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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 generate
by 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.