any machine you owned and tweaked entirely on your own hardware to work in a way specifically beneficial to your workflow.

I'm an artist and designer too, the fear of how fast these tools can replicate styles and take jobs becomes a lot less scary when I can take advantage of it myself or enhance my workflow with it myself without paying a subscription tax to do so. But if the "art community" can't understand or imagine how bad this situation could have been then I don't know what to tell them, some people just like being screwed over I guess...

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#67

Post by sp332 »

amingilani wrote: post #48
mvdtnz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a violation of HN guidelines.

Sorry, what is? It isn’t to post or ask for archival links. It’s only a contravention if someone complains about paywalls.

When I try posting archived links, they are auto-dead.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#68

Post by sp332 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #4

Every Forbes article should have the warning that they are not real publication anymore. Everything they publish is written with an intention that you believe an authors opinion as fact. The model for Stability ends in a likely way, they will be swallowed up in a payday. We have recent examples of this. For now, they’re the most open area in a garden of closing gates. And I wish them all the best.

Yup, that’s why the HN code shows the username after the domain now, same as Twitter users.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#69

Post by saurik »

blueblisters wrote: post #27

SD3.0 looks really good and will probably displace a lot of closed image generation models once it's out. I don't understand why Stability gets so little support from the community. They released the first usable open-source models and their models are the foundation of the most interesting AI-bashing workflows out there - VC funded or otherwise.

FWIW, they lost my interest entirely when they launched SD 2.0 and the model was worse, presumably (this was what people at the time were coming up with as the core problem) as they went overboard in their attempts at preventing it from generating naked photos (by removing so much from the training set that it no longer seemed to understand as well what a human looked like). The wider community then just got stuck on SD 1.5 and so frankly it isn't clear to me if the work Stability was doing was even relevant anymore... even just a few weeks ago I saw some new thing using SD, said to myself "god I hope it is using 1.5", and it was in fact (thankfully) still using 1.5.

Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

#70

Post by gitfan86 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #4

Every Forbes article should have the warning that they are not real publication anymore. Everything they publish is written with an intention that you believe an authors opinion as fact. The model for Stability ends in a likely way, they will be swallowed up in a payday. We have recent examples of this. For now, they’re the most open area in a garden of closing gates. And I wish them all the best.

I was contacted by a Forbes writer for a hit piece, and his pitch on why he wanted to talk to me was clearly a lie.

They feel that they are entitled to be dishonest while writing articles about how CEOs are dishonest.

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