9 ms·

Stability.ai sent a take down request to Runway ML's SD v1.5 citing IP Leak

179 points by amrrs 4y ago

jw1224 4y ago
This is really strange, and is being handled very badly. RunwayML are an official partner of Stability AI. Stability has been delaying the release of their 1.5 model for several weeks now, citing unspecified "legal concerns". RunwayML has seemingly gone ahead and released it themselves anyway, forcing Stability to file a takedown request for leaking their IP. In the aftermath of the AUTOMATIC1111 debacle last week, this doesn't reflect well on Stability's comms. Things seem a lot less open since investors got on board...
- noworriesnate 4y ago
  I hadn't heard of the controversy, it seems like this is a good summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y1uuvj/automatic1111_did_nothing_wrong_some_people_are/ https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y1uuvj/aut...
  - nohat 4y ago
    Maybe that post has been edited into coherence, but when it was posted that summary was misleading or flat wrong about a lot of points.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/y22zg6/whats_up_with_the_drama_on_rstablediffusion/ https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/y22zg6/whats_... This is the summary that should be read, the top post by ttopE.
      - capableweb 4y ago
        I'm not sure how trustworthy that post is. I haven't read it all, but there are lots of mistakes & misnomers that makes it hard to trust the rest. > Stable Diffusion is an open source program It's not a program, it's a model. It is also not open source, its license is "Creative ML OpenRAIL-M" which is "open-source like" or "permissive", but it does limit the usage of the model. > has seen many variations, or forks, on the original code, all typically hosted on github, a code sharing platform. The most popular and arguably the most complex of these forks is automatic1111s fork Automatic1111 is not maintaining a fork of the model/software but is providing a UI that uses the model rather. It was started from scratch from a user on 4chan and was taken by automatic1111 and put on GitHub, where they further continued working on the codebase. I think automatic1111 is the only SD UI that also has public codebase but is not licensed under a permissive license (automatic1111 retains the copyright to themselves) These are things I know for sure are not true/misnomers. Which makes statements that I'm not 100% sure about, like: > someone on 4chan used an exploit on github to extract the unique model of Stable Diffusion that NovelAI had developed and just released on their service less likely to also be true. Also, if there was a 0day for GitHub, don't you think someone would have used it for something more interesting than leaking a image diffusion model and some associated code? It probably would also have been all over the news + announcements from GitHub, but I personally haven't come across any of them. But maybe I just missed it. Overall, I'd take everything you read about all this drama with a pinch of salt, there is a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation about the whole thing, and that many people who "summarize" the whole thing seems to not be actual developers don't help either.
        cercatrova 4y ago
        You're right, although I'd call them oversimplifications than outright fabrications. SD is not technically open source, and the Automatic1111 "fork" should not really be called a fork. The 4chan leak of NovelAI's model is also true (although I don't know the details of how exactly it was obtained), as I've downloaded and used it before. It does quite well with anime characters.
        kyleyeats 4y ago
        The apology it references at the end was also fake.
amrrs 4y ago
Stable Diffusion was released with Open RAIL License which allows anyone to fine-tune and release their own models while complying the ToS of the original SD release. It's quite strange IP Leak is quoted in the take down request. https://huggingface.co/spaces/CompVis/stable-diffusion-license https://huggingface.co/spaces/CompVis/stable-diffusion-licen...
- fragmede 4y ago
  Pedantically iiuc, Stable Diffusion 1.3 and 1.4 were released with that license but 1.5 has yet to be released officially. Besides a verbal promise from Emad which isn't legally binding, there's no reason a) 1.5 ever has to be released, but b) if it is, since it's Stability AI's IP, they're free to put whatever license they want on 1.5 including a proprietary for-money license which having a public torrent leak cuts in the revenue from.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    1.5 is out now, so I suppose the point's moot. edit: never mind, jumped the gun and thought it was an official release but it turns out I was just confused. https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5
    - minimaxir 4y ago
      That is the repo/release this takedown request was about. Note that it is not the stabilityai repo.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Hmm, that doesn't seem like an open source license. https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
capableweb 4y ago
Seems the CEO/Founder of Runway has replied that there hasn't been any leaks and it's a proper release, made as permitted by the license and therefore should be online soon again. > Cris here - the CEO and Co-founder of Runway. Since our founding in 2018, we’ve been on a mission to empower anyone to create the impossible. So, we’re excited to share this newest version of Stable Diffusion so that we can continue delivering on our mission. > This version of Stable Diffusion is a continuation of the original High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models work that we created and published (now more commonly referred to as Stable Diffusion). Stable Diffusion is an AI model developed by Patrick Esser from Runway and Robin Rombach from LMU Munich. The research and code behind Stable Diffusion was open-sourced last year. The model was released under the CreativeML Open RAIL M License. > We confirm there has been no breach of IP as flagged and we thank Stability AI for the compute donation to retrain the original model. https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/discussions/1#6351a36ca9a9ae18220726c7 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/discus... Edit: According to Discord messages from Emad Mostaque (founder of Stability AI) they have taken back the takedown request and seems this is the official release of the Stable Diffusion model version 1.5.
- hwers 4y ago
  Sounds to me like runway released it without consulting stability, called it “1.5” - which according to the license they’re allowed to do but pretty scammy since emad had hyped a model with that label. And now stability is deciding to call this the official release to be nice to runway and avoid a general PR thing and community infight.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - the_duke 4y ago
    To me it seems the other way around. 1.5 was apparently held back by Stability for weeks. Runway finally decided to just release it. Stability requested a take down, and here you see the Runway CEO telling Stability in no uncertain terms "this ours to release, we created it, it's under an OS license, you don't hold any IP rights here; all you did was provide compute" If anything this is a pretty stern rebuke of Stability and a sign of considerable disagreement between the two parties.
qeternity 4y ago
Does anyone have a good resource on Stability, their history, and relationship to Runway? I haven't followed the space closely in a couple of years but they seemingly exploded from nowhere and I'm not entirely sure what their mandate is.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  tl;dr the development of the original Stable Diffusion was assisted via a collaboration between Runway and StabilityAI.
mikkergp 4y ago
I get the impression we're about to see an ocean of litigation around AI and IP. If you're not a participant it will probably make good popcorn fodder. Though I don't doubt that there is a threat to graphics design and other creative jobs, may not be time to switch careers quite yet.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Because there is a lot of money and fear involved I agree that there will be a lot of litigation, but the outcomes will be mixed at best for the copyright holders. Lots of people have memorized lyrics to copyrighted songs but no one is suing them for the memorization. They are only suing when the memorizer is trying to make money off of the song without permission of the copyright holder. The burden of proof is on the copyright holder to prove that the builder of the model was intending to distribute IP that they did not own.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    > They are only suing when the memorizer is trying to make money off of the song without permission of the copyright holder. Granted everything I know about copyright law I learned in a few audio tapes in my car, but I think the question I have is not, can you sue AI for absorbing information, but is AI unique enough that you couldn't find byte strings or patterns that match source material too closely. See the recent twitter thread on CSParse for example: https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554
    - gitfan86 4y ago
      It is just weights, there is no string of bytes
      - mikkergp 4y ago
        I’m talking about outputs not the model itself, the GitHub copilot example has lots of shared bytes
dhdgrygev 4y ago
I'm thoroughly confused. Is this the 1.5 release everyone was waiting for, or not?
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Yes, but it was unclear.
- scottmf 4y ago
  No
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    This is the v1.5 we were waiting for, you can test it by using the same seed locally and on DreamStudio.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
aliqot 4y ago
They claim to have not sent a takedown. https://i.imgur.com/ayMxTYp.png https://i.imgur.com/ayMxTYp.png
- threevox 4y ago
  Yeah suuuure, Emad
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  This plays strangely with the: "Stability legal team reached out to Hugging Face reverting the initial takedown request, therefore we closed this thread" that is on the Hugging Face page.
cma 4y ago
Are models that aren't overfit on something else copyrighted even copyrightable in the US? I know they are in the UK and it may differ from place to place.
- cma 4y ago
  Opps meant to say Stability.ai are in the UK, not imply trained weights are copyrightable in the UK, I don't think that is known
ansk 4y ago
This is exactly why Stability's role as a middleman in these model releases is an indefensible business position. The research underlying stable diffusion does not belong to them, so any company which wants to fund the training of the next iteration of these models can easily step in and fill their role. And since Stability itself is not pioneering this line of research (rather, they are just facilitating the training and distribution of models), they will always be lagging behind other companies which employ the researchers themselves (i.e. Runway's apparent position in this debacle). Stability's role as middleman has been so far innocuous if not generally helpful, but now that this role has a market price of $1B, companies and researchers are going to be eager to cut them out of the process and reap the rewards for themselves.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lowdest 4y ago
  Stability has a research team. They've just brought over David Ha (@hardmaru on Twitter) from Google Brain to lead strategy.
  - hustwindmaple1 4y ago
    It's quite strange to have a great RS to lead _strategy_
    - ma2rten 4y ago
      If that's what they want to work on?
- lairv 4y ago
  Runway is not "any company" they were part of the research for the original stable-diffusion release and were still working with StabilityAI team on SD. There must have been internal disagreements on the release of 1.5 version
lt 4y ago
It's a little confusing, but as far as a understand it, Stable Diffusion was created by a collaboration between RunwayML and Compvis (aka Machine Vision and Learning research group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) with Stability.AI funding the computing power for training and LAION.AI (also funded by Stability.AI) providing the dataset. The first few releases of model and code have been done by Compvis, and this one by RunwayML. More than permitted by the license, this seems to have been released by the actual developers. I've seen speculation that it has been released this way to provide distance between Stability.AI from eventual future litigations, but it feels more like an internal ultimatum deadline.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  > I've seen speculation that it has been released this way to provide distance between Stability.AI from eventual future litigations, but it feels more like an internal ultimatum deadline. It could be both. A company it is not necessarily a monolithic entity.
panny 4y ago
>Use Restrictions You agree not to use the Model or Derivatives of the Model: >- To generate or disseminate information for the purpose to be used for administration of justice, law enforcement, immigration or asylum processes, such as predicting an individual will commit fraud/crime commitment (e.g. by text profiling, drawing causal relationships between assertions made in documents, indiscriminate and arbitrarily-targeted use). Ironic isn't it? How people who licensed their software forbidding its use for stopping illegal activity are accused of breaking the law.
yazzku 4y ago
Claiming IP, eh? Tell me where you're sourcing all those pictures and videos from, along with the license for each.
secatanzaro 4y ago
I’d highly recommend that anyone chiming in read about the origins of Stable Diffusion before casting judgement: https://research.runwayml.com/the-research-origins-of-stable-difussion https://research.runwayml.com/the-research-origins-of-stable...
jph00 4y ago
Someone involved with Stability.ai posted this article about the "leak": https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-the-future-of-open-source-ai https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-the-future-of-open...
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  > We’ve heard from regulators and the general public that we need to focus more strongly on security to ensure that we’re taking all the steps possible to make sure people don't use Stable Diffusion for illegal purposes or hurting people. This is absurd. We don't hold off on releasing other open source code or datasets that could be used to break the law or hurt people, except where they are subject to export controls (cryptography). I can sympathize with people worried about the danger of photorealistic AI-generated images of individuals, but (1) stable diffusion is not that good: it is quite common to see extra fingers or limbs that blur together. (2) When image generation does become good enough to be dangerous, society will adapt by holding people less responsible for images they appear in.
  - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    > stable diffusion is not that good: it is quite common to see extra fingers or limbs that blur together. This is quite simply no longer the case. Yes, a naive use of the toolset will output bad quality images but experienced users can get images of this quality reliably now: https://imgur.com/a/W7D7Djh https://imgur.com/a/W7D7Djh (possibly nsfw: realistic vampire woman with clothes drenched in blood). It would be easy for someone to instead generate illegal content of that quality. This does not mean that I believe future release should be blocked because of this fast however. Someone can use ready available FaceApp filters to create illegal content and the application is still on the app stores, any skilled person can use Photoshop to stitch together illegal content and Adobe has yet to close down, the list goes on.
pabs3 4y ago
Are machine learning models even copyightable? They are clearly usually derived from copyrighted materials but does the training process extinguish that copyright?
- arlcode 4y ago
  That remains to be seen. Laws and courts take their sweet time to venture into novel fields which is good when it comes to technology. I wouldn't be surprised if it'll end up classified as a derived work in the end with some sort of royalty payment towards registered right holders (managed by some sort of collection society) It'll probably be different depending on your legislation. Has someone yet trained a model on music?
  - lukeh 4y ago
    That (music) will definitely bring the rightsholders out of the woodwork.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    The RIAA are already on top of the music AI issue: https://torrentfreak.com/images/USTR-2022-RIAA.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/USTR-2022-RIAA.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-flags-artificial-intelligence-music-mixer-as-emerging-copyright-threat-221017/ https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-flags-artificial-intelligence-...
de6u99er 4y ago
As I see it, this whole drama is only because big money, it's lawyers, and clueless C-level managers tasked to create a business are getting involved.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
From heroes to villains in just over a month.
edumucelli 4y ago
I wonder how this will be sorted in the future: what if Stability comes with a newer version, on top of Runway's one? I forecast a never ending battle of versions numbers as both teams have the same trunk of work.
blurbleblurble 4y ago
What are the odds this has to do with midterm elections in the US

179 points by amrrs 4y ago

This is really strange, and is being handled very badly. RunwayML are an official partner of Stability AI. Stability has been delaying the release of their 1.5 model for several weeks now, citing unspecified "legal concerns". RunwayML has seemingly gone ahead and released it themselves anyway, forcing Stability to file a takedown request for leaking their IP. In the aftermath of the AUTOMATIC1111 debacle last week, this doesn't reflect well on Stability's comms. Things seem a lot less open since investors got on board...

noworriesnate 4y ago
I hadn't heard of the controversy, it seems like this is a good summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y1uuvj/automatic1111_did_nothing_wrong_some_people_are/ https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y1uuvj/aut...
- nohat 4y ago
  Maybe that post has been edited into coherence, but when it was posted that summary was misleading or flat wrong about a lot of points.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/y22zg6/whats_up_with_the_drama_on_rstablediffusion/ https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/y22zg6/whats_... This is the summary that should be read, the top post by ttopE.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      I'm not sure how trustworthy that post is. I haven't read it all, but there are lots of mistakes & misnomers that makes it hard to trust the rest. > Stable Diffusion is an open source program It's not a program, it's a model. It is also not open source, its license is "Creative ML OpenRAIL-M" which is "open-source like" or "permissive", but it does limit the usage of the model. > has seen many variations, or forks, on the original code, all typically hosted on github, a code sharing platform. The most popular and arguably the most complex of these forks is automatic1111s fork Automatic1111 is not maintaining a fork of the model/software but is providing a UI that uses the model rather. It was started from scratch from a user on 4chan and was taken by automatic1111 and put on GitHub, where they further continued working on the codebase. I think automatic1111 is the only SD UI that also has public codebase but is not licensed under a permissive license (automatic1111 retains the copyright to themselves) These are things I know for sure are not true/misnomers. Which makes statements that I'm not 100% sure about, like: > someone on 4chan used an exploit on github to extract the unique model of Stable Diffusion that NovelAI had developed and just released on their service less likely to also be true. Also, if there was a 0day for GitHub, don't you think someone would have used it for something more interesting than leaking a image diffusion model and some associated code? It probably would also have been all over the news + announcements from GitHub, but I personally haven't come across any of them. But maybe I just missed it. Overall, I'd take everything you read about all this drama with a pinch of salt, there is a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation about the whole thing, and that many people who "summarize" the whole thing seems to not be actual developers don't help either.
      - cercatrova 4y ago
        You're right, although I'd call them oversimplifications than outright fabrications. SD is not technically open source, and the Automatic1111 "fork" should not really be called a fork. The 4chan leak of NovelAI's model is also true (although I don't know the details of how exactly it was obtained), as I've downloaded and used it before. It does quite well with anime characters.
      - kyleyeats 4y ago
        The apology it references at the end was also fake.

amrrs 4y ago

Stable Diffusion was released with Open RAIL License which allows anyone to fine-tune and release their own models while complying the ToS of the original SD release. It's quite strange IP Leak is quoted in the take down request. https://huggingface.co/spaces/CompVis/stable-diffusion-license https://huggingface.co/spaces/CompVis/stable-diffusion-licen...

fragmede 4y ago
Pedantically iiuc, Stable Diffusion 1.3 and 1.4 were released with that license but 1.5 has yet to be released officially. Besides a verbal promise from Emad which isn't legally binding, there's no reason a) 1.5 ever has to be released, but b) if it is, since it's Stability AI's IP, they're free to put whatever license they want on 1.5 including a proprietary for-money license which having a public torrent leak cuts in the revenue from.
- fragmede 4y ago
  1.5 is out now, so I suppose the point's moot. edit: never mind, jumped the gun and thought it was an official release but it turns out I was just confused. https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5
  - minimaxir 4y ago
    That is the repo/release this takedown request was about. Note that it is not the stabilityai repo.
pabs3 4y ago
Hmm, that doesn't seem like an open source license. https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd

capableweb 4y ago

Seems the CEO/Founder of Runway has replied that there hasn't been any leaks and it's a proper release, made as permitted by the license and therefore should be online soon again. > Cris here - the CEO and Co-founder of Runway. Since our founding in 2018, we’ve been on a mission to empower anyone to create the impossible. So, we’re excited to share this newest version of Stable Diffusion so that we can continue delivering on our mission. > This version of Stable Diffusion is a continuation of the original High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models work that we created and published (now more commonly referred to as Stable Diffusion). Stable Diffusion is an AI model developed by Patrick Esser from Runway and Robin Rombach from LMU Munich. The research and code behind Stable Diffusion was open-sourced last year. The model was released under the CreativeML Open RAIL M License. > We confirm there has been no breach of IP as flagged and we thank Stability AI for the compute donation to retrain the original model. https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/discussions/1#6351a36ca9a9ae18220726c7 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/discus... Edit: According to Discord messages from Emad Mostaque (founder of Stability AI) they have taken back the takedown request and seems this is the official release of the Stable Diffusion model version 1.5.

hwers 4y ago
Sounds to me like runway released it without consulting stability, called it “1.5” - which according to the license they’re allowed to do but pretty scammy since emad had hyped a model with that label. And now stability is deciding to call this the official release to be nice to runway and avoid a general PR thing and community infight.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- the_duke 4y ago
  To me it seems the other way around. 1.5 was apparently held back by Stability for weeks. Runway finally decided to just release it. Stability requested a take down, and here you see the Runway CEO telling Stability in no uncertain terms "this ours to release, we created it, it's under an OS license, you don't hold any IP rights here; all you did was provide compute" If anything this is a pretty stern rebuke of Stability and a sign of considerable disagreement between the two parties.

qeternity 4y ago

Does anyone have a good resource on Stability, their history, and relationship to Runway? I haven't followed the space closely in a couple of years but they seemingly exploded from nowhere and I'm not entirely sure what their mandate is.

minimaxir 4y ago
tl;dr the development of the original Stable Diffusion was assisted via a collaboration between Runway and StabilityAI.

mikkergp 4y ago

I get the impression we're about to see an ocean of litigation around AI and IP. If you're not a participant it will probably make good popcorn fodder. Though I don't doubt that there is a threat to graphics design and other creative jobs, may not be time to switch careers quite yet.

gitfan86 4y ago
Because there is a lot of money and fear involved I agree that there will be a lot of litigation, but the outcomes will be mixed at best for the copyright holders. Lots of people have memorized lyrics to copyrighted songs but no one is suing them for the memorization. They are only suing when the memorizer is trying to make money off of the song without permission of the copyright holder. The burden of proof is on the copyright holder to prove that the builder of the model was intending to distribute IP that they did not own.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > They are only suing when the memorizer is trying to make money off of the song without permission of the copyright holder. Granted everything I know about copyright law I learned in a few audio tapes in my car, but I think the question I have is not, can you sue AI for absorbing information, but is AI unique enough that you couldn't find byte strings or patterns that match source material too closely. See the recent twitter thread on CSParse for example: https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554
  - gitfan86 4y ago
    It is just weights, there is no string of bytes
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      I’m talking about outputs not the model itself, the GitHub copilot example has lots of shared bytes

dhdgrygev 4y ago

I'm thoroughly confused. Is this the 1.5 release everyone was waiting for, or not?

minimaxir 4y ago
Yes, but it was unclear.
scottmf 4y ago
No
- GaggiX 4y ago
  This is the v1.5 we were waiting for, you can test it by using the same seed locally and on DreamStudio.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

aliqot 4y ago

They claim to have not sent a takedown. https://i.imgur.com/ayMxTYp.png https://i.imgur.com/ayMxTYp.png

threevox 4y ago
Yeah suuuure, Emad
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
This plays strangely with the: "Stability legal team reached out to Hugging Face reverting the initial takedown request, therefore we closed this thread" that is on the Hugging Face page.

cma 4y ago

Are models that aren't overfit on something else copyrighted even copyrightable in the US? I know they are in the UK and it may differ from place to place.

cma 4y ago
Opps meant to say Stability.ai are in the UK, not imply trained weights are copyrightable in the UK, I don't think that is known

ansk 4y ago

This is exactly why Stability's role as a middleman in these model releases is an indefensible business position. The research underlying stable diffusion does not belong to them, so any company which wants to fund the training of the next iteration of these models can easily step in and fill their role. And since Stability itself is not pioneering this line of research (rather, they are just facilitating the training and distribution of models), they will always be lagging behind other companies which employ the researchers themselves (i.e. Runway's apparent position in this debacle). Stability's role as middleman has been so far innocuous if not generally helpful, but now that this role has a market price of $1B, companies and researchers are going to be eager to cut them out of the process and reap the rewards for themselves.

deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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lowdest 4y ago
Stability has a research team. They've just brought over David Ha (@hardmaru on Twitter) from Google Brain to lead strategy.
- hustwindmaple1 4y ago
  It's quite strange to have a great RS to lead _strategy_
  - ma2rten 4y ago
    If that's what they want to work on?
lairv 4y ago
Runway is not "any company" they were part of the research for the original stable-diffusion release and were still working with StabilityAI team on SD. There must have been internal disagreements on the release of 1.5 version

lt 4y ago

It's a little confusing, but as far as a understand it, Stable Diffusion was created by a collaboration between RunwayML and Compvis (aka Machine Vision and Learning research group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) with Stability.AI funding the computing power for training and LAION.AI (also funded by Stability.AI) providing the dataset. The first few releases of model and code have been done by Compvis, and this one by RunwayML. More than permitted by the license, this seems to have been released by the actual developers. I've seen speculation that it has been released this way to provide distance between Stability.AI from eventual future litigations, but it feels more like an internal ultimatum deadline.

gpderetta 4y ago
> I've seen speculation that it has been released this way to provide distance between Stability.AI from eventual future litigations, but it feels more like an internal ultimatum deadline. It could be both. A company it is not necessarily a monolithic entity.

panny 4y ago

>Use Restrictions You agree not to use the Model or Derivatives of the Model: >- To generate or disseminate information for the purpose to be used for administration of justice, law enforcement, immigration or asylum processes, such as predicting an individual will commit fraud/crime commitment (e.g. by text profiling, drawing causal relationships between assertions made in documents, indiscriminate and arbitrarily-targeted use). Ironic isn't it? How people who licensed their software forbidding its use for stopping illegal activity are accused of breaking the law.

yazzku 4y ago

Claiming IP, eh? Tell me where you're sourcing all those pictures and videos from, along with the license for each.

secatanzaro 4y ago

I’d highly recommend that anyone chiming in read about the origins of Stable Diffusion before casting judgement: https://research.runwayml.com/the-research-origins-of-stable-difussion https://research.runwayml.com/the-research-origins-of-stable...

jph00 4y ago

Someone involved with Stability.ai posted this article about the "leak": https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-the-future-of-open-source-ai https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-the-future-of-open...

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
> We’ve heard from regulators and the general public that we need to focus more strongly on security to ensure that we’re taking all the steps possible to make sure people don't use Stable Diffusion for illegal purposes or hurting people. This is absurd. We don't hold off on releasing other open source code or datasets that could be used to break the law or hurt people, except where they are subject to export controls (cryptography). I can sympathize with people worried about the danger of photorealistic AI-generated images of individuals, but (1) stable diffusion is not that good: it is quite common to see extra fingers or limbs that blur together. (2) When image generation does become good enough to be dangerous, society will adapt by holding people less responsible for images they appear in.
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  > stable diffusion is not that good: it is quite common to see extra fingers or limbs that blur together. This is quite simply no longer the case. Yes, a naive use of the toolset will output bad quality images but experienced users can get images of this quality reliably now: https://imgur.com/a/W7D7Djh https://imgur.com/a/W7D7Djh (possibly nsfw: realistic vampire woman with clothes drenched in blood). It would be easy for someone to instead generate illegal content of that quality. This does not mean that I believe future release should be blocked because of this fast however. Someone can use ready available FaceApp filters to create illegal content and the application is still on the app stores, any skilled person can use Photoshop to stitch together illegal content and Adobe has yet to close down, the list goes on.

pabs3 4y ago

Are machine learning models even copyightable? They are clearly usually derived from copyrighted materials but does the training process extinguish that copyright?

arlcode 4y ago
That remains to be seen. Laws and courts take their sweet time to venture into novel fields which is good when it comes to technology. I wouldn't be surprised if it'll end up classified as a derived work in the end with some sort of royalty payment towards registered right holders (managed by some sort of collection society) It'll probably be different depending on your legislation. Has someone yet trained a model on music?
- lukeh 4y ago
  That (music) will definitely bring the rightsholders out of the woodwork.
- pabs3 4y ago
  The RIAA are already on top of the music AI issue: https://torrentfreak.com/images/USTR-2022-RIAA.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/USTR-2022-RIAA.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-flags-artificial-intelligence-music-mixer-as-emerging-copyright-threat-221017/ https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-flags-artificial-intelligence-...

de6u99er 4y ago

As I see it, this whole drama is only because big money, it's lawyers, and clueless C-level managers tasked to create a business are getting involved.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

From heroes to villains in just over a month.

edumucelli 4y ago

I wonder how this will be sorted in the future: what if Stability comes with a newer version, on top of Runway's one? I forecast a never ending battle of versions numbers as both teams have the same trunk of work.

blurbleblurble 4y ago

What are the odds this has to do with midterm elections in the US