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Does that really matter if you can easily generate something that comes pretty close (at least in a superficial way) to the artist by just entering the artists

Does that really matter if you can easily generate something that comes pretty close (at least in a superficial way) to the artist by just entering the artists name with your description?

jaggs 4y ago
That's a really good question, and it's key to the issue at hand I think. Any competent artist can create a lookalike style of another artist at will. It's just a matter of looking at the paint type, brushes, materials, strokes, composition, etc and copying that. In fact, here's Vincent Van Gogh copying other artists of his time - https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/van-gogh-copy/ https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/van-gogh-copy/ . How does this differ from a machine doing the output? Apart from speed and flexibility?
- diemes1 4y ago
  Van Gogh's studies of existing works of the time still maintain his 'style', his brush strokes, use of color, rendering of form. No matter how many times he copies another's work he's still Van Gogh and his work expresses and reflects who he 'is'. There is no existing model from which we can accurately imitate the human creative process, so it begs the question, what is the nature of the imagery generated? Think of it like your hand writing and signature style. Even if it may appear similar to others, it's still uniquely identifiable as yours. If someone copies your writing style and signature to forge documents, it wouldn't just become ok as long as they forge new documents, in any case it would be immoral and illegal without your express consent. That is the nature of algorithmically generated imagery, complex forgery, but instead of the forgery being of an individual, it's modeled from billions of images scraped from the internet. This is entirely different from the human creative process.
williamcotton 4y ago
Go type in any of those artists and/or the names of their works in to both Google Images and Stable Diffusion. Notice a difference? The image that is generated from SD is going to be so far from similar and something that someone else would choose instead of the plaintiff’s works it’s comical. Rather people are using SD to create music groove synths, remove people from the backgrounds of images, turn their dogs into Dali paintings, and many non-infringing uses (Sony v Universal). At some point VCRs, Google Images, Google Books and Stable Diffusion all make indiscriminate copies of many works. A factor that weighs heavy in both determining fair use or not is how useful the tool is for non-infringing cases, in favor for Google Books, against for TorrentFire-things. Since SD is basically incapable of recreating any of the plaintiff’s works and entirely capable of many things that has nothing to do with the plaintiff’s entire industry it weighs heavily in favor of fair use. The fact that the artist’s names come back is because the name is associated with a visual style. For Sarah Anderson you can get better results for her style by using “quirky, black and white cartoon, striped sweater, big eyes”… and then get back grotesque cartoons and sift through trash, inpainting for hours… and then end up with an entirely original cartoon looking thing that is noninfringing because styles cannot be copyrighted. Neither can ideas! (Seldon v Baker) Someone uploading “Sarah Anderson SD Tuned Model” to HuggingFace could be infringing on a trademark violation or a common-law publicity violation, but that’s already protected and has nothing to do with making copies for the sake of training an algorithm. I’m not sure it is currently illegal and should ever be considered wrong to have “Sarah Anderson is known for her quirky black and white cartoon characters with big eyes and black and white striped sweaters that she puts on daily calendars and sells on Amazon” be knowledge in the public domain as this is a fact about the world.

Does that really matter if you can easily generate something that comes pretty close (at least in a superficial way) to the artist by just entering the artists name with your description?

jaggs 4y ago

That's a really good question, and it's key to the issue at hand I think. Any competent artist can create a lookalike style of another artist at will. It's just a matter of looking at the paint type, brushes, materials, strokes, composition, etc and copying that. In fact, here's Vincent Van Gogh copying other artists of his time - https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/van-gogh-copy/ https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/van-gogh-copy/ . How does this differ from a machine doing the output? Apart from speed and flexibility?

diemes1 4y ago
Van Gogh's studies of existing works of the time still maintain his 'style', his brush strokes, use of color, rendering of form. No matter how many times he copies another's work he's still Van Gogh and his work expresses and reflects who he 'is'. There is no existing model from which we can accurately imitate the human creative process, so it begs the question, what is the nature of the imagery generated? Think of it like your hand writing and signature style. Even if it may appear similar to others, it's still uniquely identifiable as yours. If someone copies your writing style and signature to forge documents, it wouldn't just become ok as long as they forge new documents, in any case it would be immoral and illegal without your express consent. That is the nature of algorithmically generated imagery, complex forgery, but instead of the forgery being of an individual, it's modeled from billions of images scraped from the internet. This is entirely different from the human creative process.

williamcotton 4y ago

Go type in any of those artists and/or the names of their works in to both Google Images and Stable Diffusion. Notice a difference? The image that is generated from SD is going to be so far from similar and something that someone else would choose instead of the plaintiff’s works it’s comical. Rather people are using SD to create music groove synths, remove people from the backgrounds of images, turn their dogs into Dali paintings, and many non-infringing uses (Sony v Universal). At some point VCRs, Google Images, Google Books and Stable Diffusion all make indiscriminate copies of many works. A factor that weighs heavy in both determining fair use or not is how useful the tool is for non-infringing cases, in favor for Google Books, against for TorrentFire-things. Since SD is basically incapable of recreating any of the plaintiff’s works and entirely capable of many things that has nothing to do with the plaintiff’s entire industry it weighs heavily in favor of fair use. The fact that the artist’s names come back is because the name is associated with a visual style. For Sarah Anderson you can get better results for her style by using “quirky, black and white cartoon, striped sweater, big eyes”… and then get back grotesque cartoons and sift through trash, inpainting for hours… and then end up with an entirely original cartoon looking thing that is noninfringing because styles cannot be copyrighted. Neither can ideas! (Seldon v Baker) Someone uploading “Sarah Anderson SD Tuned Model” to HuggingFace could be infringing on a trademark violation or a common-law publicity violation, but that’s already protected and has nothing to do with making copies for the sake of training an algorithm. I’m not sure it is currently illegal and should ever be considered wrong to have “Sarah Anderson is known for her quirky black and white cartoon characters with big eyes and black and white striped sweaters that she puts on daily calendars and sells on Amazon” be knowledge in the public domain as this is a fact about the world.