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We’ve filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion

• rep_movsd 4y ago
  Oh sure! The value of PI contains a sequence of bits that is an illegal image. Ban it!
  • visarga 4y ago
    Is it true that just by writing PI you violate countless copyrights and go to jail? You can find porn pics in the math book?
• dr_dshiv 4y ago
  “Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.” That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? “Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bined to derive other images. It is, in short, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool.“ “Diffu­sion is a way for an AI pro­gram to fig­ure out how to recon­struct a copy of the train­ing data through denois­ing. Because this is so, in copy­right terms it’s no dif­fer­ent from an MP3 or JPEG—a way of stor­ing a com­pressed copy of cer­tain dig­i­tal data.” The examples of training diffusion (eg, reconstructing a picture out of noise) will be core to their argument in court. Certainly during training the goal is to reconstruct original images out of noise. But, do they exist in SD as copies? Idk
  • codeflo 4y ago
    You seem to be under the impression that SD can only generate original art. However, it will literally recreate existing paintings for you if you just prompt it with the title. Identical composition and everything.
    • Filligree 4y ago
      I’m curious. Can you give an example of that happening for a painting that’s still in copyright?
    • Aerroon 4y ago
      Photoshop can also recreate existing paintings if you just "prompt it with the correct input", no?
      • codeflo 4y ago
        So you're saying "if I put the made-up straw man argument that I intend to knock down in quotation marks, it's less obvious that it's not actually what the other person wrote"?
        • Aerroon 4y ago
          I'm pointing out that the model has a piece missing - the input from the user. You can't just flippantly dismiss it, because input from the user is a crucial part of recreating the works the model is supposedly copying. It's an important factor to consider, because any digital painting program will let you recreate any art work with the correct user input. It's not sufficient to just consider whether it can reproduce an image, but also how much user input was required to do so.
    • gdubs 4y ago
      Models like MidJourney and StableDiffusion can generate very close renditions of some very well known paintings – and if it has enough of a conceptual understanding of even a less known painting, it can do a pretty impressive rendition of that as well. But it's virtually impossible for these models to make an exact replica – a photocopy - of an existing painting, because that would make it break some laws of information theory probably. It's not a lossless compression engine. Paintings like, "Girl With the Pearl Earring" appear so frequently in the datasets that the models tend to overfit on them – which is actually not something you want when designing a model. It tends to create issues for you. But that's why a painting like that can be simulated somewhat accurately. But even then – it's never going to be 100%.
  • akjetma 4y ago
    I don't think you have to reproduce an entire original work to demonstrate copyright violation. Think about sampling in hip hop for example. A 2 second sample, distorted, re-pitched, etc. can be grounds for a copyright violation.
    • Salgat 4y ago
      The difference here is that the images aren't stored, but rather an extremely abstract description of the image was used to very slightly adjust a network of millions of nodes in a tiny direction. No semblance of the original image even remotely exists in the model.
      • akjetma 4y ago
        there are some artists with very strong, recognizable styles. if you provide one of these artists' name in your prompt and get a result back that employs their strong, recognizable style, i think that demonstrates that the network has a latent representation of the artists work stored inside of it.
        • andybak 4y ago
          I was with you right up until the final sentence. How did "style" become "work"?
          • limitedsupply 4y ago
            That’s the key question of the lawsuit IMO!
          • WA 4y ago
            Because in some cases, adding a style prompt gives almost the original image: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wby0ob/it_might_be_possible_for_stable_diffusion_models/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wby0ob/it_...
            • 4y ago
  • TheDong 4y ago
    It doesn't matter if they exist as exact copies in my opinion. The law doesn't recognize a mathematical computer transformation as creating a new work with original copyright. If you give me an image, and I encrypt it with a randomly generated password, and then don't write down the password anywhere, the resulting file will be indistinguishable from random noise. No one can possibly derive the original image from it. But, it's still copyrighted by the original artist as long as they can show "This started as my image, and a machine made a rote mathematical transformation to it" because machine's making rote mathematical transformations cannot create new copyright. The argument for stable diffusion would be that even if you cannot point to any image, since only algorithmic changes happened to the inputs, without any human creativity, the output is a derived work which does not have its own unique copyright.
    • dymk 4y ago
      > But, it's still copyrighted by the original artist as long as they can show "This started as my image, and a machine made a rote mathematical transformation to it" because machine's making rote mathematical transformations cannot create new copyright. Do you have evidence that this is actually what the courts have decided with respect to NNs?
    • limitedsupply 4y ago
      So what happens if you put a painting into a mechanical grinder? Is the shapeless pile of dust still copyrighted work? I don’t think so.
      • jimnotgym 4y ago
        The owner of that Banksy painting certainly thinks so.
        • limitedsupply 4y ago
          The painting that has several cuts in about 25% of the surface area? Don’t think that constitutes as a shapeless pile of dust.
  • yazaddaruvala 4y ago
    > That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? In fairness, Diffusion is arguably a very complex entropy coding similar to Arithmetic/Huffman coding. Given that copyright is protectable even on compressed/encrypted files, it seems fair that the “container of compressed bytes” (in this case the Diffusion model) does “contain” the original images no differently than a compressed folder of images contains the original images. A lawyer/researcher would likely win this case if they re-create 90%ish of a single input image from the diffusion model with text input.
    • visarga 4y ago
      > 90%ish of a single input image Oh, one image is enough to apply copyright as if it were a patent, to ban a process that makes original works most of the time? The article authors say it works as a "collage tool" trying to minimise the composition and layout of the image as unimportant elements. At the same time forgetting that SD is changing textures as well, so it's a collage minus textures and composition? Is there anything left to complain about? unless, by draw of luck, both layout and textures are very similar to a training image. But ensuring no close duplications are allowed should suffice. Copyright should apply one by one, not in bulk. Each work they complain about should be judged on its own merits.
      • manholio 4y ago
        But they are not original works, they are wholly derived works of the training data set. Take that data set away and the algorithm is unable to produce a single original pixel. The fact that the derivation involves millions of works as opposed to a single one is immaterial for the copyright issue.
        • realusername 4y ago
          The training data set is indeed mandatory but that doesn't make the resulting model a derivative in itself. In fact the training is specifically made to remove derivatives.
  • synu 4y ago
    You could make the same argument that as long as you are using lossy compression you are unable to infringe on copyright.
    • visarga 4y ago
      That's a huge understatement. 5 billion images to a model of 5GB. 1 byte per image. Let's see if one byte per image would constitute a copyright violation in other fields than neural networks.
      • synu 4y ago
        It will be interesting to see how they legally define the moment where compression stops being compression and starts being an original work. If I train on one image I can get it right back out. Even two, maybe even a thousand? Not sure what the line would be where it becomes ok vs not but there will have to be some answer.
        • Xelynega 4y ago
          There only needs to be an answer if it's determined that some number isn't copyright infringement. The easy answer would be to say that the process is what prevents the works from being transformative(and thus copyrightable) and not the size of the training set.
      • forgotusername6 4y ago
        The distribution of the bytes matters a bit here. In theory the model could be over trained against one copyrighted work such that it is almost perfectly preserved within the model.
        • synu 4y ago
          You can see this with the Mona Lisa. You can get pretty close reproductions back by asking for it (or at least you could in one of the iterations). Likely it overfit due to it being such a ubiquitous image.
  • whateveracct 4y ago
    This feels like the argument of a money launderer.
  • anothernewdude 4y ago
    It's going to be very hard to them to argue against Stable Diffusion and not reach the conclusion that people looking at art are doing exactly what training the AI did. You looked at my art, now I can use copyright against the copies in your brain.
    • visarga 4y ago
      By forcing the AI community to develop technology to avoid replication of training examples they might disclose every bit of human copying as well. What can detect copyright violations in AI can be applied on human works as well.
      • Filligree 4y ago
        I’m afraid we won’t like the outcome.
  • groestl 4y ago
    > It is, in short, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool. Interesting that they mention collages. IANAL but it was my impression that collages are derivative work if they incorporate many different pieces and only small parts of the original. Their compression argument seems more convincing.
    • Filligree 4y ago
      Compression down to two bytes per image? You run into the pigeonhole argument. That level of compression can only work if there are less than seventy thousand different images in existence, total. Certainly there’s a deep theoretical equivalent between intelligence and compression, but this scenario isn’t what anyone means by “compression” normally.
      • Xelynega 4y ago
        When gzip turns my 10k character ASCII text file into a a 2kb archive, has it "compressed each character down to a fifth of a byte per character"? No, thats a misunderstanding of compression. Just like gzip, training stable diffusion certainly removes a lot of data, but without understanding the effect of that transformation of the entropy of the data it's meaningless to say thing like "two bytes per image" because(like gzip) you need the whole encoded dataset to recover the image. It's compressing many images into 10GB of data, not a single image into two bytes. This is directly analogous to what people usually mean by "compression"
  • bsder 4y ago
    > That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? If you take that tack, I'll go one step further back in time and ask "Where is your agreement from the original author who owns the copyright that you could use this image in the way you did?" The fact that there is suddenly a new way to "use an image" (input to a computer algorithm) doesn't mean that copyright magically doesn't also apply to that usage. A canonical example is the fact that television programs like "WKRP in Cincinnati" can't use the music licenses from the television broadcast if they want to distribute a DVD or streaming version--the music has to be re-licensed.
    • huggingrear 4y ago
      My assumption would be 'fair use'. Artists themselves make use of this extremely often, like when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common), fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common). The are often done for commission as well. AFAIK, downloading and learning from images, even copyrighted images, fall under fair use, this is how practically every artist today learns how to draw. Stable Diffusion does not create 1:1 copies of artwork it has been trained on, and its purpose is quite the opposite, there may be cases where the transformative aspect of a generated image may be argued as not being transformative enough, but so far I've only seen one such reproducable image, which would be the 'bloodborne box art' prompt, which was also mentioned in this discussion.
      • zowie_vd 4y ago
        > when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common) What are you talking about? I've been doing drawing and digital painting as a hobby for a long time and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common". I don't know anybody who has ever done this. > fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common) This is true in the sense that many artists do it (besides confusing trademark law and copyright law: the character designs are copyright-protected, trademarks protect brand names and logos). However, it is not fair use (as far as I'm aware at least, I'm not a lawyer). A rightholder can request for fanart to be removed and the artist would have to remove it. Rightsholders almost never do, because fanart doesn't hurt them. There's also more examples of it reproducing copyright-protected images, I pulled the "bloodborne box art" prompt from this article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03860.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03860.pdf But I agree with you that reproducing images is very much not the intention of Stable Diffusion, and it's already very rare. The way I see it, the cases of Stable Diffusion reproducing images too closely is just a gotcha for establishing a court case.
  • rysertio 4y ago
    I would agree that we're acting like hypocrites here. But unlike stable diffusion, GitHub didn't release their model. So it's extremely hard to know what's going on inside copilot, on the other hand we have the model of stable diffusion and we can see wether or not it has memorized copyrighted images.
  • locutous 4y ago
    > That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies? Discovery will show exactly what the base images for training are. You can view that the outputs are derivative works. I don't think the mechanism is going to shield the violation, and frankly it shouldn't. License your source material for the purpose and do it right. Doesn't everyone know it's wrong to steal?
    • miohtama 4y ago
      People in art school also practice by studying existing art and images.
      • thethimble 4y ago
        I think what’s clear is that this is an unprecedented type of use. I’m really interested in seeing how the courts rule on this one as it has wide implications for the AI era.
        • joshspankit 4y ago
          If not done extremely carefully, it also has wide implications for human artists
        • speleding 4y ago
          Because this use is unprecedented, as you say, it's clear that the law wasn't written with this use case in mind. The more interesting question in my mind is what we think the new law should be, rather than what the courts happen to make of the existing law. I.e., I think the answer should come from politicians not from judges.
  • jrm4 4y ago
    This is a gross misunderstanding of "copyright?" The model doesn't need to "contain" the images anymore than a Harry Potter knockoff needs to "contain" huge chunks of text from the originals.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      It depends. If names are different, character and plot details differ, etc., a book about students at a school for wizards battling great evil may be a not particularly imaginative rip-off and may even invite litigation if it's too close, but I'm guessing it wouldn't win in court. See also The Sword of Shannara and Tolkien. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Shannara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Shannara Creators mimic styles and elements of others' works all the time. Unless an ML algorithm crosses some literal copying threshold, I fail to see it as doing anything substantially different from what people routinely do.
  • baxtr 4y ago
    One idea I had was to try to recreate the original using a prompt. If you succeed, it should be obvious that the original was in the training set?
    • zowie_vd 4y ago
      The LAION-5B dataset is public, so you can check directly whether a picture is in there or not. StabilityAI only takes a very limited amount of information from each individual picture, so for Stable Diffusion to closely reproduce a picture it would need to appear quite frequently in the dataset. There are examples of this, such as old famous paintings, "bloodborne box art" and probably many others, though I haven't looked deeply into it.
    • gedy 4y ago
      No, the "original" is in the (likely detailed) prompt you give it.
    • nhtsamera 4y ago
      This is quite easy to do, but the results can be off in funny ways. For example, try putting this into SD with Euler a sampling and a cfg scale of 10: "The Night Watch, a painting made by Rembrandt in 1642" It generates a convincing low-res imitation about half the time, but it also has a tendency to make the triband flag into an American flag, or put an old ship in the background, or replace the dark city arch with a sunset... If you keep refining the prompt, you can get closer, but at that point you're just describing what the painting should look like, rather than asking the model to recall an original work.
  • Aerroon 4y ago
    Models for Stable Diffusion are about 2-8GB in size. 5 billion images means that every image gets about 1 byte. It seems to me that they're claiming here that Stability has somehow manage to store copies of these images in about 1 byte of space each. That's an incredible compression ratio!
    • SillyUsername 4y ago
      It is a form compression that loses some much of the uniqueness which gives it the high ratio. If the concept is a little hard to grasp consider an AI model like a finite state machine, but it stores affinity and weights of the data's relationship to each other too. In GPT this is words and phrases, e.g. "Frodo Baggins" high affinity, "Frodo Superman" will be negligible. Now consider all words that may link to those words - potentially billions of words (or phrases), but (probably/hopefully) none replicated. The phrases are out of specific context because they cover _all contexts_ in the training data. When you speak to GPT it randomises these words in response to you, typically choosing the words/phrases with the highest affinity, to the words you prompted, this almost gives it the appearance of emergent AI, because it is crossing different concepts (texts) in it's answers. Stable Diffusion works similarly but with colours (words), and patterns/styles (phrases). Now if you ask for a green field in the style of Van Gogh, it could compare Van Gogh's work to a backdrop from Windows XP. You could argue depending on the degree of those things it gives you you are violating copyrights, however that narrow view doesn't take into account that although you've specifically asked for Van Gogh and that's where it concentrates, it's also pulling in work from potentially hundreds of other lower affinity sources. It's this dilution which means you'll never see an untainted original source image. So in essence, it's the user who is breaching the copyright by specifying concentration on specific terms in the prompt, not the model. The model is simply a set of patterns, and the user is making those patterns breach copyright which IMHO is no different to the user copying a painting with a brush. The brush isn't the thing you sue.
      • Aerroon 4y ago
        I think so too. I also think that this is a dangerous issue, because we don't really know how our brains work. If we set legal restrictions over this and then it turns out our brains work in a similar manner, then what?
• Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  You are literally modern day luddites. If you succeed, you will undo decades of technological progress.
  • Bancakes 4y ago
    Progress? Researchers are fighting to make AI as smart as a worm. We need to reach humans first before calling AI progress.
    • myrryr 4y ago
      No you don't. They make it better? that is progress. There is no bar you get to set except "better than the last attempt"
    • nxpub 4y ago
      Don’t overestimate humans
    • readthenotes1 4y ago
      Worms help create fertile soil. Producing more topsoil would be a huge win here on Earth and make colonizing other planets dramatically more feasible. Don't underestimate worms!
    • ben_w 4y ago
      Show me one worm that can paint as well as the original DALL•E, let alone v2 or Stable Diffusion. Show me one worm — or even a hamster — that can drive a car as well as Tesla's Autopilot. Show me one single non-human animal of any species that can write functioning Python code or CSS from a natural language description of what it should achieve, even if it only gets to GPT-2 level let alone v3 as used in Copilot or v3.5 as used in ChatGPT. What we have yet to do with a worm is literally upload it's brain, but IIRC that's more because nobody with the money was interested in funding the one person publicly interested in figuring out how to measure synaptic weights in vivo.
  • realusername 4y ago
    > If you succeed, you will undo decades of technological progress. There's never been since the industrial revolution a technology which has been "uninvented" so I'm going to guess that won't happen here either. The cat is out of the bag.
• dmitriid 4y ago
  I'm on the fence about this. On the one hand, using works without consent or attribution is bad. On the other hand... This is exactly how humans train to become artists: by studying and remixing the art of others.
  • headsoup 4y ago
    It is indeed a more complex scenario than it first appears. I think the lawsuits have a case if they can prove copyrighted images were taken and used directly in the commercial product. The moral arguments about AI and it's use and abuse are broad and difficult, because they rely on the intent of the end user rather than the developer of the tool to prove an argument has merit. I personally don't like AI art, but I can't declare that it's the devil's tool and should be purged with fire. I only think it overall will be a net negative, like I feel with AutoTune. It cheapens the artform.
    • visarga 4y ago
      > It cheapens the artform. Everyone make their own artistic judgements, nobody's ideas are better. If people prefer this https://lexica.art/ https://lexica.art/ (scroll down) then that's their right.
      • headsoup 4y ago
        Tell me how those are 'ideas?' I imagine there are plenty of people that prefer Autotune voices for some reason too. Doesn't mean everyone needs to agree that it's good in itself or for artists.
        • dmitriid 4y ago
          Whether we like it or not, technology will always make it worse for some people. And it's not a new phenomenon. The printing press made scribes nearly obsolete, cars led to a mass slaughter of horses (and all related professions), and so on wherever you look. Invention of photography nearly killed whole genres of art (and gave rise to impressionism, abstractionism etc.) Unfortunately, we can only judge the outcome of these changes only decades (or even centuries) after they happen.
• chrischen 4y ago
  Why only Stability AI and not OpenAI?
  • supriyo-biswas 4y ago
    Going against a less well-funded company makes a favorable outcome more likely. Further, they only need a precedent - a ruling against SD would also apply to Dall-E.
    • chrischen 4y ago
      Makes sense. Does that mean OpenAI could essentially help fund Stability AI’s defense then?
      • __rito__ 4y ago
        I think they should. A lot of law is about precedent. AI-focused companies should get together, form a group, and have real experts giving expert testimony under oath. I also think that the courts will form expert committees consisting of real experts like Bengio, LeCun, etc. Any grifters should be avoided, but I am not sure if the judges will understand the difference.
        • rvz 4y ago
          Stability AI already drew this line with Dance Diffusion (like SD but for musicians) [0] trained on public domain music and on copyrighted music only with the permission from musicians? The fact that Stabiliity is now creating an opt-out for artists after lifting and training on copyrighted / watermarked art without permission and creating a paid SaaS solution out of it, shows that not only they willfully trampled on the copyright of artists, but they have set themselves on a weak explanation on the 'fair use, transformative' argument since the LAION-5B model contains the copyrighted images which can output verbatim / highly similar digital art by the model. The input from 'real experts like Bengio, LeCun' add little to no value in the case as digital art generated by a non-human is uncopyrightable and is public domain by default. [1] What sets the precedent is whether if using copyrighted content in a training set without permission from the author and outputting verbatim or highly similar derived works and commercializing that is fair use and not infringing. If SD drew this line or musicians, then that should be the line drawn for digital art and code, and both Copilot, Midjourney, SD and DALL-E should be trained on public domain content or content with the permission from the content author or licenses that allow AI training. So far, the 'real' grifters are Stability AI, OpenAI and Midjourney. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-diffusion https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-d... [1] https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/a-recent-entrance-to-paradise.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
• myrryr 4y ago
  I think they will ask them to use the tool to reproduce a known piece of art - which they will most certainly fail to do. I think this has an almost 0 chance of success.
  • LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    I just took the first few sentences from Wiki that describe Mona Lisa [1], pasted it on HuggingFace [2] and got pretty similar results [3]. [1] The Mona Lisa (/ˌmoʊnə ˈliːsə/ MOH-nə LEE-sə; Italian: Gioconda [dʒoˈkonda] or Monna Lisa [ˈmɔnna ˈliːza]; French: Joconde [ʒɔkɔ̃d]) is a half-length portrait painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance,[4][5] it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world". [2] https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion [3] https://imgur.com/a/L2LDOS4 https://imgur.com/a/L2LDOS4 EDIT: With the Starry Night it worked even better. But it failed to reproduce the Bathing of a Red Horse (that one doesn't have a page on English wiki, so I took the description from elsewhere).
    • visarga 4y ago
      > "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world". Outliers make bad examples. They don't share much similarity with other works.
• realusername 4y ago
  > Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bined to derive other images. It is, in short, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool. Just no, that's not how any of that works. I guess that lie is convenient to legitimate the lawsuit.
  • fruit2020 4y ago
    How does it work then? :)
    • realusername 4y ago
      The opposite way, the training images are there to support the model to generalize features. Reproducing parts of existing images in the dataset is called overfitting and is considered a failure of the model.
      • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
        how do you measure success? i wrote an OCR program in college. we split the data set in half. you train it on one half then test it against the other half. you can train stable diffusion on half the images, but then what? you use the image descriptions of the other half and measure how similar they are? in essence, attempting to reproduce exact replicas. but i guess even then it wouldn't be copyright if those images weren't used in the model. more like me describing something vividly to you and asking you to paint it and then getting angry at you because its too accurate
        • PartiallyTyped 4y ago
          FID score is a measure of success. Instead of aiming to reproduce exact replicas, you use a classifier and retrieve the input of the last layer. Do it for both generated and original inputs, and then measure the differences in the statistics. Wikipedia has a good article on this.
        • 4y ago
• scheeseman486 4y ago
  So what is the end goal of this? For copyright to transfer every step? That precedent happens, then what? Licensing schemes get set up and any piece of media that is put into these systems will result in the artist getting some kind of payment in return. Cool, that sound great. Except... who's paying? The conglomerates who already have a bunch of IP they can feed into those systems, who can afford to purchase or through brute force (ie cheaply employed artists) create new works using their already massive amounts of capital. These are the entities that will have complete and total control over the best versions of the tools that artists say will bring about their doom. You better fucking believe they'll have their own licensing system too. Copyright is a prison built for artists by big business, successfully marketed to artists as being a home.
  • ben_w 4y ago
    Mostly I agree, but: > Copyright is a prison built for artists by big business, successfully marketed to artists as being a home. I think (continuing this analogy) that copyright is indeed a home, but very few artists can afford to buy their own home, so they rent from corporate landlords, and the bigger ones are the worst ones to be tenants of.
  • jseliger 4y ago
    So what is the end goal of this? For lawyers to make money. That is the goal of much litigation.
  • Viseon 4y ago
    You're arguing that artists have a shitty home, therefore it's not worth protecting as those AI companies are trying to take even that from them. And you're somehow trying to sound like you're pro artists in all this. Please, listen to yourself.
    • scheeseman486 4y ago
      I wouldn't try reading too much into the pithy poetry I added at the last minute to make a broad, perhaps not particularly clear point about how copyright has been twisted to only serve established conglomerates rather than individuals. My main beef with the approach being taken by a lot of artists towards AI art generators, using copyright in an attempt to kick the tools in the shin (notably not actually kill it, only perhaps slow it down a bit) could set legal precedent that would make it worse for individual artists and smaller groups by putting the most useful and powerful variations of the technology exclusively in the hands of intellectual property hoarders like Disney. As opposed to a more open approach where the possibility exists for useful generators to exist for free. I'm not anti artist, I do genuinely think that this outcome would make things worse for them and better for the companies that already exploit them.
• razemio 4y ago
  There are only 2 possible outcomes, right? 1. They win, and big companies are training AI on their portfolio and new artwork which they paid for resulting in the same problem, that artists will even be paid less than today. Also resulting in incredible difficult to judge laws. Has an artist created it himself, or has he used copyrighted works to train his custom model? 2. They lose
  • visarga 4y ago
    > Has an artist created it himself, or has he used copyrighted works to train his custom model? What if the model is trained on his own works, works that are also licensed out, can the artist be sued for infringing by creating in the same style?
  • reset-password 4y ago
    Even if they win they lose, because nothing will change. Who is really going to stop using Stable Diffusion at this point?
• supriyo-biswas 4y ago
  Sometimes I have to wonder about the hypocrisy you can see on HN threads. When its software development, many here seem to understand the merits of a similar lawsuit against Copilot[1], but as soon as its a different group such as artists, then it's "no, that's not how a NN works" or "the NN model works just the same way as a human would understand art and style." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326
  • hardware2win 4y ago
    Indeed Instead of improving the world, creating better tools they want to sue eachother. I thought those times were over Or maybe it is just bias against Microsoft
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dymk 4y ago
    How do you know it's the same people making those comments?
  • synu 4y ago
    I suspect it's different people. There's a kind of bias where it seems like everyone else on a forum is all one person who behaves super inconsistently, I've thought it as well.
  • TheMiddleMan 4y ago
    I believe Copilot was giving exact copies of large parts open source projects, without the license. Are image generators giving exact (or very similar) copies of existing works? I feel like this is the main distinction.
    • limitedsupply 4y ago
      These models produce a lot of “in the style of” content, which is different from an exact copy. Is that different enough? I guess that’s what this lawsuit is going to be about.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• chrischen 4y ago
  “It is a par­a­site that, if allowed to pro­lif­er­ate, will make artists extinct.” This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement. Imagine if the medical tricorder (a device from Star Trek that does maybe 99% of what modern doctors do) is suddenly invented today. Doctors could use this argument to defend their livelihoods, but they lose sight of the fact that doctors don’t exist because society needs to employ them. They exist because we have a problem of people getting sick… if more sick people can be helped then great! That is an advancement for society because more lives are saved (as opposed to more doctors being employed), and then simply the standard for what doctors are expected to do is raised to a higher level, since someone is still expected to operate tricorders. Similarly, artists exist for their output for society. If these AI models can truly fulfill the needs of society that artists currently output (that is debatable), then that simply raises the bar for what artists are expected to output. But it doesn’t change the fact that we only care about the output for society (which can never be truly harmed by advancements such as this because if someone can not outperform the AI then they are redundant), not the fact that artists exist. Put another way, many current artists who fear this are simply doing the generative work of AI already… manually. The AI is democratizing art so that the lowest hanging fruit of art is now accessible to more people. The bar for art has now been raised so that the expected quality of newer work is to be much higher. Just like how after computer aided design was invented the quality of movie effects, digital game art, etc, all jumped. Progress means those doing current “levels” of art will need to add this tool to their repertoire to build more impressive things. Rent seeking and staying in place (from an artistic advancement point of view) is not the answer. As someone else put it in a comment here, looking at other works of art and learning how to make art and creating new art from this influence is literally how humans have been doing it for eons. Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. This AI merely makes it explicit so I guess it brings out the rent seeking feeling since people must feel it’s now possible to quantify the amount their own work contributed to something. I guess if you don’t want anyone to be influenced by it—AI included—the traditional way is to not show it to anyone.
  • vkou 4y ago
    > This is the fundamentally flawed and misguided argument that can literally be applied to any technological progress to curtail advancement. No, this is the only fundamentally correct way to view this. Before the existence of the printing press, we didn't need copyright law. Yet all that the printing press did was make transcribing books by hand faster. Quantitative changes enabled by technology are qualitative changes. And not every form that a qualitative change takes is one that leaves the world better off than we found it.
• blululu 4y ago
  21st century collage tool? While advocating for the illegalization of collages seems a bit of a stretch, I’m curious how true this is. The LAION B dataset is something like 100 TB and stable diffusion is about 10 GB so there is a factor of 10000 compression. That means a single pixel represents a 100x100 region. Perhaps someone more familiar with the topic could weigh in, but it would seem that the model would need to be representing content from more than just a single image at a to achieve that level of compression. If so the correct analogy is not a collage but a musical scale and yes Beethoven took musical notes that Bach had used but it was not exactly a copy.
  • polotics 4y ago
    Good analogy. I think that it indeed demonstrates that if the data set used to generate SD's images had been generated based on innate knowledge about painting, like Bach's created temperament with his knowledge of music, then SD would be free of copyright entanglement.
  • mikewarot 4y ago
    When you look around, you don't actually see most of stuff that's right there... you've got a small area you can see, about the size of your outstretched thumb[1], the rest of the world you think you're seeing is a projection in your mind, built as your eye darts from object to object. Thus, when we see things, we have already built a relationship map of the parts of an image, not actual pixels. This makes it possible to observe the world and interact with it in real time referencing the pieces and the concepts we label them with, otherwise we'd have to stop and very carefully look around every single time we wanted to take a step. These networks effectively do the same thing, taking in parts of images and their relationships. It's not uncommon for me to see what is clearly a distorted copy of a Getty Images trademark when I run stable diffusion locally. There's an artist who always puts his daughter Nina's name in his work... the network just thinks its just another style, and I suspect that's same for the Getty thing. One thing that is super cool is you can draw a horribly amateur sketch of something, and have Stable Diffusion turn it into something close to the starting drawing in outline, but far better in detail. A sketch of a flower I did came out as Tulips, Roses and Poppy depending on the prompts used to process it, but it was generally in the same pose and scale. [1] https://developer.tobii.com/xr/learn/eye-behavior/visual-angles/#your-thumb-is-two-degrees-wide https://developer.tobii.com/xr/learn/eye-behavior/visual-ang...
• dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  Why do we keep posting the same arguments over and over with these stories. It's like how humans learn. It contains chunks of copywriter material. What about copilot. Hackers don't respect artists. Yadda yadda. It's boring. I don't know the answer, but after reading the same things over and over I don't know if I trust myself to even have a valid opinion about it.
  • mbgerring 4y ago
    There’s a pretty easy answer here actually: if you want to include data in a set of training data for an AI system, you need to have (formal, statutory) permission to use it.
    • chii 4y ago
      why should a new right (the right to study the works) be granted without some compensation given back to society? The existing set of rights granted under copyright does not include this.
      • visarga 4y ago
        Yes, copyright protects expression, not ideas. Ideas are protected with patents.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          It's implementations (supposedly) that are covered by patents. Ideas are not.
    • dymk 4y ago
      No, you don’t
  • Popeyes 4y ago
    Well at least going to court over this should clarify the legal rights of the artists and the position of AI. I can't see the artists winning.
• TheMiddleMan 4y ago
  An artist can look at images for reference, and draw something new inspired by them. Why does it matter if a software tool can do this much faster? If the artist makes the image very similar to one of the reference photos, it may be a copyright violation. It doesn't matter if the artist used a pencil or software to create the new work. Current AI image generation does, however, make it easy to unknowingly violate copyright. If it generates an image similar to something else out there you wouldn't know. I don't know much about copyright law though, am I wrong?
  • mbgerring 4y ago
    https://www.wired.com/2011/01/hope-image-flap/amp https://www.wired.com/2011/01/hope-image-flap/amp
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    I don't know if you're right or wrong, but it seems plausible that we could create a database of copyrighted images to check against.
    • visarga 4y ago
      Only the training set should suffice.
    • jaapbadlands 4y ago
      Every original image is copyrighted. You're suggesting making a digital copy of every image there is to check that AI isn't generating digital copies of every image there is.
      • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
        Not a copy, a hash or fingerprint. Just enough data to measure if it's substantially similar. But yes, it may be infeasible to index and compare against every image ever uploaded.
        • 4y ago
• kh0st 4y ago
  "assum­ing nom­i­nal dam­ages of $1 per image" that's quite an assumption lol. To quote "You can't put the genie back in the bottle" And unless I start to see some evidence that this is theft, by an identical piece in a collage being "created" by AI (impossible I think) - then I have ZERO time to consider how they are being stolen or thinking of compensation ideas. I say this with an arts degree - it sucks for struggling artists, but I only find it nominally sad that a bunch of people are gunna be out of work making Art for the McCorpos - If you are one of those artists then i'm sorry if I sound flippant or cruel about this, but you can adapt or you will die. Not literally, of course. But real artists know its the message not the medium - and they aren't in danger of dying off. They adapt.
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    the funny part is these tools are inspiring new creativity and mediums. someone made a 3d game using ai generated images. it was a lot of work to combine and put together, it only saved on the drawing. this is opening new doors for artists. but ya, they'll need to adapt. maybe an even worse analogy, but i stopped using Photoshop when css got good. no need to make images for rounded corners. no need for me to pay adobe. but no one is suing css.
    • visarga 4y ago
      Wordpress was the worst. It put millions of web devs out of work. Why was there no class action suit? /s
• ddmma 4y ago
  Pheew.. chasing Copilot was a mistake skip Dalle-2
• ggm 4y ago
  Good. The points of law here deserve to be discussed, and understood. If there is such a thing as IPR then this is front and center in what rights are. If there is something like artists moral rights then this is front and center in that debate. I didn't like the Sunny Bono law. It exists. The questions about law need to be asked.
• kstenerud 4y ago
  This sounds so much like how albums and radio threatened artists because there would be no more demand for live performances when you can just record it once and play it back a million times. Or recordable tape, or VCRs, or art reprints. And then there were the endless lawsuits over the "theft" from sampling and remixes. The medium evolves. Some artists evolve with them, while others are left behind.
  • kristopolous 4y ago
    The sampling problem is still real. There's a difference in say the cutup of the amen break into 40 parts and painstakingly re-orchestrating it and taking the strings from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir, playing it in a loop for 4:55 and rapping over it (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_Some_Kill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_Some_Kill). To be hyper specific, that's why say, Tyree's Acid Overture, which samples the same song and was released the same year and recorded in the same city, didn't see any push back (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJeFIBhZTBE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJeFIBhZTBE) - it's used more like a paintbrush in that one. There's very much an arbitrary judgment call here. Bob James probably had a case with Run DMC Peter Piper (which is take me to the Mardi gras) but he's always been really chill about it. They lucked out. Same thing here. There's this amorphous "creative effort" that creates an abstract distance between the works. Unless the engineers can show an effort to respect and police this distance, I think things might get dicey
• minimaxir 4y ago
  Oddly, there's no mention of CLIP in the post and filing, where CLIPText is the real secret of Stable Diffusion's ability to correlate text to image for all the iterations targeted by the plantiffs. I suspect adding OpenAI as a defendant would make things a tad harder legally.
  • astrange 4y ago
    SD 2.x doesn't use CLIPText anymore, although if they don't know the difference between 1.x and 2.x their argument isn't going to be very good.
    • minimaxir 4y ago
      The lawsuit doesn't make that distinction and the DeviantArt model is almost certainly based on SD 1.x
• Eduard 4y ago
  If I was an artists with a distinct art style, I would be so happy about Stable Diffusion: it's a generator for copyright infringement damage claims.
  • astrange 4y ago
    Art styles cannot, traditionally, be copyrighted.
• voytec 4y ago
  > Lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion filed against DeviantArt & others I find this title somewhat unclear. Is it filled by or against DeviantArt?
  • foundart 4y ago
    My initial impression as I read the story led me to the same confusion. However, the article soon enough shows the title is correct: > we’ve filed a class-action law­suit against Sta­bil­ity AI, DeviantArt, and Mid­jour­ney for their use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool that remixes the copy­righted works of mil­lions of artists whose work was used as train­ing data.
• mbgerring 4y ago
  Good, using work for which an author has an active copyright as training data for an AI system, without their permission, should be illegal, and the sooner this gets resolved the better.
  • chii 4y ago
    why should the right to be used as training material be exclusive to the owner of the copyright? That's more rights than initially granted by the laws of copyright. A student can read/watch many works. Under this ruling, copyrighted works can no longer be learnt from by a student.
• jimnotgym 4y ago
  I have a different take. I don't know how the law on copyright relates to AI. I can't imagine all of the arguements, I don't know the case law. I may have some gut feeling, I may want a certain outcome, but I am a nobody. I think in a common-law system a court room and a test case is needed to clarify this law. I am sad that the system for getting this into court is so expensive. I am sad that people involved are being threatened with damages, I don't think that is necessary.
• kune 4y ago
  I hope the lawyers ask those companies, what process they are using to avoid to have images from Disney movies in the training set.
• eega 4y ago
  Funny they didn’t include OpenAI in the lawsuit …
• _cs2017_ 4y ago
  The discussion here has been of a somewhat casual nature: - expressing personal feelings about the lawsuit - honestly sharing one's lack of understanding of the legal or technical issues involved - making brief, unsubstantiated claims about the lawsuit's merits - discussing HN response to this story (as this comment) I was really looking forward to educating myself on this topic from the HN comments, but it appears I am out of luck. Why is this (currently #1) story not attracting posts from the many HN users who could offer detailed and insightful analysis? Is it considered a toxic or an overly-politicized topic that most people avoid? Or there's some other explanation I'm not seeing?
  • ghaff 4y ago
    Probably because: 1. No one knows. Real expert IP lawyers I know tend to think it's probably OK with various caveats. 2.) Under even simpler scenarios fair use is a pretty fuzzy line even for things that are better understood and often end up litigated on a case basis. Someone else gave various examples from music. I cited the Obama "Hope" poster elsewhere. Very little is absolute at the margins.
• Ephil012 4y ago
  “Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bined to derive other images.” This seems like it’s not an accurate description of what diffusion is doing. A diffusion model is not the same as compression. They’re implying that Stable Diffusion is taking the entire dataset and making it smaller then storing it. Instead, it’s just learning patterns about the art and replicating those patterns. The “compression” they’re referring to is the latent space representation which is how Stable Diffusion avoids having to manipulate large images during computation. I mean you could call it a form of compression, but the actual training images aren’t stored using that latent space in the final model afaik. So it's not compressing every single image and storing it in the model. This page says there were 5 billion images in the stable diffusion training dataset (albeit that may not be true as I see online it’s closer to the 2 billion mark). A Stable Diffusion model is about 5 gb. 5 gb / 5 billion is 1 byte per image. That’s impossible to fit an image in 1 byte. Obviously the claim about it storing compressed copies of the training data is not true. The size of the file comes from the weights in it, not because it’s storing “compressed copies”. In general, it seems this lawsuit is misrepresenting how Stable Diffusion works on a technical level.
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    If you can put a bunch of large things together into a small file and then later (lossily) extract the large thing out of that smaller file, I'd argue that's compression, yeah. It doesn't really matter if it was intended to be art up as a compression algorithm or not in my opinion. If anything, this approach can be considered a revolution in lossy image compression, even though there's no real market for that at the moment. If someone finds a way to reverse a hash, I'd also argue that hashing has now become a form of compression. I think in 5 billion images there are more than enough common image areas to allow for average compression to become lower than a single byte. This is a lossy process, it does not need a complete copy of the source data, similar to how an MP3 doesn't contain most of the audio data fed into it. I think the argument that SD revolves around lossless compression is quite an interesting one, even if the original code authors didn't realise that's what they were doing. It's the first good technical argument I've heard, at least. All of those could've been prevented if the model was trained on public domain images instead of random people's copyrighted work. Even if this lawsuit succeeds, I don't think image generation algorithms will be banned. Some AI companies will just have spent a shitton of cash failing to get away with copyright violation, but the technology can still work for art that's either unlicensed or licensed in such a way that AI models can be trained based on it.
• wildpeaks 4y ago
  If they're so confident that copyright wouldn't apply to them, they should train their models using Disney content and set a proper precedent instead of using content from smaller artists.
  • astrange 4y ago
    Mickey's in there.
    • rvz 4y ago
      There you go. Try and generate a image of Mickey Mouse with his mouth closed using Stable Diffusion and you will see a verbatim image of him copied straight from Disney.
  • Vecr 4y ago
    I think they might get into trade mark/trade dress issues. There are few enough Disney locations and characters that some form of at least pseudo-overfitting would probably be a problem.
• napier 4y ago
  Until all this frenzied generative furore I believed the starving artist meme-trope and had no idea there were so many making a good living (while still alive) by selling art to the general public. Thought the industry such as it is was more of a money laundering angle for very rich tax evaders and a fortunate, well connected few artists with luck, clout and gallery relationships. And most of what seems fashionable in the trad/modern art world bears very little stylistic or textural resemblance to the sorts of AI image synthesis work that people seem to make popular.
• vldmrs 4y ago
  I find this lawsuit very important both for AI community as well as for artists since it can let everyone know where the boundaries are. All mentioned models were trained on a large batch of works taken from Internet - no one is going to argue that. All of those models cannot exists without content created by people. The models allow to mimic the styles of particular artists making it a perfect tool to kill creativity and artists diversity in the long term.
  • visarga 4y ago
    > The models allow to mimic the styles of particular artists making it a perfect tool to kill creativity and artists diversity in the long term. It is a tool that allows radical combinations of concepts and styles, I'd say it empowers combinatorial exploration. And the combinatorial space is very sparsely explored.
• bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  It seems to me the communal voice of HN varies widely on copyright issues depending on who is getting sued and who is getting potentially hurt by violations. People who generally make less money than programmers - writers, artists, musicians - should stop their whining and their unfair uses of copyright to control their creative output. Programmers who are getting shafted by big corporations using their code to build machine learning models need urgent protection and fairness. It probably doesn't help that almost every copyright argument here gets made with the understanding of copyright prevalent in the American model - that is to say that copyright exists to promote the progress of science and the useful arts - whereas in many countries copyright is understood as existing because the creator of something has a moral right to control and ownership of whatever they made. Obviously this lawsuit is in the U.S but I suppose even if it loses here other lawsuits in other countries, with a different understanding of copyright, might succeed.
  • realusername 4y ago
    I'm personally for a massive reduction of copyright time to align it on patents but that's beside the point, even in the current copyright system that argument against machine learning makes no sense. The proof of that is they even had to lie about how stable diffusion works on this website to make it convincing, that's a clear sign that they are in the wrong. Even themselves discovered that the truth won't get them very far. > Obviously this lawsuit is in the U.S but I suppose even if it loses here other lawsuits in other countries, with a different understanding of copyright, might succeed. The cat is just out of the bag anyways, if machine learning is outlawed in the US, it will flourish somewhere else instead.
    • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      I meant it more that if the suit fails in the U.S similar suits might work in other countries. It is a multi-front battle they face.
  • mijamo 4y ago
    Copyright does not exist in every country. You have intellectual rights and commercial rights but those are different from the US concept of copyright. In France for instance an artist cannot transfer the moral rights over its art, but can transfer the commercial rights, and there is no copyright concept (which makes is funny when sites copy the US have have a copyright mention at the bottom)
• seydor 4y ago
  This should be more about the externalities of the models. You can sue factories for emitting too much CO2 without making claims about their IP. The internet has been built, from the get go, on the premise of violating the spirit of copyright laws. Google got away with that because they gave away a small percent of their profits to content makers via ads. Other companies were not so lucky to have that privileged access. The images here are a big part of the model, there is no way around it, that huge blob of numbers doesn't build itself from scratch. But i don't know if these lawsuits have much merit. There is so much money in AI that these companies can forgo scraping, and instead send thousands of people to take photos of pretty much every artwork for themselves.
• foundart 4y ago
  An AI "student" which can be used to infinitely scale production of derivative works can easily be used to create works that are copyright violations. It can also be used to create works that are probably not copyright violations and yet seem to be unfair because they deliver large economic benefits to the deployers of the AI while relying on the uncompensated creativity of the original artists. The interesting questions to me here are: 1. Should we attempt to modify copyright law to reflect this sense of unfairness? 2. Is it even possible to do so?
• imgabe 4y ago
  Every time you post an image on the Internet, you grant a license for people to make copies of it. Facebook, Instagram, I'm sure DeviantArt and any other site that hosts images has language to this effect in their terms and conditions. It is necessary for a copy to be made in order to transmit the image to a client for anyone to view it. If Stable Diffusion and Midjourney viewing the images is a violation of copyright, then so is Google Image search and everyone with a web browser viewing any non-public domain image on the Internet.
• cateye 4y ago
  https://donotpay.com/ https://donotpay.com/ should be involved in this case :)
• fab1an 4y ago
  Hoping for a quick sane ruling here. The whole thing is written in a way that clearly isn't interested in the fundamental reality of the technology, and calling it a "collage tool" is just manipulatively wrong.
• kklemon 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_weavers%27_uprising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_weavers%27_uprising
• nonbirithm 4y ago
  At the point that a program that could instantly copy the style of your favorite artist within half an hour was invented, a lawsuit being filed against its creators was inevitable. And I'm not sure what humanity can do to just not invent Stable Diffusion. The math is impeccable, and the results speak for themselves, and it's convinced a lot of people. It's angered many others for understandable reasons, and has the potential to cause harm. Financially yes, but also (and I think more importantly) in a spiritual sense - setting the standards of millions of people that art can be created better and faster by a non-human entity, and that humans are meant to be preempted at their passions if something more cost-efficient comes along. So how could this situation have been reasonably avoided? Was it meant to be avoided? Even supposing this lawsuit succeeds and Stability AI is dissolved, it's not going to change the fact that people are going to keep using Stable Diffusion anyway, even if people stop themselves from talking about it in the open. Another thing I've been mulling about is the negative effects of new technologies could be amplified if those technologies can be completely controlled by an independent person. As an example, 3D-printed gun are considered less dangerous than traditionally manufactured guns, but there was the incident where Shinzo Abe was assassinated using a homemade gun in spite of the extremely strict gun control measures in Japan. I think the conversation about that kind of danger would be intensely revisited if just anyone has the ability to manufacture a more efficient weapon using only things they can buy themselves. Giving away the 8 gigabytes of Stable Diffusion for free with the means to run it on anyone's computer means that the harms that many people perceive about AI-generated art are going to exist forever. There is no solution to the problem now, only ideological differences to be repeated forever. To those that are against it, art style appropriation is now a mathematically defined fact, published as replicable research. If the progress in generative art today breaks the spirits of artists, the small hope for me is that at least it was a technology that's unlikely to cause mass deaths or destruction. I have to wonder if humanity will be ready when that time does come for a different breakthrough. AI art at this stage can already cause mass die-offs of motivation and attention spans.
• rich_sasha 4y ago
  It feels like "used to train NN" is not well covered by copyright. It assumes people will either just look at a piece of art, or copy it verbatim (or near enough). Do artists mind a human browsing their work, or buying it? Not at all. Probably even learning from it is fine. But "thanks for your hard work, my AI has it from here" seems justifiably objectionable for an artist, who would reasonably expect to charge money for this. I feel for the creators. I'm glad AI is making progress. Not sure how the lawsuit will go.
• Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I keep getting reminded of the Tom Scott near-future video on how lawyers end up ruining the singularity. [1] As the line between artificial neural nets and natural neural nets continue to blur, surely the same rules should apply to both? Of course the counter-argument "some NNs are somehow different than others based on color [2]" walks you straight into an ongoing ethical minefield in the social sciences and biology. It's certainly going to be interesting times. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E Tom Scott, how lawyers ruined the singularity [2] by analogy to https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 what color are your bits
  • puppydups 4y ago
    >>I keep getting reminded of the Tom Scott near-future video on how lawyers end up ruining the singularity If you think that this tech is remotely close to anything resembling general intelligence or a singularity, I've got an image model to sell you.
    • fritzo 4y ago
      general intelligence is just an ecosystem of specialized models stitched together, interacting. if laws prohibit these components, then the system can't be built legally
• cf141q5325 4y ago
  I think the Andy Warhol appropriation debate is worth mentioning here.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• puppydups 4y ago
  Does anyone else think it's grifty for a company to scrape up your (and other's) intellectual property, reconfigure it, and then attempt to sell it back to you for just $9.99 via dreambooth?
  • somethingor 4y ago
    Depends on if “attempt to sell it back to you” is an accurate framing
    • puppydups 4y ago
      I think it is. Take away the training and there is no product.
  • ImprobableTruth 4y ago
    If they also give you the means to just do it yourself? Imo something like dall-e or midjourney is much worse.
    • puppydups 4y ago
      They are all horrible, including the open source one (SD). I would never wish MY OWN work to be stolen and used, so why would I ever use a tool that stole someone else's work? I try not to be hypocritical.
      • rvz 4y ago
        It is like someone breaking into your house, taking all of your furniture, works, and assets without your permission and then selling it back to you or to the highest bidder. It seems almost everyone here in this thread is fine with such a grift on digital artists but when it is Copilot or ChatGPT; two years ago it was: 'Hardly going to compete against developers', with ChatGPT it became 'But juniors are only affected, not us seniors' and with GPT-4 + Copilot it will be: 'Please stop using AI code and sue GitHub now!' Obviously this wasn't the case with Dance Diffusion (music version of Stable Diffusion) and that was trained on public domain music or the permission of musicians. It is almost as if that they knew if they did train it on copyrighted music and released it as open source, Stability AI would be out of business before they could counter the lawsuit. [0] It is indeed a grift and the legal system will catch up on both Copilot and Stable Diffusion on using for copyrighted content in the training set of their AI models. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-diffusion/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-d...
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Cat is out of the bag running natively on millions of devices, no ctrl-Z here.
• rainy_day_sun 4y ago
  I have an image I made with SD and it added the Getty image watermark.
• wskish 4y ago
  We should see a lot of "transformative fair use" defenses for all generative model modalities. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transf... It's a fun twist that many even have "transformer" in the name.
• pierotofy 4y ago
  Perhaps this will signal that it's time to start training these generative AI algorithms on freely licensed data instead of grabbing whatever is available.
  • barney54 4y ago
    Why?
• IAmGraydon 4y ago
  This just wreaks of the Luddism of the 19th century all over again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite Good luck stopping the inertia of progress.
  • dmm 4y ago
    I hope not. The Luddites were defeated by killing them. > At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula.
• GaggiX 4y ago
  I read so much misinformation that it's incredible, somehow they seem to believe that diffusion model store compressed images from the training dataset and that they interpolate between two samples.
• Imnimo 4y ago
  They've got a copy of a figure from the original diffusion paper, showing a diffusion process on a spiral dataset. They seem to completely misunderstand it. The figure does not show image diffusion, rather it shows a diffusion process in which each data item is a 2D point. The figure is showing diffusion on an entire dataset and demonstrating that it can approximately reconstruct the spiral-shaped distribution. I'm surprised they couldn't find someone with even a rudimentary understanding of diffusion models to review this.
  • grandmczeb 4y ago
    Wow, not only do they get this wrong, it’s the core example they use to demonstrate copying.
    • Imnimo 4y ago
      Yeah, and their next figure isn't any better. They show a latent space interpolation figure from DDPM, and they seem to think this is how Diffusion models produce a "collage" (as they describe the process). Of course, this figure has nothing to do with how image generation is actually performed. It's just an experiment for the purpose of the paper to demonstrate that the latent space is structured. In fact, this only works because the source images are given as input to the forward process - thus, the details being interpolated are from the inputs not from the model. If you look at Appendix Figure 9 from the same paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.11239.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.11239.pdf) it is clear what's going on. Only when you take a smaller number of diffusing (q) steps can you successfully interpolate. When you take a large number of diffusing steps (top row of figure 9), all of the information from the input images is lost, and the "interpolations" are now just novel samples. It's very hard for me to find a reason to include Figure 8 but not Figure 9 in their lawsuit that isn't either a complete lack of understanding, or intentional deception.
  • AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    I don’t know if it’s that they lack the understanding or they aim to avoid that understanding because it largely invalidates the lawsuit. In general taking abstract concepts and styles from things is acceptable, not protected by copyright, and crucial to creative exploration. The burden of proof is on those claiming SD is not doing this.
• thway15269037 4y ago
  Thank god lots of models are already public plus more are on their way. Can't put genie in the bottle, not this one.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• goldenshale 4y ago
  Lame. These are scared opportunists who are going to screw things up for everyone because they are afraid of the unknown. Seriously, do something new and creative if you are an artist. Design your way into relevance.
• nxmnxm99 4y ago
  Where there is progress there are yuppity losers sueing it into oblivion
• rsuelzer 4y ago
  What is the pay structure for the attorneys bringing this lawsuit? My guess is they will get about 40 percent of any monetary awards.
• AlessioGr 4y ago
  Why don't they challenge openai or midjourney? But no, they decide to challenge one of the few open and moral alternatives out there.
• datacruncher01 4y ago
  I get their argument on the basis of the idea. But I think it's not valid when you apply the scale of the stable diffusion model. They show a case of a simple spiral and that the technology can create a similar looking spiral calling it a copy. But when you factor in the billions of trained images, the amount of specific information from all of these sources is like 1 byte. They are going to have to show that the model copies ALL source images with perfect retention, and they are 100 percent full of shit if they think they can demonstrate that. What you may find is that some models out there are heavily biased on source images and can produce some outputs that are too similar to original works, in that case, there may be an issue.
• SillyUsername 4y ago
  "we’ve filed a class-action law­suit against Sta­bil­ity AI, DeviantArt, and Mid­jour­ney for their use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion" Good luck with that - DevianArt doesn't produce work, just hosts it, which is mostly indeterminable from human input, and Midjourney use their own engine trained on different data. Advertising the fact you've not done adequate due diligence before public announcement of intent to sue doesn't (imho) give me the best impression of your lawyering chops.