> [...] it's pretty inconceivable that the model could become copyrightable without becoming a derivative work of the training data. Another perspective that m

> [...] it's pretty inconceivable that the model could become copyrightable without becoming a derivative work of the training data. Another perspective that may become important is the fact that not all cultures share the same interpretation of copyright. In Japan there was a case in which a court ruled that selling a memory card with preloaded save data for a video game was a breach of the original work's integrity.[1] This I think will get greater attention in the near future because a large portion of the interest in SD stems from generating new art derived from the styles of art on Pixiv, a Japanese website. The data for many popular forks of SD like Waifu Diffusion and the proprietary NovelAI model were sourced from Western sites like Danbooru, which has been known for violating copyright and artist takedown requests by reposting art without the creator's permission for many years. With the sheer popularity of SD and the fact that so much of the innovation came off of the backs of thousands of artists who weren't so much as asked for consent, it remains to be seen if attitudes towards those sites and this process of mass-scale data collection will remain the same in the near future. I also have to wonder what the implications would have been if NovelAI ended up launching what is now the leaked model as a paid service, given the unresolved question of consent that surrounds the original data. HN and the people who support SD can have their own opinions about copyright not applying in this specific case. They can delve into the technicalities of why they think the models are not copyrightable. But even beyond legal means, the artists can still ask the programmers to take everything down, and potentially be refused. The insistence that "it's different in this case" can break the hearts of people that see the world differently. I think this will be a debate that transcends arguing over the technicalities of copyright, involving fundamentally differing cultural values of how the acts of creation and reproduction should be treated with respect. It will not end with "how will this fit into the existing (Western-centric) framework of copyright," but "what is the right thing to do." [1] https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%E3%81%8D%E3%83%A1%E3%83%A2%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AB%E3%83%A1%E3%83%A2%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6 https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...