8 ms·

Stable Diffusion Frivolous Litigation

32 points by ronsor 4y ago

colesantiago 4y ago
These tired arguments for AI art are irrelevant and all over the place. Nobody cares about the model output or an academic explanation of how diffusion works. It is all about the training data. The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission and violating the copyright. I've just searched the dataset to find mickey mouse, marvel and some disney characters images in the training dataset. So then it is trained on copyrighted material, and Midjourney and especially SD are building and profit SaaS on the backs of the work without permission or compensation. Even that alone is a valid reason litigation, and I wouldn't be surprised if Disney joins in against this or asks SD to remove them from the next model release. Just do the following: 1. Just ask for permission to use the artists work? 2. Train on public domain images, there are plenty out there. It's that simple.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  > artists had their art trained on without their permission and violating the copyright Okay, I'll bite. Since when does copyright require permission to learn from the copyrighted material? I don't need your permission for that, and neither should an AI. Or alternately, assuming you reject the "human-AI analogy": since when do I need permission to collect statistical information about copyrighted material? Should Disney be able to sue me for telling you how much screen time Jafar had in Disney's Aladdin, or what percentage of pixels in the first 5 minutes were a shade of blue?
  - johnnymorgan 4y ago
    This, training is passive knowledge. Basically this is saying if you look at it, and then learn to draw you owe Disney money. Disney would love that but it's ludicrous
  - Snild 4y ago
    Machines are not people, and don't enjoy the same rights as us. (And I would not call it "learning", at least not in the same meaning of the word as for humans, but that's a more philosophical discussion.)
    - stale2002 4y ago
      > Machines are not people, and don't enjoy the same rights as us Fortunately, a machine isn't doing anything on its own. It is the person who uses the machine that is doing something. And it is the human who is allowed to use tools to create transformative work.
  - visarga 4y ago
    Nobody's arguing that near-duplications or trademark violations are not bad. But I think they want a broader power grab - to extend copyright to art styles. In other words to protect not just the expression but also the ideas themselves. They want something like patent + trademark + copyright all in one.
  - karpierz 4y ago
    Copyright requires permission to produce derivative works. If I take a picture of Mickey Mouse, add 1 to each RGB value, it would still be covered under copyright. I think the term 'learn' is doing the heavy lifting in your argument here. Specifically, your argument seems to be: 1. We use the term 'learn' as shorthand for 'fitting a machine learning algorithm to data'. 2. We also use the term 'learn' for a human looking at copyrighted material to practice their craft. 3. Humans using copyrighted material to learn doesn't make their works derivative. 4. Therefore, machine learning algorithms that are trained on copyrighted material aren't producing derivative works. This argument holds an implicit assumption: if we use the same term for a process, it should covered by the same rules/laws. Which I think isn't very sound.
    - andybak 4y ago
      I'm not sure "derivative work" has the legal meaning that would support your argument. To quote Wikipedia: > In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of an original The key part here is "major copyrightable".
      - karpierz 4y ago
        Can you be more specific? I'm not sure how this affects the argument I've laid out. To be clear, my argument doesn't show that statistical generative approaches to art are violating copyright by using copyrighted data. It only shows that the argument "humans learn on copyrighted stuff therefore it's legal for AI to do it" isn't a sound argument. Another argument that relies on the definition of derivative work might be able to show that you can train a model on copyrighted data without producing works that violate copyright.
        andybak 4y ago
        I might have misunderstood you. "humans learn on copyrighted stuff therefore it's legal for AI to do it" - Learning can never be a violation of copyright. A work (digital or physical) can potentially violate copyright. So there are two potential "work" here: 1. The model itself 2. Images created with the model. I would argue that (1) can't violate copyright as it's not a derivative work (2) may or may not violate copyright but if it does, then it does so to exactly the same degree as it would if it wasn't AI generated. In other words "You're not allowed to plagarize copyrighted works no matter what production method you use".
  - fxtentacle 4y ago
    The illegal part is actually SD selling the images which contain copyrighted material. If you were to paint Mickey and sell those paintings, Disney might sue you. Why should SD (the company) be allowed to do that?
    - andybak 4y ago
      I don't understand this comment. SD aren't selling images of Mickey Mouse. Can you explain your point a bit more clearly?
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      Can you link to an example where Stability AI are selling images of Mickey Mouse? Sounds pretty hard to believe tbh, but you seem confident.
      - fxtentacle 4y ago
        When you type in "Mickey Mouse" as a prompt and pay for their generation tool, they are in effect selling you a Mickey Mouse image.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    You definitely need permission to make copies of people's art on your computers to use whilst learning though (copyright holders tend to be OK with or completely unaware of that, but it's a right they reserve) More to the point, this feels like the "have your cake and eat it" of legal arguments. If we're going to anthropomorphise AI to the extent we argue storing data in its data corpus without authorisation is just like allowing a human to look at your legally owned stuff, and reinterpreting that data in a [sometimes not particularly] lossy fashion as a set of weights and biases is just like a human learning, we should probably follow the "AI is just like a person" argument through to its logical conclusion and hold it legally responsible for not respecting copyright law if it ever produces outputs with trademarked images or uncanny resemblance to copyrighted material that aren't deemed "fair use", just like a person would be. (tbf, it's not too hard to imagine a world in which ChatGPT says "I'm sorry, but I am not able to write stories involving Mickey Mouse, because Mickey Mouse is the intellectual property of the Disney Corporation. Respecting intellectual property rights is very important", and I'm not sure that's an improvement...)
  - amelius 4y ago
    > Since when does copyright require permission to learn from the copyrighted material? Ah, but you are anthropomorphizing an algorithm. What is happening inside the computer you call learning, but it is just some mathematical function. Other people might not agree that this is learning, and might call it "mixing" or "copying".
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      Fine then. Say I went through Star Wars and counted how many blue pixels there were in each frame and published a list of the counts. Would you claim that list would be infringing? Doing statistical analysis does not violate copyright, or Google would have to shut down tomorrow.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        > Fine then. Say I went through Star Wars and counted how many blue pixels there were in each frame and published a list of the counts. Would you claim that list would be infringing? If you were instructed to counted blue pixels by somebody who used your lists for a SaaS product which could generate high fidelity representations of Death Stars, wookies and Harrison Ford (someone else probably counted the other colour pixels!) every time a customer of theirs typed in "Star Wars", quite possibly.
    - johnthewise 4y ago
      The algorithm itself tries to learn to remove noise. This part of algorithm is undeniably a learning process, evidenced by the fact that it gets better along the training process. It just happens to be that, in order to remove noise, you need to have an understanding of the underlying thing(probability distribution), so in order to learn to remove noise, it needs to learn the images. I don't understand how a mathematical function by definition can't learn, since it's just a language we use to describe what's going on.
- srackey 4y ago
  Copyrighted training data is used in the training of a model, but doesn’t exist within the model weights in any real sense. Doesn’t seem different to if I hired an artist to make me a painting of a Disney character (I’m sure there exists copyrighted material in their training dataset).
  - jounker 4y ago
    If it generates an artists signature when producing something in that artists style, then I’d argue against that idea. And frequently enough, they will generate a recognizable signature.
    - srackey 4y ago
      This is just because it’s still a little dumb. If I hired a human artist to produce something in another other artists style and it copied their signature, what is that considered to be? Artist stupidity imo. Or at least a failure of communication. Models will get better and stop doing that.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  A machine is copying the image when learning from it no more than a brain is copying an image by trying to memorize it. In either case you are never going to get the same image out. I am not aware of copyright asserting itself over the perception of anything. Plus, regardless of poorly-enforced legal 'realities', you cannot control something once it is out in the public space. It may as well be public domain. Artists are learning first-hand that they have no control, as it should be. I say this as an artist myself, either I release my work publicly and it will do with it what it wishes (paying me would be nice, but really difficult to reasonably expect), or I hoard my art privately and it dies when I die, unseen and unperceived. The problem is the computer people have been dealing with bots for a while, we have tools and years of best practice to deal with it. Artists don't, this is new to them, and frankly a lot of them like to get wrapped up in emotions and do not give a damn about technical nuances -- as you correctly assert. So they will generally repeat whatever trite line sounds best. (You can see this firsthand on with the copypasted memes on facebook/reddit) How many of these guys truly understand the issue? Or are they just the next generation of luddites trying to fight off the next printing press or camera?
  - arlcode 4y ago
    You can certainly require fees to be paid. That wouldn't be unusal. Collection agencies are a thing and laws can be adopted to account for AI. Then it's pay x amount of money to use generative art. And SAAS services can be required to collect those. Self hosted Setups can come later.
    - pdntspa 4y ago
      No, you can't require fees to be paid. That is my point. You can try -- all of entertainment certainly does with DRM and all these stupids rental models for everything. They can come up with registries and agencies to handle "collections", but all of this is toothless if I can acquire the bits and do whatever I want outside of their purview. If I can find a way to view the artwork I can do what I wish with the knowledge and emotions that I gained from it, and there is nothing you can do to stop me. This is not so different from AI learning, the exact images are not stored in the model. Neither are they "compressed". You cannot get the same exact image out that you put in. People need to get over this awful model of rent-seeking and collections. There are always other ways to monetize.
- andybak 4y ago
  > The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission Yes. > and violating the copyright. No.
- c7b 4y ago
  > violating the copyright that's a personal opinion, not a legal fact. until we don't have court rulings on this matter, all legal statements are opinions. in order to have a civilized debate, we should be careful about separating opinions and facts, and clearly marking the former as such.
- visarga 4y ago
  > Nobody cares about the model output > The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission Interesting that you care about the training data but not the generated images. The only explanation I found is that you want to stop the "evil" from the root and have the models unaware of your style. Do you believe that the style of an artist who is not included in the diffusion training set can't be replicated? No style is actually outside the scope of the model after it has learned the first few thousand styles. They become a map that will reveal every other style.
- niemandhier 4y ago
  That just Google books, Google image search and Google news all over again…
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Your argument would make Google illegal -- they are copying and indexing other people's content (including images, as it happens), to make a profit, on the backs of other people's work, without a license or permission. But the courts have already ruled that this is not the case. Your argument is based on what makes sense to you, but not seemingly informed by actual copyright law. It is harder and harder to get "what makes sense to me" to be consistent as digital technology changes the landscape, that is true. Not as a matter of law, but just your own moral sense, I'm curious if you think web-crawling for indexes for web searches (including image searches) ought to be legal. And if so, what's the difference?
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    As my wife keeps pointing out to me when I incessantly point out that “people on the internet are wrong about copyright”… who cares? The courts certainly don’t.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Courts have ruled against Google caching and displaying content in search timelines before. Google vs NewsCorp ultimately ended with Google paying NewsCorp license fees to index its content! But most people haven't sued because they actually want to be indexed by Google (and Googlebot respects robots.txt if they don't) But Google search does not use images for the same purpose, and does not sell access to the images, and at present most AI models don't offer an opt-out, so the copyright implications are different (most logically, indexing and displaying an image with tacit permission and a backlink on an ad-supported web page is not the same as selling derivative works based on an image). By extension, they are not necessarily the same for StableDiffusion as they are for DALL-E, or for LLM models as they are for generative image models or licensed codebases, and copyright law has never been and probably never will be applied evenly across different jurisdictions, mediums and even individual cases.
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      I can't find any lawsuit between News Corp and Google. In what country? Google did agree to some kind of paid agreement with News Corp in 2001, according to news coverage at the time in part to avoid the threat of legislation in Australia that might have required Google to pay for content to index it. (No such legislation was passed in Australia, let alone the USA). One USA case from back in the day that ruled that Google Indexing (and caching) was fair use, was Field v. Google, from 2006. http://www.eff.org/IP/blake_v_google/google_nevada_order.pdf http://www.eff.org/IP/blake_v_google/google_nevada_order.pdf Another USA case that ruled that Google Image indexing, and using thumbnails in search results, was fair use was Perfect 10 v. Google (2007). https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/2007%20Perfect%2010%20Abridged.pdf https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/2007%20Perfect%2... It's true it hasn't been super extensively litigated, and never made it to the supreme court. Perhaps because in fairly short order content owners realized they actually wanted to be indexed in google. And because Google (if not everyone) would respect a robots.txt to keep them out if they didn't. The Google Books case is also probably relevant. (Which Google also, eventually, won). There are other cases not specifically involving Google that are relevant, one for example with an index of tv news broadcasts that provided keyword search and let users view clips. The court ruled this was fair use too. Fox News v. TVEYES, Inc., 43 F. Supp. 3d 379 (S.D. N.Y. 2014). I don't think I can find any USA cases that suggest indexing for a search engine would be a copyright violation and not fair use. Let alone against Google specifically. When you say courts have ruled against Google, can you cite any particular cases? Maybe they were from other jurisdictions than USA? Or cases relevant to this present topic even if not about search engines? And yet, GP's description applies just as much to google indexing images. Google makes money off of a search index that copies copyrighted content without explicit permission or compensation. Still, you are right that other factors may be different; it requires an argument that goes beyond GP's, and is actually based on the law. In the USA, where OP suit is filed, I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but I think these image AI's are going to have a pretty good case for fair use, even if it what they did counts as "making a copy" (which I think isn't totally clear). It is a very transformative use. I think convincing a court that the AI's will result in lost revenue (for the specific works used as training data, not in general for the field) would probably be necessary, but not sufficient, to overcome a fair use defense -- and I don't think that argument is even a slam dunk. And is still just one factor in fair use; the transformative nature of the use has lately been given a lot of weight in the law, and seems pretty overwhelming here. Of course, sometimes courts do surprising things.
- hanoz 4y ago
  Has a child violated copyright when they've watched so much Disney that they can now draw a pretty good likeness of one of their characters in an original pose?
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    probably (but I doubt there is case law here because suing a child for copyright infringement would be a really bad look)
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      Wait. In this analogy, you think that even watching the film counts as copyright infringement? To be clear, stability have not used SD to generate an image which is infringing, they have merely trained a model which someone else could use to generate (allegedly) infringing material.
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        no. the problem in this analogy would be the copying. i.e. making the drawing
        sebzim4500 4y ago
        But Stability hasn't done that so what's with the lawsuit?
    - deleted 4y ago
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  - jMyles 4y ago
    There seems to be a sockpuppet constituency desperately trying to sell "yes" as an answer to this question. It's hard to see how the endgame of this nonsense is anything but total thought control (couched with semantic distinctions between "thought" as it occurs in your biomass and "thought" as simulated in an electronic device).
  - 4y ago
CppViking 4y ago
If the goal of this website was to convey information, it failed for me because I have no idea in which order to read the columns of text. Why couldn't they just make a simple page or article?
- c7b 4y ago
  The website seems to strongly assume that you are already familiar with this site: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ I stumbled a bit initially too, but it is in fact a reasonably readable [0] point-by-point response to the statements on the first site. They should maybe just add a landing page or a top section to explain what they're doing here. [0] edit: on desktop, on mobile it looks pretty bad for me. shouldn't have been too hard to make this responsive I guess, just put the sections and reply below one another
  - andybak 4y ago
    They should also run a spellchecker over it.
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srackey 4y ago
It is too late. Sorry artists but it’s over. These models can be trained cheaply(compared to a model like GPT-3), run on consumer GPUs, and are open source. Even if somehow Stable Diffusion got forced to take it down, it’s already out! Will be available with BitTorrent forever. Stable Diffusion could be stopped by US copyright law, but there will be 100 Chinese and Russian startups, who will develop even better models and not give a fuck. This is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. Adapt or die!
- andybak 4y ago
  This is not mentioned enough and it's hard to think of an outcome to any legal action that would fix the things that traditional artists are asking to be fixed. And even if there was an effective legal block on allegedly infringing models - an "IP clean" AI model would on the whole be equally disruptive. There's enough material out there in the public domain to create effective image generation models. It might not match the style of living artists very well, but that's not really the thing that's going to be the real problem.
- deleted 4y ago
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- fxtentacle 4y ago
  You could say the same about any JPEG on the internet. Yet artists successfully recover licensing fees for those. It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too.
  - andybak 4y ago
    Which would be fine and not an issue. Plagarism is already handled by copyright law. What won't happen is "x in the style of y" suddenly becoming an enforceable infringement (whether AI produced or not)
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    >It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too. Then companies will just clean-room the thing by getting tens of thousands of developing world artists to draw things and generate training data. Combined with all the works out of copyright and those bought from existing licensors will get you probably the same quality models. That costs money but so does GPT-3 and look where we are. There is no getting the cat back in the bag, it's five blocks away with a rocket strapped to it's back.
fdslakfdsjk 4y ago
Context: The page is a response to Matthew Butterick’s arguably frivolous lawsuits against co-pilot and now stable diffusion. (Both websites prominently feature Butterick’s self-portrait and biography, I’m not trying to ad hominem this or anything but it appears to be his personal branding)
siliconc0w 4y ago
INAL but I think the test is does it, "harm the market for or value of X's images" so the information theory of bits and bytes doesn't really matter. I think stable diffusion, chatGPT, or CoPilot may actually fail this test - it depends on much leeway they get for the perceived public benefit and the 'transformative-ness' of this technology. What would be pretty cool would be that if the courts decided open-source = public benefit = acceptable, proprietary for profit platform = no public benefit = unacceptable without consent.
jasonmarks_ 4y ago
> Once again: what works? Copyright law is built around works,[18] and you have yet to show that even your clients, let alone anyone else, has works violated by infringing works that were not sufficiently transformatively different. I messed around with Stable Diffusion and asked it to generate a lacrosse player. In the output image the crosse had a partial unmistakable unique design, too exact to be considered noise. The piece of equipment is the STX Arrow (a one-off design from a few years back). I certainly think you could argue it was not "transformatively different". Again the STX Arrow is literally the only crosse with that particular design AFAIK stable diffusion img: https://twitter.com/jasonmarks__/status/1570893504339116032 https://twitter.com/jasonmarks__/status/1570893504339116032 STX arrow: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/43/9d/e8/439de85ff04ec0f19f8f629209e57657.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/43/9d/e8/439de85ff04ec0f19f8f...
- williamcotton 4y ago
  Cool, so now if you put that image on a t-shirt and sell it online you, and only you, are liable. Are you trying to put the blame on Stable Diffusion for making you choose to publish an image with a trademark?
  - jasonmarks_ 4y ago
    Hi there, just pointing out that I noticed not everything is getting lost in noise.
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    contributory copyright infringement exists
janef0421 4y ago
This seems poorly argued. There's a lot of emphasis on technical minutiae, but the question is whether the way the model embeds and reproduces the features of the input images infringes on copyright. I would think that is more dependent on the capabilities and functions of the models, not the specific mechanism of implementation. Also, the Jevon's paradox bit is a tangent. AI image tools may become widespread, and their use may expand the art market, benefitting artists who make use of them. That is not a relevant point, because the lawsuit is not about the legality of image-generating neural networks; It is about whether using an unlicensed image to train such a model infringes on its copyright. If it was found that it does, then AI art could still transform the art market; All that would change would be that images would need to licensed for training.
DannyBee 4y ago
IP lawyer here: This reads like a bunch of technical arguments that have no interesting legal meaning. You already can't avoid copyright infringement by using statistical distributions whose output is substantially similar to the original. IE Lossy compression does not avoid infringement This is already law. The only question is how far does that reach and where fair use provides a defense to something that would otherwise be infringement. How transformative must something be, etc. The basic test for infringement is access to the work and substantially similar result. Intermediate means do not matter. You could have monkeys whose kids have genes that got passed along that enable them to redraw your work, so that they have no literal knowledge and have never seen it. If the output is the original work, its still infringement. The article also gets wrong that court cases also have been a (reasonable) continuation of plenty of conversations, from civil rights to you name it. I personally am not a fan of this litigation, but this author doesn't make good arguments about it

32 points by ronsor 4y ago

These tired arguments for AI art are irrelevant and all over the place. Nobody cares about the model output or an academic explanation of how diffusion works. It is all about the training data. The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission and violating the copyright. I've just searched the dataset to find mickey mouse, marvel and some disney characters images in the training dataset. So then it is trained on copyrighted material, and Midjourney and especially SD are building and profit SaaS on the backs of the work without permission or compensation. Even that alone is a valid reason litigation, and I wouldn't be surprised if Disney joins in against this or asks SD to remove them from the next model release. Just do the following: 1. Just ask for permission to use the artists work? 2. Train on public domain images, there are plenty out there. It's that simple.

Ajedi32 4y ago
> artists had their art trained on without their permission and violating the copyright Okay, I'll bite. Since when does copyright require permission to learn from the copyrighted material? I don't need your permission for that, and neither should an AI. Or alternately, assuming you reject the "human-AI analogy": since when do I need permission to collect statistical information about copyrighted material? Should Disney be able to sue me for telling you how much screen time Jafar had in Disney's Aladdin, or what percentage of pixels in the first 5 minutes were a shade of blue?
- johnnymorgan 4y ago
  This, training is passive knowledge. Basically this is saying if you look at it, and then learn to draw you owe Disney money. Disney would love that but it's ludicrous
- Snild 4y ago
  Machines are not people, and don't enjoy the same rights as us. (And I would not call it "learning", at least not in the same meaning of the word as for humans, but that's a more philosophical discussion.)
  - stale2002 4y ago
    > Machines are not people, and don't enjoy the same rights as us Fortunately, a machine isn't doing anything on its own. It is the person who uses the machine that is doing something. And it is the human who is allowed to use tools to create transformative work.
- visarga 4y ago
  Nobody's arguing that near-duplications or trademark violations are not bad. But I think they want a broader power grab - to extend copyright to art styles. In other words to protect not just the expression but also the ideas themselves. They want something like patent + trademark + copyright all in one.
- karpierz 4y ago
  Copyright requires permission to produce derivative works. If I take a picture of Mickey Mouse, add 1 to each RGB value, it would still be covered under copyright. I think the term 'learn' is doing the heavy lifting in your argument here. Specifically, your argument seems to be: 1. We use the term 'learn' as shorthand for 'fitting a machine learning algorithm to data'. 2. We also use the term 'learn' for a human looking at copyrighted material to practice their craft. 3. Humans using copyrighted material to learn doesn't make their works derivative. 4. Therefore, machine learning algorithms that are trained on copyrighted material aren't producing derivative works. This argument holds an implicit assumption: if we use the same term for a process, it should covered by the same rules/laws. Which I think isn't very sound.
  - andybak 4y ago
    I'm not sure "derivative work" has the legal meaning that would support your argument. To quote Wikipedia: > In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of an original The key part here is "major copyrightable".
    - karpierz 4y ago
      Can you be more specific? I'm not sure how this affects the argument I've laid out. To be clear, my argument doesn't show that statistical generative approaches to art are violating copyright by using copyrighted data. It only shows that the argument "humans learn on copyrighted stuff therefore it's legal for AI to do it" isn't a sound argument. Another argument that relies on the definition of derivative work might be able to show that you can train a model on copyrighted data without producing works that violate copyright.
      - andybak 4y ago
        I might have misunderstood you. "humans learn on copyrighted stuff therefore it's legal for AI to do it" - Learning can never be a violation of copyright. A work (digital or physical) can potentially violate copyright. So there are two potential "work" here: 1. The model itself 2. Images created with the model. I would argue that (1) can't violate copyright as it's not a derivative work (2) may or may not violate copyright but if it does, then it does so to exactly the same degree as it would if it wasn't AI generated. In other words "You're not allowed to plagarize copyrighted works no matter what production method you use".
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  The illegal part is actually SD selling the images which contain copyrighted material. If you were to paint Mickey and sell those paintings, Disney might sue you. Why should SD (the company) be allowed to do that?
  - andybak 4y ago
    I don't understand this comment. SD aren't selling images of Mickey Mouse. Can you explain your point a bit more clearly?
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Can you link to an example where Stability AI are selling images of Mickey Mouse? Sounds pretty hard to believe tbh, but you seem confident.
    - fxtentacle 4y ago
      When you type in "Mickey Mouse" as a prompt and pay for their generation tool, they are in effect selling you a Mickey Mouse image.
- notahacker 4y ago
  You definitely need permission to make copies of people's art on your computers to use whilst learning though (copyright holders tend to be OK with or completely unaware of that, but it's a right they reserve) More to the point, this feels like the "have your cake and eat it" of legal arguments. If we're going to anthropomorphise AI to the extent we argue storing data in its data corpus without authorisation is just like allowing a human to look at your legally owned stuff, and reinterpreting that data in a [sometimes not particularly] lossy fashion as a set of weights and biases is just like a human learning, we should probably follow the "AI is just like a person" argument through to its logical conclusion and hold it legally responsible for not respecting copyright law if it ever produces outputs with trademarked images or uncanny resemblance to copyrighted material that aren't deemed "fair use", just like a person would be. (tbf, it's not too hard to imagine a world in which ChatGPT says "I'm sorry, but I am not able to write stories involving Mickey Mouse, because Mickey Mouse is the intellectual property of the Disney Corporation. Respecting intellectual property rights is very important", and I'm not sure that's an improvement...)
- amelius 4y ago
  > Since when does copyright require permission to learn from the copyrighted material? Ah, but you are anthropomorphizing an algorithm. What is happening inside the computer you call learning, but it is just some mathematical function. Other people might not agree that this is learning, and might call it "mixing" or "copying".
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Fine then. Say I went through Star Wars and counted how many blue pixels there were in each frame and published a list of the counts. Would you claim that list would be infringing? Doing statistical analysis does not violate copyright, or Google would have to shut down tomorrow.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      > Fine then. Say I went through Star Wars and counted how many blue pixels there were in each frame and published a list of the counts. Would you claim that list would be infringing? If you were instructed to counted blue pixels by somebody who used your lists for a SaaS product which could generate high fidelity representations of Death Stars, wookies and Harrison Ford (someone else probably counted the other colour pixels!) every time a customer of theirs typed in "Star Wars", quite possibly.
  - johnthewise 4y ago
    The algorithm itself tries to learn to remove noise. This part of algorithm is undeniably a learning process, evidenced by the fact that it gets better along the training process. It just happens to be that, in order to remove noise, you need to have an understanding of the underlying thing(probability distribution), so in order to learn to remove noise, it needs to learn the images. I don't understand how a mathematical function by definition can't learn, since it's just a language we use to describe what's going on.
srackey 4y ago
Copyrighted training data is used in the training of a model, but doesn’t exist within the model weights in any real sense. Doesn’t seem different to if I hired an artist to make me a painting of a Disney character (I’m sure there exists copyrighted material in their training dataset).
- jounker 4y ago
  If it generates an artists signature when producing something in that artists style, then I’d argue against that idea. And frequently enough, they will generate a recognizable signature.
  - srackey 4y ago
    This is just because it’s still a little dumb. If I hired a human artist to produce something in another other artists style and it copied their signature, what is that considered to be? Artist stupidity imo. Or at least a failure of communication. Models will get better and stop doing that.
pdntspa 4y ago
A machine is copying the image when learning from it no more than a brain is copying an image by trying to memorize it. In either case you are never going to get the same image out. I am not aware of copyright asserting itself over the perception of anything. Plus, regardless of poorly-enforced legal 'realities', you cannot control something once it is out in the public space. It may as well be public domain. Artists are learning first-hand that they have no control, as it should be. I say this as an artist myself, either I release my work publicly and it will do with it what it wishes (paying me would be nice, but really difficult to reasonably expect), or I hoard my art privately and it dies when I die, unseen and unperceived. The problem is the computer people have been dealing with bots for a while, we have tools and years of best practice to deal with it. Artists don't, this is new to them, and frankly a lot of them like to get wrapped up in emotions and do not give a damn about technical nuances -- as you correctly assert. So they will generally repeat whatever trite line sounds best. (You can see this firsthand on with the copypasted memes on facebook/reddit) How many of these guys truly understand the issue? Or are they just the next generation of luddites trying to fight off the next printing press or camera?
- arlcode 4y ago
  You can certainly require fees to be paid. That wouldn't be unusal. Collection agencies are a thing and laws can be adopted to account for AI. Then it's pay x amount of money to use generative art. And SAAS services can be required to collect those. Self hosted Setups can come later.
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    No, you can't require fees to be paid. That is my point. You can try -- all of entertainment certainly does with DRM and all these stupids rental models for everything. They can come up with registries and agencies to handle "collections", but all of this is toothless if I can acquire the bits and do whatever I want outside of their purview. If I can find a way to view the artwork I can do what I wish with the knowledge and emotions that I gained from it, and there is nothing you can do to stop me. This is not so different from AI learning, the exact images are not stored in the model. Neither are they "compressed". You cannot get the same exact image out that you put in. People need to get over this awful model of rent-seeking and collections. There are always other ways to monetize.
andybak 4y ago
> The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission Yes. > and violating the copyright. No.
c7b 4y ago
> violating the copyright that's a personal opinion, not a legal fact. until we don't have court rulings on this matter, all legal statements are opinions. in order to have a civilized debate, we should be careful about separating opinions and facts, and clearly marking the former as such.
visarga 4y ago
> Nobody cares about the model output > The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission Interesting that you care about the training data but not the generated images. The only explanation I found is that you want to stop the "evil" from the root and have the models unaware of your style. Do you believe that the style of an artist who is not included in the diffusion training set can't be replicated? No style is actually outside the scope of the model after it has learned the first few thousand styles. They become a map that will reveal every other style.
niemandhier 4y ago
That just Google books, Google image search and Google news all over again…
jrochkind1 4y ago
Your argument would make Google illegal -- they are copying and indexing other people's content (including images, as it happens), to make a profit, on the backs of other people's work, without a license or permission. But the courts have already ruled that this is not the case. Your argument is based on what makes sense to you, but not seemingly informed by actual copyright law. It is harder and harder to get "what makes sense to me" to be consistent as digital technology changes the landscape, that is true. Not as a matter of law, but just your own moral sense, I'm curious if you think web-crawling for indexes for web searches (including image searches) ought to be legal. And if so, what's the difference?
- williamcotton 4y ago
  As my wife keeps pointing out to me when I incessantly point out that “people on the internet are wrong about copyright”… who cares? The courts certainly don’t.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Courts have ruled against Google caching and displaying content in search timelines before. Google vs NewsCorp ultimately ended with Google paying NewsCorp license fees to index its content! But most people haven't sued because they actually want to be indexed by Google (and Googlebot respects robots.txt if they don't) But Google search does not use images for the same purpose, and does not sell access to the images, and at present most AI models don't offer an opt-out, so the copyright implications are different (most logically, indexing and displaying an image with tacit permission and a backlink on an ad-supported web page is not the same as selling derivative works based on an image). By extension, they are not necessarily the same for StableDiffusion as they are for DALL-E, or for LLM models as they are for generative image models or licensed codebases, and copyright law has never been and probably never will be applied evenly across different jurisdictions, mediums and even individual cases.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    I can't find any lawsuit between News Corp and Google. In what country? Google did agree to some kind of paid agreement with News Corp in 2001, according to news coverage at the time in part to avoid the threat of legislation in Australia that might have required Google to pay for content to index it. (No such legislation was passed in Australia, let alone the USA). One USA case from back in the day that ruled that Google Indexing (and caching) was fair use, was Field v. Google, from 2006. http://www.eff.org/IP/blake_v_google/google_nevada_order.pdf http://www.eff.org/IP/blake_v_google/google_nevada_order.pdf Another USA case that ruled that Google Image indexing, and using thumbnails in search results, was fair use was Perfect 10 v. Google (2007). https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/2007%20Perfect%2010%20Abridged.pdf https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/2007%20Perfect%2... It's true it hasn't been super extensively litigated, and never made it to the supreme court. Perhaps because in fairly short order content owners realized they actually wanted to be indexed in google. And because Google (if not everyone) would respect a robots.txt to keep them out if they didn't. The Google Books case is also probably relevant. (Which Google also, eventually, won). There are other cases not specifically involving Google that are relevant, one for example with an index of tv news broadcasts that provided keyword search and let users view clips. The court ruled this was fair use too. Fox News v. TVEYES, Inc., 43 F. Supp. 3d 379 (S.D. N.Y. 2014). I don't think I can find any USA cases that suggest indexing for a search engine would be a copyright violation and not fair use. Let alone against Google specifically. When you say courts have ruled against Google, can you cite any particular cases? Maybe they were from other jurisdictions than USA? Or cases relevant to this present topic even if not about search engines? And yet, GP's description applies just as much to google indexing images. Google makes money off of a search index that copies copyrighted content without explicit permission or compensation. Still, you are right that other factors may be different; it requires an argument that goes beyond GP's, and is actually based on the law. In the USA, where OP suit is filed, I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but I think these image AI's are going to have a pretty good case for fair use, even if it what they did counts as "making a copy" (which I think isn't totally clear). It is a very transformative use. I think convincing a court that the AI's will result in lost revenue (for the specific works used as training data, not in general for the field) would probably be necessary, but not sufficient, to overcome a fair use defense -- and I don't think that argument is even a slam dunk. And is still just one factor in fair use; the transformative nature of the use has lately been given a lot of weight in the law, and seems pretty overwhelming here. Of course, sometimes courts do surprising things.
hanoz 4y ago
Has a child violated copyright when they've watched so much Disney that they can now draw a pretty good likeness of one of their characters in an original pose?
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  probably (but I doubt there is case law here because suing a child for copyright infringement would be a really bad look)
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Wait. In this analogy, you think that even watching the film counts as copyright infringement? To be clear, stability have not used SD to generate an image which is infringing, they have merely trained a model which someone else could use to generate (allegedly) infringing material.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      no. the problem in this analogy would be the copying. i.e. making the drawing
      - sebzim4500 4y ago
        But Stability hasn't done that so what's with the lawsuit?
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- jMyles 4y ago
  There seems to be a sockpuppet constituency desperately trying to sell "yes" as an answer to this question. It's hard to see how the endgame of this nonsense is anything but total thought control (couched with semantic distinctions between "thought" as it occurs in your biomass and "thought" as simulated in an electronic device).
- 4y ago

CppViking 4y ago

If the goal of this website was to convey information, it failed for me because I have no idea in which order to read the columns of text. Why couldn't they just make a simple page or article?

c7b 4y ago
The website seems to strongly assume that you are already familiar with this site: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/ I stumbled a bit initially too, but it is in fact a reasonably readable [0] point-by-point response to the statements on the first site. They should maybe just add a landing page or a top section to explain what they're doing here. [0] edit: on desktop, on mobile it looks pretty bad for me. shouldn't have been too hard to make this responsive I guess, just put the sections and reply below one another
- andybak 4y ago
  They should also run a spellchecker over it.
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srackey 4y ago

It is too late. Sorry artists but it’s over. These models can be trained cheaply(compared to a model like GPT-3), run on consumer GPUs, and are open source. Even if somehow Stable Diffusion got forced to take it down, it’s already out! Will be available with BitTorrent forever. Stable Diffusion could be stopped by US copyright law, but there will be 100 Chinese and Russian startups, who will develop even better models and not give a fuck. This is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. Adapt or die!

andybak 4y ago
This is not mentioned enough and it's hard to think of an outcome to any legal action that would fix the things that traditional artists are asking to be fixed. And even if there was an effective legal block on allegedly infringing models - an "IP clean" AI model would on the whole be equally disruptive. There's enough material out there in the public domain to create effective image generation models. It might not match the style of living artists very well, but that's not really the thing that's going to be the real problem.
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fxtentacle 4y ago
You could say the same about any JPEG on the internet. Yet artists successfully recover licensing fees for those. It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too.
- andybak 4y ago
  Which would be fine and not an issue. Plagarism is already handled by copyright law. What won't happen is "x in the style of y" suddenly becoming an enforceable infringement (whether AI produced or not)
- marcinzm 4y ago
  >It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too. Then companies will just clean-room the thing by getting tens of thousands of developing world artists to draw things and generate training data. Combined with all the works out of copyright and those bought from existing licensors will get you probably the same quality models. That costs money but so does GPT-3 and look where we are. There is no getting the cat back in the bag, it's five blocks away with a rocket strapped to it's back.

fdslakfdsjk 4y ago

Context: The page is a response to Matthew Butterick’s arguably frivolous lawsuits against co-pilot and now stable diffusion. (Both websites prominently feature Butterick’s self-portrait and biography, I’m not trying to ad hominem this or anything but it appears to be his personal branding)

siliconc0w 4y ago

INAL but I think the test is does it, "harm the market for or value of X's images" so the information theory of bits and bytes doesn't really matter. I think stable diffusion, chatGPT, or CoPilot may actually fail this test - it depends on much leeway they get for the perceived public benefit and the 'transformative-ness' of this technology. What would be pretty cool would be that if the courts decided open-source = public benefit = acceptable, proprietary for profit platform = no public benefit = unacceptable without consent.

jasonmarks_ 4y ago

> Once again: what works? Copyright law is built around works,[18] and you have yet to show that even your clients, let alone anyone else, has works violated by infringing works that were not sufficiently transformatively different. I messed around with Stable Diffusion and asked it to generate a lacrosse player. In the output image the crosse had a partial unmistakable unique design, too exact to be considered noise. The piece of equipment is the STX Arrow (a one-off design from a few years back). I certainly think you could argue it was not "transformatively different". Again the STX Arrow is literally the only crosse with that particular design AFAIK stable diffusion img: https://twitter.com/jasonmarks__/status/1570893504339116032 https://twitter.com/jasonmarks__/status/1570893504339116032 STX arrow: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/43/9d/e8/439de85ff04ec0f19f8f629209e57657.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/43/9d/e8/439de85ff04ec0f19f8f...

williamcotton 4y ago
Cool, so now if you put that image on a t-shirt and sell it online you, and only you, are liable. Are you trying to put the blame on Stable Diffusion for making you choose to publish an image with a trademark?
- jasonmarks_ 4y ago
  Hi there, just pointing out that I noticed not everything is getting lost in noise.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  contributory copyright infringement exists

janef0421 4y ago

This seems poorly argued. There's a lot of emphasis on technical minutiae, but the question is whether the way the model embeds and reproduces the features of the input images infringes on copyright. I would think that is more dependent on the capabilities and functions of the models, not the specific mechanism of implementation. Also, the Jevon's paradox bit is a tangent. AI image tools may become widespread, and their use may expand the art market, benefitting artists who make use of them. That is not a relevant point, because the lawsuit is not about the legality of image-generating neural networks; It is about whether using an unlicensed image to train such a model infringes on its copyright. If it was found that it does, then AI art could still transform the art market; All that would change would be that images would need to licensed for training.

DannyBee 4y ago

IP lawyer here: This reads like a bunch of technical arguments that have no interesting legal meaning. You already can't avoid copyright infringement by using statistical distributions whose output is substantially similar to the original. IE Lossy compression does not avoid infringement This is already law. The only question is how far does that reach and where fair use provides a defense to something that would otherwise be infringement. How transformative must something be, etc. The basic test for infringement is access to the work and substantially similar result. Intermediate means do not matter. You could have monkeys whose kids have genes that got passed along that enable them to redraw your work, so that they have no literal knowledge and have never seen it. If the output is the original work, its still infringement. The article also gets wrong that court cases also have been a (reasonable) continuation of plenty of conversations, from civil rights to you name it. I personally am not a fan of this litigation, but this author doesn't make good arguments about it