5 ms·

Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on one person's work. And I think the

by gdubs 4y ago

Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on one person's work. And I think the conversation would benefit from not conflating the two. I'm sort of a copyright 'moderate' I suppose. I think people should get paid for their work, and trying to just rip-off a single person's style (and I'm not at all saying this particular example was nefarious in intent) just feels gross. But I also think too much baggage and we stifle new ideas an innovations. However, I also think that most of the conversation around large models like StableDiffusion lack an understanding of how these models actually work. There's this misconception that they're a kind of 'collage machine'. The contribution of individual artists in these base models are like drops in a vast vast ocean. [edit: I repeat myself; recovering from Covid, forgive me.] They take this incredibly large set of digitized human creativity, and in turn we all get this amazing tool: a synthesizer for imagination. Anyway, just my personal opinion. It's become a very 'us vs them', lines-in-the-sand argument these days, and it'd be great if the conversation could be less heated and more philosophical.

yieldcrv 4y ago
> Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on one person's work. I don't. Stability.ai did the big training sets and it is coincidence that it remembers the names and categories accurately. If you want to leverage this tool more fine tuned then you add these modules with more accurate naming. I would be for some way to compensate artists, like if the use of a module gave them a royalty, but I don't think it is an ethical, legal, or social norm to enforce. If it happens in a uncircumventable way, I would be for it. If it doesn't, I'm for that too.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Hey, we want to use machines to steal people's creative work, take away their jobs in the future, and create more algorithm generated garbage since it worked so well for news sites and promoting videos/posts/social media. We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works, but be able to ignore artists and copyright in every other way. Why do people seem to have a strong opinion against this? It's just stealing the most intimate thing humans create (art) so that we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our own uses because evil artists won't let us just do what we want with their works and won't let us profit on their work. Artists are jerks.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  > We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works The current IP rights system allows for work for hire, assignments. Reframing it to "I commissioned an AI" obliterates any debate about who owns what. When you commission the rights of what is created is assigned to you, for this machine model, just add that clarity in the TOS and its a done deal.
- leereeves 4y ago
  Creating art similar to another artist's work isn't stealing when humans do it, why would it be stealing when machines do it? (Unless the result is too similar, like the Wonder Woman image generated by Stable Diffusion shown in the article, in which case it's "stealing" whether created by human or machine.)
  - manholio 4y ago
    Because machines are not humans, and shouldn't enjoy the benefits of fair use. Copyright law exists to balance the interests of the people that make up the society, not some abstract caricatural embodiment in algorithmic form.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Should humans using machines enjoy the benefit of fair use?
      - manholio 4y ago
        Sure, if you build your own model, train it on copyrighted works, then use it to create art; or if you use someone else's model which properly license its copyrighted sources, and use that to create art. In both cases your output is a new creative work sufficiently different from its parents to not constitute infringement and enjoy its own copyright protection. However, the model creator/distributor will never be able to claim fair use on the model itself, which is choke full of unlicensed material and can only exist if trained on such material. It's not really a subtle or particularly difficult legal distinction, in traditional terms it's like an artistic collage (model output) vs a database of copyrighted works (trained model). The trained model is not a sufficiently different work that stands on its own, in fact it is just a compressed algorithmic representation of the works used to train it, legally speaking it is those works.
soraki_soladead 4y ago
> Anyway, just my personal opinion. It's become a very 'us vs them', lines-in-the-sand argument these days, and it'd be great if the conversation could be less heated and more philosophical. It's heated and less philosophical because many artists are worried about their livelihood while a multi-billion dollar company is working towards making them obsolete often using their own work. I don't understand the confusion people have towards this issue.
- lbotos 4y ago
  > many artists are worried about their livelihood while a multi-billion dollar company is working towards making them obsolete often using their own work. You do realize that most commercial art is "art for hire" and in this very story some of the examples trained were not owned by the artist. Multi-billion dollar companies already do this. Hire artist to draw Corporate IP. Corp owns and can do whatever they want with it. Maybe they hire that artist again. Maybe they hire someone else and they share the work in a reference folder.
  - allturtles 4y ago
    But now they (maybe) get to skip the "hire arist" step. Which, from the point-of-view of the artists, is the most important part.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    The distinction I think is that the multi-billion dollar company working towards making artists obsolete by using their own work didn't pay any of these artists for that IP. At least with hiring an artist to draw corporate IP, an artist has to relinquish their rights to that work explicitly and are paid for those rights.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Are we talking about Stable Diffusion or GitHub Copilot here?
  - soraki_soladead 4y ago
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Screw one person? A great offense. Screw lots of people at once? A great innovation.
- meowface 4y ago
  You have a point, but it's also how art works in general. Most artists draw inspiration from a conglomeration of hundreds/thousands of other artists. If an artist draws inspiration from one and only one artist, they're just a plagiarist. (Not necessarily saying that clears up any potential legal or ethical issue with generative image models training on artists' work.)
  - lancesells 4y ago
    But these aren't artists and this isn't art. This is fast food. This is content for articles and technology for startups to become the middelman for yet another thing. There will be art coming from these tools at some point but right now it's creatively bankrupt illustrations driven by curiousity and lots of creatively bankrupt people.
    - shafoshaf 4y ago
      Yet. As "real" artists start using these generations to leapfrog their projects, at some point, how is this different from someone studying a style and producing something in that style with that addition of actual "art?"
      - itronitron 4y ago
        That's like expecting a chef to take inspiration from a fast food menu. It might happen but it's more likely that the chef already knows what makes fast food taste good and can develop a new menu based on their fundamental knowledge.
        t-writescode 4y ago
        The fundamental knowledge they gained by looking at thousands upon thousands of previous bits of information; and, after today, that collection of insights is going to include auto-generated artwork, as well.
manholio 4y ago
It doesn't really matter: the AI model is a compressed representation of copyrighted works processed by a generic, non-artistic algorithm specifically engineered to extract the artistic features of such works. Conceptually, it's very similar to running lossy JPEG over a single copyrighted work versus a giant folder of works from different artists, then shipping that compressed collection to you customers so they cut and paste sections of those works in their collages. The output your customers create with this tool might be sufficiently original to warant copyright protection and fair use, but your algorithmic distribution of the original works (the model) is a clear copyright violation, it doesn't matter if it affects a single artist or thousands.
- johnthewise 4y ago
  How do you copyright a style though?
- lbotos 4y ago
  > your algorithmic distribution of the original works (the model) is a clear copyright violation Depends on if it's considered "transformative" enough. If Google can cache thumbnails for search, how is an AI model not a "search database+algorithm?" That said, I do expect that SD will be shut down for copyright infringement at some point because you are right, the model does have a bunch of copyrighted material in it and Disney's lawyers will probably come swifter and more prepared than the defense.
  - manholio 4y ago
    As a general rule, the fair use thumbnails enjoy is very limited, only in certain jurisdictions, and only for very specific use-cases. An universal art-production machine that can compete in the market place with the original artist - and indeed crush them on productivity and price - certainly does not qualify as fair use.
- treis 4y ago
  >AI model is a compressed representation of copyrighted works But it's not because you can't get a copy of the copyrighted works back out.
simion314 4y ago
I think painters also copy each other styles , or make copy of popular works, artists don't like this but I did not seen people demanding "do not use this art style because XYZ created it", For me, just a regular person, the art is not something an soulless machine can generate or a monkey with a camera, the intent and mind is important. So a guy can ask an AI to create a malformed portrait of some subject with some artist style , the value of the art is in the subject,theme and not the style IMO. Like if you ask for a portrait of X steping on Y dead body, dressed in Z and with M,N,P the artistic value is in your idea behind this and not in the pixels. I remember similar complaints when digital art started to get popular, that is not real art , that you just move pixels around
mordae 4y ago
In the end, you are not going to be paid for drawing everything all over again. You are going to get paid for devising a unique style to match the creative vision of the movie, series, book or whatever and for tweaking the machine outputs. There is a chance that style will become copyright-able. Well, eventually common style banks will appear.
fragmede 4y ago
Misconception? I mean, if it talks like one and quacks like a collage machine, that's kinda what it is. It's just using an infinite (well, 4 GiB) magazine reel to cut out from.
baud147258 4y ago
I've seen that with good models (I think it was StableDiffusion, not sure), you could get style imitation of a specific person's style; even if it was using a ocean of works, the model was still successfully fishing the exact drops of a specific artist (or close enough that I couldn't tell the difference). And thus the model was able to rip-off dozen of different styles.

by gdubs 4y ago

yieldcrv 4y ago

> Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on one person's work. I don't. Stability.ai did the big training sets and it is coincidence that it remembers the names and categories accurately. If you want to leverage this tool more fine tuned then you add these modules with more accurate naming. I would be for some way to compensate artists, like if the use of a module gave them a royalty, but I don't think it is an ethical, legal, or social norm to enforce. If it happens in a uncircumventable way, I would be for it. If it doesn't, I'm for that too.

ROTMetro 4y ago

Hey, we want to use machines to steal people's creative work, take away their jobs in the future, and create more algorithm generated garbage since it worked so well for news sites and promoting videos/posts/social media. We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works, but be able to ignore artists and copyright in every other way. Why do people seem to have a strong opinion against this? It's just stealing the most intimate thing humans create (art) so that we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our own uses because evil artists won't let us just do what we want with their works and won't let us profit on their work. Artists are jerks.

yieldcrv 4y ago
> We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works The current IP rights system allows for work for hire, assignments. Reframing it to "I commissioned an AI" obliterates any debate about who owns what. When you commission the rights of what is created is assigned to you, for this machine model, just add that clarity in the TOS and its a done deal.
leereeves 4y ago
Creating art similar to another artist's work isn't stealing when humans do it, why would it be stealing when machines do it? (Unless the result is too similar, like the Wonder Woman image generated by Stable Diffusion shown in the article, in which case it's "stealing" whether created by human or machine.)
- manholio 4y ago
  Because machines are not humans, and shouldn't enjoy the benefits of fair use. Copyright law exists to balance the interests of the people that make up the society, not some abstract caricatural embodiment in algorithmic form.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Should humans using machines enjoy the benefit of fair use?
    - manholio 4y ago
      Sure, if you build your own model, train it on copyrighted works, then use it to create art; or if you use someone else's model which properly license its copyrighted sources, and use that to create art. In both cases your output is a new creative work sufficiently different from its parents to not constitute infringement and enjoy its own copyright protection. However, the model creator/distributor will never be able to claim fair use on the model itself, which is choke full of unlicensed material and can only exist if trained on such material. It's not really a subtle or particularly difficult legal distinction, in traditional terms it's like an artistic collage (model output) vs a database of copyrighted works (trained model). The trained model is not a sufficiently different work that stands on its own, in fact it is just a compressed algorithmic representation of the works used to train it, legally speaking it is those works.

soraki_soladead 4y ago

> Anyway, just my personal opinion. It's become a very 'us vs them', lines-in-the-sand argument these days, and it'd be great if the conversation could be less heated and more philosophical. It's heated and less philosophical because many artists are worried about their livelihood while a multi-billion dollar company is working towards making them obsolete often using their own work. I don't understand the confusion people have towards this issue.

lbotos 4y ago
> many artists are worried about their livelihood while a multi-billion dollar company is working towards making them obsolete often using their own work. You do realize that most commercial art is "art for hire" and in this very story some of the examples trained were not owned by the artist. Multi-billion dollar companies already do this. Hire artist to draw Corporate IP. Corp owns and can do whatever they want with it. Maybe they hire that artist again. Maybe they hire someone else and they share the work in a reference folder.
- allturtles 4y ago
  But now they (maybe) get to skip the "hire arist" step. Which, from the point-of-view of the artists, is the most important part.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  The distinction I think is that the multi-billion dollar company working towards making artists obsolete by using their own work didn't pay any of these artists for that IP. At least with hiring an artist to draw corporate IP, an artist has to relinquish their rights to that work explicitly and are paid for those rights.
fragmede 4y ago
Are we talking about Stable Diffusion or GitHub Copilot here?
- soraki_soladead 4y ago

MichaelCollins 4y ago

Screw one person? A great offense. Screw lots of people at once? A great innovation.

meowface 4y ago
You have a point, but it's also how art works in general. Most artists draw inspiration from a conglomeration of hundreds/thousands of other artists. If an artist draws inspiration from one and only one artist, they're just a plagiarist. (Not necessarily saying that clears up any potential legal or ethical issue with generative image models training on artists' work.)
- lancesells 4y ago
  But these aren't artists and this isn't art. This is fast food. This is content for articles and technology for startups to become the middelman for yet another thing. There will be art coming from these tools at some point but right now it's creatively bankrupt illustrations driven by curiousity and lots of creatively bankrupt people.
  - shafoshaf 4y ago
    Yet. As "real" artists start using these generations to leapfrog their projects, at some point, how is this different from someone studying a style and producing something in that style with that addition of actual "art?"
    - itronitron 4y ago
      That's like expecting a chef to take inspiration from a fast food menu. It might happen but it's more likely that the chef already knows what makes fast food taste good and can develop a new menu based on their fundamental knowledge.
      - t-writescode 4y ago
        The fundamental knowledge they gained by looking at thousands upon thousands of previous bits of information; and, after today, that collection of insights is going to include auto-generated artwork, as well.

manholio 4y ago

It doesn't really matter: the AI model is a compressed representation of copyrighted works processed by a generic, non-artistic algorithm specifically engineered to extract the artistic features of such works. Conceptually, it's very similar to running lossy JPEG over a single copyrighted work versus a giant folder of works from different artists, then shipping that compressed collection to you customers so they cut and paste sections of those works in their collages. The output your customers create with this tool might be sufficiently original to warant copyright protection and fair use, but your algorithmic distribution of the original works (the model) is a clear copyright violation, it doesn't matter if it affects a single artist or thousands.

johnthewise 4y ago
How do you copyright a style though?
lbotos 4y ago
> your algorithmic distribution of the original works (the model) is a clear copyright violation Depends on if it's considered "transformative" enough. If Google can cache thumbnails for search, how is an AI model not a "search database+algorithm?" That said, I do expect that SD will be shut down for copyright infringement at some point because you are right, the model does have a bunch of copyrighted material in it and Disney's lawyers will probably come swifter and more prepared than the defense.
- manholio 4y ago
  As a general rule, the fair use thumbnails enjoy is very limited, only in certain jurisdictions, and only for very specific use-cases. An universal art-production machine that can compete in the market place with the original artist - and indeed crush them on productivity and price - certainly does not qualify as fair use.
treis 4y ago
>AI model is a compressed representation of copyrighted works But it's not because you can't get a copy of the copyrighted works back out.

simion314 4y ago

I think painters also copy each other styles , or make copy of popular works, artists don't like this but I did not seen people demanding "do not use this art style because XYZ created it", For me, just a regular person, the art is not something an soulless machine can generate or a monkey with a camera, the intent and mind is important. So a guy can ask an AI to create a malformed portrait of some subject with some artist style , the value of the art is in the subject,theme and not the style IMO. Like if you ask for a portrait of X steping on Y dead body, dressed in Z and with M,N,P the artistic value is in your idea behind this and not in the pixels. I remember similar complaints when digital art started to get popular, that is not real art , that you just move pixels around

mordae 4y ago

In the end, you are not going to be paid for drawing everything all over again. You are going to get paid for devising a unique style to match the creative vision of the movie, series, book or whatever and for tweaking the machine outputs. There is a chance that style will become copyright-able. Well, eventually common style banks will appear.

fragmede 4y ago

Misconception? I mean, if it talks like one and quacks like a collage machine, that's kinda what it is. It's just using an infinite (well, 4 GiB) magazine reel to cut out from.

baud147258 4y ago

I've seen that with good models (I think it was StableDiffusion, not sure), you could get style imitation of a specific person's style; even if it was using a ocean of works, the model was still successfully fishing the exact drops of a specific artist (or close enough that I couldn't tell the difference). And thus the model was able to rip-off dozen of different styles.