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> Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every

by planb 4y ago

> Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work.

batmenace 4y ago
I would assume that the point is that you had to pay - in one way or another - for access to this material, which is the intention when it is published and shared. You bought your books, your toys, your TV shows (through ads). SD, by scraping the web, gets all the benefits of prior work without necessarily having adequately compensated the work's creators.
- contravariant 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure I didn't buy any of the images I view while browsing the web. Sending me ads doesn't constitute a transaction, besides I usually don't choose to look at them anyway.
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    you also didn't flip millions of illustrations into a commercial product without paying the creators or rights holders to license them. this is theft plain and simple.
    - thegrimmest 4y ago
      I think the point is that he did, and that we all do, when we train our meat neural networks (on copyrighted material) in a way that makes us better at providing a commercial service (our job). If a human has a right to view and learn from a copyrighted image on the internet, why shouldn't an AI?
      - planb 4y ago
        Yes, this is exactly my point. And I’d go even one step further: creating real artificial intelligence cannot be possible without learning from the real world - which means learning also from copyrighted material. So a law that prevents this (even by just requiring to pay a minuscule fee) would effectively ensure that such a technology will be developed in a country with different laws.
- Somatochlora 4y ago
  Besides the point that these are freely viewable images anyways, this is also clearly not people's real objection. If you were making a novel-writing ai, it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model.
  - batmenace 4y ago
    I agree. In theory, some may be placated if the person creating an SD artwork had to ultimately compensate the creators of those artworks that were used by SD in order to stich together the image, akin to sampling records in music.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model. because by buying the book you are not buying the right to distribute derivative works of that book. I prefer straightforward movie piracy than the "hidden behind a curtain of supposedly artistic value" one.
pnt12 4y ago
Two objections: 1: you cannot produce thousands of detailed pictures in a day, this program can. The argument gets pretty clear if you transpose it to other objects, ie why is it fair to ride a bicycle in the sidewalk but not drive a car? 2: copyright laws. You may not see a picture and imitate it. How do you know this AI didn't just imitate one of the million pictures it saw? And if you distribute it and the author wants to sue, who should it sue? The author of the AI or the person who prompted it?
- Fricken 4y ago
  It's a lot of work for a human to produce an image, but they can think thousands of images in a day quite easily. The artistic process often begins with some daydreaming.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > but they can think thousands of images in a day quite easily thought is not a crime yet. thought police is not a thing, yet...
- dymk 4y ago
  If someone crashes into your house, do you sue the car or the person?
  - TchoBeer 4y ago
    What if AI is controlling the car? Do you sue the passenger?
    - dymk 4y ago
      Yes, I don't get a free pass for harming somebody with a tool I'm operating just because the tool is "automatic" in some way. If the person operating the car is the passenger, then you sue them. If it's Google operating their Waymo fleet, you sue them. Car manufacturers in the future may offer to take on the liability themselves for autopilot mistakes, but that's not yet the deal offered. At the end of the day, there's no legal magic or loopholes. Somebody is ultimately the operator of the vehicle, even if their hands aren't on the steering wheel.
moffkalast 4y ago
> It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work. That is legitimately a problem, people get sued for it all the time.
jwie 4y ago
I think the difference is SD is generating strictly derivative work from inputs where the human is synthesizing and creating from reference.
- wffurr 4y ago
  I'm not sure that distinction is as clear as you're implying.
latexr 4y ago
Your comment reminded me of Boulet’s “Fuck Peter Pan”: https://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/ https://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material That's in fact a problem: plagiarism is considered cheating/intellectual dishonesty and can ruin a career, copyright infringement is punished by civil law (and fined), counterfeit is a crime, etc. etc. You must retain yourself from copying too much, but only the original author (and eventually a judge) can decide if that happened. If stable diffusion is used for counterfeiting or the result infringe the copyright, do you think the fact that the model was trained on unlicensed copyrighted material is irrelevant?
- thegrimmest 4y ago
  Authoring any work, no matter how closely copied, is not an infringement. The infringement is commercial distribution of copyrighted work. And yes, I do think you should be liable for whatever you distribute commercially, regardless of how you obtain it.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Authoring any work, no matter how closely copied, is not an infringement Nitpicking, but only unless it's not counterfeit material. Claiming painting is from "famous painter X" while it's instead a copy it's an infringement. How long before "famous painter X's new painting found in the attic of old lady"?
    - thegrimmest 4y ago
      But in that case it's not the work that's the problem, but the misrepresentation (read lie) about the provenance.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        and the fact that it is a replica anyway, copying money is a crime, almost anywhere in the World, the simple act of making a copy is enough. Money usually contain artworks I would also not generate pictures of child pornography There's a reason why SD apply censorship filters to generated images
acdha 4y ago
This is going to be the legal challenge for the next few years: every year there are lawsuits alleging that music, drawings, etc. are too similar to someone else's work but those take time and require human judgement to decide whether something crosses the line, and the scale which tools like this offer makes that basically as feasible as it was to individually sue Napster users for sharing other people's works. I'd expect that level of legislative response, and also would bet on lawsuits over any authorized data in their training corpus.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material What your brain has learned cannot be transferred with an USB stick in seconds Not even your offspring will receive any of it If I want to learn everything you know, I have to learn what you learned , assuming I will be able to Kinda of a big difference, don't you think? These kinds of comments are embarrassingly low effort, just because we threw rocks at each other when we all were chimps, doesn't mean that guns haven't been a game changer and made homicide easier even for people that would never be able to hit anybody by throwing rocks.
- planb 4y ago
  The original article talks about moral (not even legal) objections to learning from copyrighted data. Your comment implies that DALL-E 2 is morally okay, because they don't distribute the model ("copy everything it knows to a USB stick") but only sell access to the algorithm to generate images, while Stable Diffusions open source model is a problem because it can be copied. Most people would take the exact opposite stance I guess.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > The original article talks about moral (not even legal) objections to learning from copyrighted data. but I am replying to "My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work" Difference being your brain has not been trained by someone (for profit), you have trained it using YEARS OF YOUR LIFE TO ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE which is morally acceptable (does not imply that the use you do of it is legally acceptable), given that you paid a very high price, sacrificing your own time for the objective. And that your knowledge is only yours, you can't transfer it to anyone, it doesn't even show up in your DNA. > Your comment implies that DALL-E 2 is morally okay, because they don't distribute the model Implication doesn't mean what you think it means. My comment doesn't imply anything of the sort, you are > Most people would take the exact opposite stance I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_premise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_premise

by planb 4y ago

batmenace 4y ago

I would assume that the point is that you had to pay - in one way or another - for access to this material, which is the intention when it is published and shared. You bought your books, your toys, your TV shows (through ads). SD, by scraping the web, gets all the benefits of prior work without necessarily having adequately compensated the work's creators.

contravariant 4y ago
I'm pretty sure I didn't buy any of the images I view while browsing the web. Sending me ads doesn't constitute a transaction, besides I usually don't choose to look at them anyway.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  you also didn't flip millions of illustrations into a commercial product without paying the creators or rights holders to license them. this is theft plain and simple.
  - thegrimmest 4y ago
    I think the point is that he did, and that we all do, when we train our meat neural networks (on copyrighted material) in a way that makes us better at providing a commercial service (our job). If a human has a right to view and learn from a copyrighted image on the internet, why shouldn't an AI?
    - planb 4y ago
      Yes, this is exactly my point. And I’d go even one step further: creating real artificial intelligence cannot be possible without learning from the real world - which means learning also from copyrighted material. So a law that prevents this (even by just requiring to pay a minuscule fee) would effectively ensure that such a technology will be developed in a country with different laws.
Somatochlora 4y ago
Besides the point that these are freely viewable images anyways, this is also clearly not people's real objection. If you were making a novel-writing ai, it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model.
- batmenace 4y ago
  I agree. In theory, some may be placated if the person creating an SD artwork had to ultimately compensate the creators of those artworks that were used by SD in order to stich together the image, akin to sampling records in music.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model. because by buying the book you are not buying the right to distribute derivative works of that book. I prefer straightforward movie piracy than the "hidden behind a curtain of supposedly artistic value" one.

pnt12 4y ago

Two objections: 1: you cannot produce thousands of detailed pictures in a day, this program can. The argument gets pretty clear if you transpose it to other objects, ie why is it fair to ride a bicycle in the sidewalk but not drive a car? 2: copyright laws. You may not see a picture and imitate it. How do you know this AI didn't just imitate one of the million pictures it saw? And if you distribute it and the author wants to sue, who should it sue? The author of the AI or the person who prompted it?

Fricken 4y ago
It's a lot of work for a human to produce an image, but they can think thousands of images in a day quite easily. The artistic process often begins with some daydreaming.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > but they can think thousands of images in a day quite easily thought is not a crime yet. thought police is not a thing, yet...
dymk 4y ago
If someone crashes into your house, do you sue the car or the person?
- TchoBeer 4y ago
  What if AI is controlling the car? Do you sue the passenger?
  - dymk 4y ago
    Yes, I don't get a free pass for harming somebody with a tool I'm operating just because the tool is "automatic" in some way. If the person operating the car is the passenger, then you sue them. If it's Google operating their Waymo fleet, you sue them. Car manufacturers in the future may offer to take on the liability themselves for autopilot mistakes, but that's not yet the deal offered. At the end of the day, there's no legal magic or loopholes. Somebody is ultimately the operator of the vehicle, even if their hands aren't on the steering wheel.

moffkalast 4y ago

> It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work. That is legitimately a problem, people get sued for it all the time.

jwie 4y ago

I think the difference is SD is generating strictly derivative work from inputs where the human is synthesizing and creating from reference.

wffurr 4y ago
I'm not sure that distinction is as clear as you're implying.

latexr 4y ago

Your comment reminded me of Boulet’s “Fuck Peter Pan”: https://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/ https://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material That's in fact a problem: plagiarism is considered cheating/intellectual dishonesty and can ruin a career, copyright infringement is punished by civil law (and fined), counterfeit is a crime, etc. etc. You must retain yourself from copying too much, but only the original author (and eventually a judge) can decide if that happened. If stable diffusion is used for counterfeiting or the result infringe the copyright, do you think the fact that the model was trained on unlicensed copyrighted material is irrelevant?

thegrimmest 4y ago
Authoring any work, no matter how closely copied, is not an infringement. The infringement is commercial distribution of copyrighted work. And yes, I do think you should be liable for whatever you distribute commercially, regardless of how you obtain it.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Authoring any work, no matter how closely copied, is not an infringement Nitpicking, but only unless it's not counterfeit material. Claiming painting is from "famous painter X" while it's instead a copy it's an infringement. How long before "famous painter X's new painting found in the attic of old lady"?
  - thegrimmest 4y ago
    But in that case it's not the work that's the problem, but the misrepresentation (read lie) about the provenance.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      and the fact that it is a replica anyway, copying money is a crime, almost anywhere in the World, the simple act of making a copy is enough. Money usually contain artworks I would also not generate pictures of child pornography There's a reason why SD apply censorship filters to generated images

acdha 4y ago

This is going to be the legal challenge for the next few years: every year there are lawsuits alleging that music, drawings, etc. are too similar to someone else's work but those take time and require human judgement to decide whether something crosses the line, and the scale which tools like this offer makes that basically as feasible as it was to individually sue Napster users for sharing other people's works. I'd expect that level of legislative response, and also would bet on lawsuits over any authorized data in their training corpus.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material What your brain has learned cannot be transferred with an USB stick in seconds Not even your offspring will receive any of it If I want to learn everything you know, I have to learn what you learned , assuming I will be able to Kinda of a big difference, don't you think? These kinds of comments are embarrassingly low effort, just because we threw rocks at each other when we all were chimps, doesn't mean that guns haven't been a game changer and made homicide easier even for people that would never be able to hit anybody by throwing rocks.

planb 4y ago
The original article talks about moral (not even legal) objections to learning from copyrighted data. Your comment implies that DALL-E 2 is morally okay, because they don't distribute the model ("copy everything it knows to a USB stick") but only sell access to the algorithm to generate images, while Stable Diffusions open source model is a problem because it can be copied. Most people would take the exact opposite stance I guess.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > The original article talks about moral (not even legal) objections to learning from copyrighted data. but I am replying to "My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work" Difference being your brain has not been trained by someone (for profit), you have trained it using YEARS OF YOUR LIFE TO ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE which is morally acceptable (does not imply that the use you do of it is legally acceptable), given that you paid a very high price, sacrificing your own time for the objective. And that your knowledge is only yours, you can't transfer it to anyone, it doesn't even show up in your DNA. > Your comment implies that DALL-E 2 is morally okay, because they don't distribute the model Implication doesn't mean what you think it means. My comment doesn't imply anything of the sort, you are > Most people would take the exact opposite stance I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_premise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_premise