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It might not be storing all of the images, but it's clearly storing copies of some of the source images. A few weeks before OpenAI made DALL-E 2 open, I went

It might not be storing all of the images, but it's clearly storing copies of some of the source images. A few weeks before OpenAI made DALL-E 2 open, I went through a series of prompts using well known artists as a basis. Vermeer was one of them. It generated some pretty amazing works that were 'inspired' but not direct copies of Vermeer's works. I started feeding the same prompts into StableDiffiusion (the HuggingFace online demo) and it output direct copies of Vermeer's works with minimal modifications.

lifthrasiir 4y ago
Do you have the exact prompt that essentially generated Vemeer's works? Omitted in the parent, but I also noted that while it is hard to reconcile the idea of human-directed transformative use with ML models, it might be actually easier to verify the models' plagarism---which is not equivalent to copyright infringement but can be a problem by its own---once you have a right prompt as they are decidable.
- paranoidrobot 4y ago
  "the girl with a pearl earring by Johannes Vermeer" and variations on that, will spit out the named painting. Two examples: https://imgur.com/a/KAxmZCl https://imgur.com/a/KAxmZCl The original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring#/media/File:1665_Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring#/med... It's reproducing the folds in the headband, riffles in the clothing, etc. It's not just a "similar" reproduced image, it's clearly some minor variation on the original.
- comex 4y ago
  I just typed in 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' and got this: https://drop.qoid.us/vermeer.png https://drop.qoid.us/vermeer.png And, for a slightly different scenario, here's what I got for 'pikachu': https://drop.qoid.us/pikachu.png https://drop.qoid.us/pikachu.png But I think this sort of thing is the exception rather than the rule (similar to Copilot regurgitating the text of software licenses). Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on the internet. I don't know what kind of deduplication process was used for Stable Diffusion, but if you consider multiple photos of the same painting, plus images distorted by compression, or cropped, or embedded in other images, plus attempts to redraw it or even parody it, I can easily imagine that the training set contained thousands of images or more that are essentially the same work. And so the model memorized it, albeit at low resolution. Similarly, it's seen countless different images of Pikachu. However, this seems to only apply to the very peak of popularity. I tested some other Pokemon: it does a decent job with Charizard, but with Bulbasaur and Squirtle and Jigglypuff its output only somewhat resembles the character design, and for less popular Pokemon there's no resemblance at all.
  - paranoidrobot 4y ago
    > the exception rather than the rule [...] . Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on the internet I think that's part of the point, though. Even if it's working like some kind of feature detection - "this is what 'nose' looks like [nose1,nose2,...,nose9999]" and "this is what 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' looks like [vermeer1,vermeer2,...,]" Clearly it is storing copies of those images internally, and constant re-enforcement of it finding noses and vermeer paintings in the sources pushes the priority of those features up so that it stores them. We can't trust these models, as they exist right now, to reliably generate new works, rather than spit out something that already exists.
    - comex 4y ago
      Not reliably, no. But at least for this size of model, its capacity to memorize seems to be limited to works that are so popular that 'everyone' knows what they look like. And it also seems to generate them only when asked. So in any situation where a human is reviewing the output, it doesn't seem like there's a big risk of plagiarizing something by accident. Larger models may differ.
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      Technically speaking, there can be only so many such reproducible works in the model due to the information-theoretic constraint. But yes, I agree that this is a close enough reproduction of the Vermeer's work, and while this is indeed in public domain, you are right that other copyrighted works may be present in the model, in verbatim and extractable with a right but currently unknown prompt.
    - newswasboring 4y ago
      I feel like this is one of those occasions where perfect is an enemy of the good. Yes there might be some, very very famous, artworks stored inside it. But unless you think StableAI has completely blown past the current hutter prize winner, there is no way this thing is storing many things. The things it might be storing are too public to really be that big of a deal. It will spit out a Vermeer, but your submission to Divient Art in 2007 is definitely protected.

lifthrasiir 4y ago

Do you have the exact prompt that essentially generated Vemeer's works? Omitted in the parent, but I also noted that while it is hard to reconcile the idea of human-directed transformative use with ML models, it might be actually easier to verify the models' plagarism---which is not equivalent to copyright infringement but can be a problem by its own---once you have a right prompt as they are decidable.

paranoidrobot 4y ago
"the girl with a pearl earring by Johannes Vermeer" and variations on that, will spit out the named painting. Two examples: https://imgur.com/a/KAxmZCl https://imgur.com/a/KAxmZCl The original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring#/media/File:1665_Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring#/med... It's reproducing the folds in the headband, riffles in the clothing, etc. It's not just a "similar" reproduced image, it's clearly some minor variation on the original.
comex 4y ago
I just typed in 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' and got this: https://drop.qoid.us/vermeer.png https://drop.qoid.us/vermeer.png And, for a slightly different scenario, here's what I got for 'pikachu': https://drop.qoid.us/pikachu.png https://drop.qoid.us/pikachu.png But I think this sort of thing is the exception rather than the rule (similar to Copilot regurgitating the text of software licenses). Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on the internet. I don't know what kind of deduplication process was used for Stable Diffusion, but if you consider multiple photos of the same painting, plus images distorted by compression, or cropped, or embedded in other images, plus attempts to redraw it or even parody it, I can easily imagine that the training set contained thousands of images or more that are essentially the same work. And so the model memorized it, albeit at low resolution. Similarly, it's seen countless different images of Pikachu. However, this seems to only apply to the very peak of popularity. I tested some other Pokemon: it does a decent job with Charizard, but with Bulbasaur and Squirtle and Jigglypuff its output only somewhat resembles the character design, and for less popular Pokemon there's no resemblance at all.
- paranoidrobot 4y ago
  > the exception rather than the rule [...] . Girl with a Pearl Earring is so famous that there are countless copies of it on the internet I think that's part of the point, though. Even if it's working like some kind of feature detection - "this is what 'nose' looks like [nose1,nose2,...,nose9999]" and "this is what 'girl with a pearl earring vermeer' looks like [vermeer1,vermeer2,...,]" Clearly it is storing copies of those images internally, and constant re-enforcement of it finding noses and vermeer paintings in the sources pushes the priority of those features up so that it stores them. We can't trust these models, as they exist right now, to reliably generate new works, rather than spit out something that already exists.
  - comex 4y ago
    Not reliably, no. But at least for this size of model, its capacity to memorize seems to be limited to works that are so popular that 'everyone' knows what they look like. And it also seems to generate them only when asked. So in any situation where a human is reviewing the output, it doesn't seem like there's a big risk of plagiarizing something by accident. Larger models may differ.
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    Technically speaking, there can be only so many such reproducible works in the model due to the information-theoretic constraint. But yes, I agree that this is a close enough reproduction of the Vermeer's work, and while this is indeed in public domain, you are right that other copyrighted works may be present in the model, in verbatim and extractable with a right but currently unknown prompt.
  - newswasboring 4y ago
    I feel like this is one of those occasions where perfect is an enemy of the good. Yes there might be some, very very famous, artworks stored inside it. But unless you think StableAI has completely blown past the current hutter prize winner, there is no way this thing is storing many things. The things it might be storing are too public to really be that big of a deal. It will spit out a Vermeer, but your submission to Divient Art in 2007 is definitely protected.