25 ms·

An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

91 points by spiffage 4y ago

layer8 4y ago
> future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. How does this work? Do they retrain the model from scratch every week? Or is it somehow possible to retroactively remove specific training-set items from the already-trained model?
cycomanic 4y ago
I don't really understand the argument about danger mouses grey album being different from just a random "mash up" because the artistic merit behind the grey album. Sure the grey album is likely much more pleasant to listen to and would likely be considered worthy of copyright itself, where a random mash might not be. That doesn't change the fact that danger mouse had to ask permission to use Jay Zs and the Beatles work (and likely had to pay), or otherwise would have violated copyright. So how is that argument relevant. Nobody is arguing that composing images via stable diffusion prompts (like making some collage) is not a creative process. The argument is does one have to have permission/licence of the original creators.
gcoakes 4y ago
Am I the only one who thinks this just isn't defined well enough to be decided by the judiciary? It should be legislated. My opinion is that ML training should be distinctly different from human learning.
- jen20 4y ago
  I agree that it should both be legislated, and substantially different to human learning. In the US (or UK) however, most legislators are such intellectual lightweights that they have no hope of grasping even the basics of what they are legislating.
scotty79 4y ago
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. This is incredibly disheartening. Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Rent seeking by owners of AI machines is OK, but not by copyright owners?
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Yes. Abolish all copyright. Are we hackers or not?
    - manigandham 4y ago
      Who is “we”?
      - Kiro 4y ago
        Participants on a site called Hacker News.
    - t433 4y ago
      Spoiler alert: They're not! This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.
      - kragen 4y ago
        pg did originally call it 'startup news' but i don't think you have standing to accuse him of 'appropriating' the term 'hacker' until you've hacked together something of comparable significance to on lisp or viaweb
quitit 4y ago
Interestingly it shows the tenuous nature of the plaintiffs case, even before getting into the plaintiff's large errors. Since reasonably simplified information about SD is available and/or the plaintiff could have involved an expert to review his claims - it does raise a question if the function of the lawsuit is more about rattling chains rather than the merits of their argument. I.E. A deliberate ploy to extract a settlement.
- jerf 4y ago
  Ultimately, this is just something that has to be solved with legislation, not a court case. It's too novel a setup for a court case to deal with under existing frameworks. I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse. But proving that illegal under current law is certainly going to be a challenge. I have not read the original complaint but it surprises me that the lawsuit doesn't have a much stronger focus on this aspect. Copyright law is very concerned about not destroying the market for a given work through infringement, but this is a case about destroying the market for entire artists at a stroke. But that's a hard argument in court. There's no legal basis for claiming damages because the entire market itself is being destroyed. Though I'm not sure it's any weaker than the other claims trying to be made. The basic problem is, this isn't illegal in any sense. I don't just mean "illegal in that it must be banned" but any level of gradation in between, in the licenses, in requiring compensation, in any sort of regulation whatsoever. Technology has simply outrun law again.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Even in the strictest possible strengthening of IP law, where you need the artists written permission before feeding their data into a neural network, I think the market for artists is doomed. Disney can train a model from every frame of their video library as well as whatever they can find which is unambiguosly public domain. Then they could hire a few hundred artists to draw whatever the model is bad at by the end of this process for finetuning.
acomjean 4y ago
>"The output represents the model’s understanding of what is useful, aesthetic, pleasing, etc. and that, together with data filtering and cleaning that general image generating AI companies do,2 is what the companies consider most valuable, not the training data.3" This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models? No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.
- lodovic 4y ago
  I compare it to reading a big stack of comic books and then trying to create your own, painstakingly reproducing the layout, color palettes and character styles. Or listening to (eg) Pink Floyd and then making a song that really matches their music. YouTube is full of those, it's really similar to SD images. But still not the same as sampling as that requires actually duplicating parts of the original. The reason we have copyright for a limited time is to promote the arts, not to give people a monopoly on a specific style so they can milk it. (although that is what seems to be happening)
- seydor 4y ago
  They are never going to compensate the artists. It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for
  - krisoft 4y ago
    uhm. What you are proposing is compensating the artists. Those 1000 designers are the artist in question then. > It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for I bet that you are massively underestimating the cost of that.
  - gugagore 4y ago
    I think you underestimate the scale of data these models are trained on by many orders of magnitude.
tshadley 4y ago
"[The complaint] argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data." As noted in OP, this is an outstandingly bad definition of Deep-Neural-Networks, and the lawsuit should fail when the court hears an explanation from any competent practitioner. However, a correct definition would make the lawsuit far more interesting, imo. Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How does this entity affect social well-being, how should existing laws be modified--if at all-- with the welfare of humanity in mind, etc?
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > the lawsuit will fail when the court hears an explanation from an expert So how often does this happen? Somehow I'm too cynical to believe that a judge would rule against the intellectual property industry. The whole thing is based on absurd concepts to begin with, concepts that can be reduced to the ownership of unique numbers. Once a society accepts that, what difference do explanations make?
- simiones 4y ago
  > Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How can you claim with a straight face that this is a better explanation of what an NN is? An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. It is much much closer to "a giant archive of compressed images being used to interpolate between them" (though it's not that) than it is to a "superhumanly talented artist".
  - tshadley 4y ago
    > An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close. You'll need more than wikipedia to appreciate what deep-neural-networks are doing here, it's dimensional space that's key. What DNNs do that is similar to the human brain is that they order "concepts" in high-dimensional space. Colors, textures, shape and hierarchies of same are organized and cross-referenced with text in an incredibly complex connectome. It would be useless to memorize images with their textual descriptions as that would be horrendously inefficient/ineffective during inference. Rather, the model must do what we do and understand what makes an image a "landscape" or a "portrait" or a "cartoon". It needs to understand what is an artist's style and how to perform it on a work never before created. "Understanding" can only mean ordering meaningless letters and pixels in multidimensional space so that they line up with human understanding (and human 'understanding', in turn, can only mean ordering meaningless sensory perceptions in the brain's multidimensional connectome such that reality turns out to be approximately predicted and controlled). The only systems that work this way efficiently are neural networks, biological and artificial.
rafale 4y ago
I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  I hope the exact opposite. AI, including AGI if we ever get there, cannot be allowed to be strangled in its crib by artificially limiting the information it can learn from in the name of IP maximalism. IP law already goes way too far, the line should be drawn here.
  - troyvit 4y ago
    If you want new art you probably want some form of IP. What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      Love of their craft. The same reason anybody undertakes any creative endeavor without charging for it. I admit my position is a bit extreme, but I would like to see the concept of IP abolished as it has become an abusive dead weight on culture. More moderately, all art is derivative at the end of the day. None of it was created ex nihilo. We already have legal guardrails for direct reproduction of specific characters and specific pieces, and that is plenty. The fact that maximalists want to kill a nascent technology by restricting the right to learn from, something that even our extremely slanted laws have carveouts for, is nothing short of offensive.
    - nyolfen 4y ago
      totally ludicrous and hard to believe you actually think this. please take a glance at all of human history.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
sebstefan 4y ago
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I think this restriction was more about trying to shut up some very vocal people on social media and less about the law. Copying an artists style is legal in every jurisdiction in which Stability operates.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I don't. Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons. Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this. [0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-copyright/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
  - hnfong 4y ago
    Moral rights is indeed "the right to be identified as the author of a work". I don't think it means the author has a right to all similar styles. If I can legally ask somebody to paint me something in the style of a famous (living) artist, that person presumably having seen and studied their famous works for a while, why should I not be able to ask the AI to do the same thing? (I understand there might be people who think even a human person emulating the style of another artist is morally wrong, but at least that's a consistent argument)
    - ben_w 4y ago
shanebellone 4y ago
I've been saying this since it came out... Stable Diffusion is equivalent to hip-hop sampling in the 80s and 90s. The outcome is obvious.
- haswell 4y ago
  I’ve heard this argument on numerous occasions but I have never heard someone justify it or why they believe it. Are there specific similarities that make you believe these are equivalent scenarios? Not just “it feels thematically similar”.
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    It's the closest thing to a precedent. Hip-hop originally recorded and transformed vocals, instruments, and beats to create something new from pieces of something old. The practice occurred without permission and obviously ended up in court. Now sampling requires a licensing agreement. The additional cost has fundamentally changed the genre (over the last 40 years). Hip-hop and tech both ignored IP rights because neither started with a legal framework and both would have found the additional cost prohibitive.
    - haswell 4y ago
      That's helpful. I wasn't aware of the eventual licensing enforcement. If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules). I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefore is by definition not infringing. I suspect this might be where the flurry of downvotes came from.
      - shanebellone 4y ago
        "you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules" The systems are similar too despite having completely different internal processes. Both transformed existing IP without permission, to produce sufficiently remixed art as an output. A sufficiently generic abstraction would look very similar despite the disparity of domain. The primary difference between hip-hop and Stable Diffusion is that AI cannot rationalize, explain, or attribute inspiration to a final product. There was no aha moment and thus no creativity. It has no vested interest in its work.
dns_snek 4y ago
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts for the jury to wade through. How can this possibly be a valid good faith argument? Either they're in breach of authors' copyright which extends to every piece of art that they included in the dataset without permission, or they're in the clear and aren't obligated to respond to removal requests. This reads like damage control to me in an effort to temporarily silence the loudest critics.
- devwastaken 4y ago
  They don't have to remove images from the training set, they're saying they're opting to do so, and using that as an argument as to why if there supposedly could be copyright infringement, they're not liable, because they allow it to be removed. They could just as well not do anything and continue on - it's likely this case will be in defendents favor. Same as how Google can crawl the net, cache data, transform it, etc.
- hehdhdhkf 4y ago
  Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties. These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work. If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing. They either don’t understand how it works or they are just upset that a computer can make art as good as (or better than) they can in a fraction of the time. All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck, but it would be great if we all could try to understand reality first.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    > If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing. Try making a comic book with a character that looks like Mickey Mouse and see how well that goes.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
It's interesting the IP attorney cites The Grey Album as being an example of something that is legal, when the reality is that the case was never brought because the original artists wishes meant it was unattractive for EMI to pursue the case.
kmeisthax 4y ago
>The complaint includes a section attempting to explain how Stable Diffusion works. It argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data. I've seen the collage tool argument several times, and I don't agree with it. But I can understand why people believe it. You see, there's a very large number of people who use AI art generators as a tracing tool. Like, to the point where someone who has never touched one might believe that it literally just photobashes existing images together. The reality is that there's three ways to use art generators: - You can tell it to generate an image with a non-copyright-infringing prompt. i.e. "a dog police officer holding a gun" - You can ask it to replicate an existing style, by adding keywords like "in the style of <existing artist>" - You can modify an existing image. This is in lieu of the random seed image that is normally provided to the AI. That last one is confusing, because it makes people think that the AI itself is infringing when it's only the person using it. But I could see the courts deciding that letting someone chuck an image into the model gives you liability, especially with all of the "you have full commercial rights to everything you generate" messaging people keep slapping onto these. Style prompting is one of those things that's also legally questionable, though for different reasons. As about 40,000 AI art generator users have shouted at me over the past year, you cannot copyright a style. But at the same time, producing "new" art that's substantially similar to copyrighted art is still illegal. So, say, "a man on a motorcycle in the style of Banksy" might be OK, but "girl holding a balloon in the style of Banksy" might not be. The latter is basically asking the AI to regurgitate an existing image, or trace over something it's already seen. I think a better argument would be that, by training the AI to understand style prompts, Stability AI is inducing users to infringe upon other people's copyright.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Great write-up. SD's removing the ability to imitate styles will probably go a long way to quell objections, though it will be interesting to see if there's a future legal split over the styles of living and dead artists. I don't imagine that anyone would object to 'autoseurat' for example. I can see see a future dispute arising over outpainting (beginning with an existing copyrighted work) but there infringement and identity of the infringer (the user, not the toolmaker) is more clear.
Animats 4y ago
That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement. Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA takedown request without a copyright registration, but you can't enforce it in court without one.[2] This raises the question of, if you as a service receive a DMCA takedown request, should you ask the requestor to send proof of copyright registration, and if they don't, ignore the request? [1] https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ [2] https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright-necessary-for-a-dmca-takedown/ https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright...
- rebuilder 4y ago
  Is this requirement to register specifically a feature of the DMCA? It seems quite surprising if, as the article claims, “people who don’t have registered copyrights cannot enforce their copyrights in court.” That would mean that the vast majority of artwork posted online is essentially free to exploit in the USA, since I’m sure most people do not routinely register their works with the copyright office before posting them.
- mcbits 4y ago
  Unless they're legally obligated to show proof of copyright registration for the takedown notice to be a valid, it would be risky to assume they didn't register it just because they didn't show proof.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Most of this revolves around the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. That is, doing a takedown without authenticating the ownership of the copyright provides immunity against being sued for contributory infringement. But to actually win such a lawsuit, the purported copyright owner would have to show proof of registration. This suggests an online process which looks like this: * US Service provider offers web page for DMCA notices. * Web page requests that the user enter copyright registration info. * If user fails to provide registration info, web page offers links to various national copyright registration sites to register a copyright. A payment receipt for copyright registration is acceptable as temporary proof of registration, but must be followed up within some period of time by actual proof of registration. * Temporary proof of registration is enough for a takedown, but the material will go back up if full proof is not submitted later. This would put a big dent in nuisance DMCA claims. The service provider might get sued occasionally, but for big providers, it's probably worth litigating this once or twice. The companies that have valuable IP file copyright registrations. Disney will be able to show a copyright registration on all their movies.
xeyownt 4y ago
I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.
- lofaszvanitt 4y ago
  Think of it as this way: in order to create 5 very different illustrations you need to talk with 5 people. in the end 5 people will get money when they finish with their work. an AI consumes these artists past output and instead of paying to these artists it will gather income to the owner. So by using the output of 5 people who have spent decades on perfecting their craft, the AI generates income by stealing their work, and the money flows to the owner only, who doesn't give back anything to these people. so in essence AI in this form kills income stream for humans, since it gives back nothing.
  - theRealMe 4y ago
    Throughout history almost all skills have been learned/copied from other people. Especially things like art are learned by studying previous work. What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot? Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?
    - lofaszvanitt 4y ago
      For a human it takes time, it takes effort, in order to copy/learn someone's style. And the outcome is not guaranteed to be a success. There is no problem with AI, but if you generate an image with words, something like: make a painting in the style of "X artist", then maybe compensate people for their work and everybody else included, whose expertise was used during the creation of given art. So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life. The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work. I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.
consumer451 4y ago
A lawyer who works on YouTube channel Corridor Crew posted a decent breakdown on this lawsuit recently as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857
mensetmanusman 4y ago
“LLMs are illegal because anything they see is owned by other people” The Disney protection act rears its head…

91 points by spiffage 4y ago

> future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. How does this work? Do they retrain the model from scratch every week? Or is it somehow possible to retroactively remove specific training-set items from the already-trained model?

cycomanic 4y ago

I don't really understand the argument about danger mouses grey album being different from just a random "mash up" because the artistic merit behind the grey album. Sure the grey album is likely much more pleasant to listen to and would likely be considered worthy of copyright itself, where a random mash might not be. That doesn't change the fact that danger mouse had to ask permission to use Jay Zs and the Beatles work (and likely had to pay), or otherwise would have violated copyright. So how is that argument relevant. Nobody is arguing that composing images via stable diffusion prompts (like making some collage) is not a creative process. The argument is does one have to have permission/licence of the original creators.

gcoakes 4y ago

Am I the only one who thinks this just isn't defined well enough to be decided by the judiciary? It should be legislated. My opinion is that ML training should be distinctly different from human learning.

jen20 4y ago
I agree that it should both be legislated, and substantially different to human learning. In the US (or UK) however, most legislators are such intellectual lightweights that they have no hope of grasping even the basics of what they are legislating.

scotty79 4y ago

RandomLensman 4y ago
Rent seeking by owners of AI machines is OK, but not by copyright owners?
- Kiro 4y ago
  Yes. Abolish all copyright. Are we hackers or not?
  - manigandham 4y ago
    Who is “we”?
    - Kiro 4y ago
      Participants on a site called Hacker News.
  - t433 4y ago
    Spoiler alert: They're not! This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.
    - kragen 4y ago
      pg did originally call it 'startup news' but i don't think you have standing to accuse him of 'appropriating' the term 'hacker' until you've hacked together something of comparable significance to on lisp or viaweb

quitit 4y ago

Interestingly it shows the tenuous nature of the plaintiffs case, even before getting into the plaintiff's large errors. Since reasonably simplified information about SD is available and/or the plaintiff could have involved an expert to review his claims - it does raise a question if the function of the lawsuit is more about rattling chains rather than the merits of their argument. I.E. A deliberate ploy to extract a settlement.

jerf 4y ago
Ultimately, this is just something that has to be solved with legislation, not a court case. It's too novel a setup for a court case to deal with under existing frameworks. I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse. But proving that illegal under current law is certainly going to be a challenge. I have not read the original complaint but it surprises me that the lawsuit doesn't have a much stronger focus on this aspect. Copyright law is very concerned about not destroying the market for a given work through infringement, but this is a case about destroying the market for entire artists at a stroke. But that's a hard argument in court. There's no legal basis for claiming damages because the entire market itself is being destroyed. Though I'm not sure it's any weaker than the other claims trying to be made. The basic problem is, this isn't illegal in any sense. I don't just mean "illegal in that it must be banned" but any level of gradation in between, in the licenses, in requiring compensation, in any sort of regulation whatsoever. Technology has simply outrun law again.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Even in the strictest possible strengthening of IP law, where you need the artists written permission before feeding their data into a neural network, I think the market for artists is doomed. Disney can train a model from every frame of their video library as well as whatever they can find which is unambiguosly public domain. Then they could hire a few hundred artists to draw whatever the model is bad at by the end of this process for finetuning.

acomjean 4y ago

>"The output represents the model’s understanding of what is useful, aesthetic, pleasing, etc. and that, together with data filtering and cleaning that general image generating AI companies do,2 is what the companies consider most valuable, not the training data.3" This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models? No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.

lodovic 4y ago
I compare it to reading a big stack of comic books and then trying to create your own, painstakingly reproducing the layout, color palettes and character styles. Or listening to (eg) Pink Floyd and then making a song that really matches their music. YouTube is full of those, it's really similar to SD images. But still not the same as sampling as that requires actually duplicating parts of the original. The reason we have copyright for a limited time is to promote the arts, not to give people a monopoly on a specific style so they can milk it. (although that is what seems to be happening)
seydor 4y ago
They are never going to compensate the artists. It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for
- krisoft 4y ago
  uhm. What you are proposing is compensating the artists. Those 1000 designers are the artist in question then. > It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for I bet that you are massively underestimating the cost of that.
- gugagore 4y ago
  I think you underestimate the scale of data these models are trained on by many orders of magnitude.

tshadley 4y ago

"[The complaint] argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data." As noted in OP, this is an outstandingly bad definition of Deep-Neural-Networks, and the lawsuit should fail when the court hears an explanation from any competent practitioner. However, a correct definition would make the lawsuit far more interesting, imo. Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How does this entity affect social well-being, how should existing laws be modified--if at all-- with the welfare of humanity in mind, etc?

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> the lawsuit will fail when the court hears an explanation from an expert So how often does this happen? Somehow I'm too cynical to believe that a judge would rule against the intellectual property industry. The whole thing is based on absurd concepts to begin with, concepts that can be reduced to the ownership of unique numbers. Once a society accepts that, what difference do explanations make?
simiones 4y ago
> Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How can you claim with a straight face that this is a better explanation of what an NN is? An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. It is much much closer to "a giant archive of compressed images being used to interpolate between them" (though it's not that) than it is to a "superhumanly talented artist".
- tshadley 4y ago
  > An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close. You'll need more than wikipedia to appreciate what deep-neural-networks are doing here, it's dimensional space that's key. What DNNs do that is similar to the human brain is that they order "concepts" in high-dimensional space. Colors, textures, shape and hierarchies of same are organized and cross-referenced with text in an incredibly complex connectome. It would be useless to memorize images with their textual descriptions as that would be horrendously inefficient/ineffective during inference. Rather, the model must do what we do and understand what makes an image a "landscape" or a "portrait" or a "cartoon". It needs to understand what is an artist's style and how to perform it on a work never before created. "Understanding" can only mean ordering meaningless letters and pixels in multidimensional space so that they line up with human understanding (and human 'understanding', in turn, can only mean ordering meaningless sensory perceptions in the brain's multidimensional connectome such that reality turns out to be approximately predicted and controlled). The only systems that work this way efficiently are neural networks, biological and artificial.

rafale 4y ago

I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.

Karunamon 4y ago
I hope the exact opposite. AI, including AGI if we ever get there, cannot be allowed to be strangled in its crib by artificially limiting the information it can learn from in the name of IP maximalism. IP law already goes way too far, the line should be drawn here.
- troyvit 4y ago
  If you want new art you probably want some form of IP. What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Love of their craft. The same reason anybody undertakes any creative endeavor without charging for it. I admit my position is a bit extreme, but I would like to see the concept of IP abolished as it has become an abusive dead weight on culture. More moderately, all art is derivative at the end of the day. None of it was created ex nihilo. We already have legal guardrails for direct reproduction of specific characters and specific pieces, and that is plenty. The fact that maximalists want to kill a nascent technology by restricting the right to learn from, something that even our extremely slanted laws have carveouts for, is nothing short of offensive.
  - nyolfen 4y ago
    totally ludicrous and hard to believe you actually think this. please take a glance at all of human history.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

sebstefan 4y ago

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.

sebzim4500 4y ago
I think this restriction was more about trying to shut up some very vocal people on social media and less about the law. Copying an artists style is legal in every jurisdiction in which Stability operates.
ben_w 4y ago
I don't. Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons. Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this. [0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-copyright/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
- hnfong 4y ago
  Moral rights is indeed "the right to be identified as the author of a work". I don't think it means the author has a right to all similar styles. If I can legally ask somebody to paint me something in the style of a famous (living) artist, that person presumably having seen and studied their famous works for a while, why should I not be able to ask the AI to do the same thing? (I understand there might be people who think even a human person emulating the style of another artist is morally wrong, but at least that's a consistent argument)
  - ben_w 4y ago

shanebellone 4y ago

I've been saying this since it came out... Stable Diffusion is equivalent to hip-hop sampling in the 80s and 90s. The outcome is obvious.

haswell 4y ago
I’ve heard this argument on numerous occasions but I have never heard someone justify it or why they believe it. Are there specific similarities that make you believe these are equivalent scenarios? Not just “it feels thematically similar”.
- shanebellone 4y ago
  It's the closest thing to a precedent. Hip-hop originally recorded and transformed vocals, instruments, and beats to create something new from pieces of something old. The practice occurred without permission and obviously ended up in court. Now sampling requires a licensing agreement. The additional cost has fundamentally changed the genre (over the last 40 years). Hip-hop and tech both ignored IP rights because neither started with a legal framework and both would have found the additional cost prohibitive.
  - haswell 4y ago
    That's helpful. I wasn't aware of the eventual licensing enforcement. If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules). I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefore is by definition not infringing. I suspect this might be where the flurry of downvotes came from.
    - shanebellone 4y ago
      "you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules" The systems are similar too despite having completely different internal processes. Both transformed existing IP without permission, to produce sufficiently remixed art as an output. A sufficiently generic abstraction would look very similar despite the disparity of domain. The primary difference between hip-hop and Stable Diffusion is that AI cannot rationalize, explain, or attribute inspiration to a final product. There was no aha moment and thus no creativity. It has no vested interest in its work.

dns_snek 4y ago

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts for the jury to wade through. How can this possibly be a valid good faith argument? Either they're in breach of authors' copyright which extends to every piece of art that they included in the dataset without permission, or they're in the clear and aren't obligated to respond to removal requests. This reads like damage control to me in an effort to temporarily silence the loudest critics.

devwastaken 4y ago
They don't have to remove images from the training set, they're saying they're opting to do so, and using that as an argument as to why if there supposedly could be copyright infringement, they're not liable, because they allow it to be removed. They could just as well not do anything and continue on - it's likely this case will be in defendents favor. Same as how Google can crawl the net, cache data, transform it, etc.
hehdhdhkf 4y ago
Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties. These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work. If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing. They either don’t understand how it works or they are just upset that a computer can make art as good as (or better than) they can in a fraction of the time. All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck, but it would be great if we all could try to understand reality first.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  > If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing. Try making a comic book with a character that looks like Mickey Mouse and see how well that goes.

philipwhiuk 4y ago

It's interesting the IP attorney cites The Grey Album as being an example of something that is legal, when the reality is that the case was never brought because the original artists wishes meant it was unattractive for EMI to pursue the case.

kmeisthax 4y ago

>The complaint includes a section attempting to explain how Stable Diffusion works. It argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data. I've seen the collage tool argument several times, and I don't agree with it. But I can understand why people believe it. You see, there's a very large number of people who use AI art generators as a tracing tool. Like, to the point where someone who has never touched one might believe that it literally just photobashes existing images together. The reality is that there's three ways to use art generators: - You can tell it to generate an image with a non-copyright-infringing prompt. i.e. "a dog police officer holding a gun" - You can ask it to replicate an existing style, by adding keywords like "in the style of <existing artist>" - You can modify an existing image. This is in lieu of the random seed image that is normally provided to the AI. That last one is confusing, because it makes people think that the AI itself is infringing when it's only the person using it. But I could see the courts deciding that letting someone chuck an image into the model gives you liability, especially with all of the "you have full commercial rights to everything you generate" messaging people keep slapping onto these. Style prompting is one of those things that's also legally questionable, though for different reasons. As about 40,000 AI art generator users have shouted at me over the past year, you cannot copyright a style. But at the same time, producing "new" art that's substantially similar to copyrighted art is still illegal. So, say, "a man on a motorcycle in the style of Banksy" might be OK, but "girl holding a balloon in the style of Banksy" might not be. The latter is basically asking the AI to regurgitate an existing image, or trace over something it's already seen. I think a better argument would be that, by training the AI to understand style prompts, Stability AI is inducing users to infringe upon other people's copyright.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Great write-up. SD's removing the ability to imitate styles will probably go a long way to quell objections, though it will be interesting to see if there's a future legal split over the styles of living and dead artists. I don't imagine that anyone would object to 'autoseurat' for example. I can see see a future dispute arising over outpainting (beginning with an existing copyrighted work) but there infringement and identity of the infringer (the user, not the toolmaker) is more clear.

Animats 4y ago

That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement. Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA takedown request without a copyright registration, but you can't enforce it in court without one.[2] This raises the question of, if you as a service receive a DMCA takedown request, should you ask the requestor to send proof of copyright registration, and if they don't, ignore the request? [1] https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ [2] https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright-necessary-for-a-dmca-takedown/ https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright...

rebuilder 4y ago
Is this requirement to register specifically a feature of the DMCA? It seems quite surprising if, as the article claims, “people who don’t have registered copyrights cannot enforce their copyrights in court.” That would mean that the vast majority of artwork posted online is essentially free to exploit in the USA, since I’m sure most people do not routinely register their works with the copyright office before posting them.
mcbits 4y ago
Unless they're legally obligated to show proof of copyright registration for the takedown notice to be a valid, it would be risky to assume they didn't register it just because they didn't show proof.
- Animats 4y ago
  Most of this revolves around the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. That is, doing a takedown without authenticating the ownership of the copyright provides immunity against being sued for contributory infringement. But to actually win such a lawsuit, the purported copyright owner would have to show proof of registration. This suggests an online process which looks like this: * US Service provider offers web page for DMCA notices. * Web page requests that the user enter copyright registration info. * If user fails to provide registration info, web page offers links to various national copyright registration sites to register a copyright. A payment receipt for copyright registration is acceptable as temporary proof of registration, but must be followed up within some period of time by actual proof of registration. * Temporary proof of registration is enough for a takedown, but the material will go back up if full proof is not submitted later. This would put a big dent in nuisance DMCA claims. The service provider might get sued occasionally, but for big providers, it's probably worth litigating this once or twice. The companies that have valuable IP file copyright registrations. Disney will be able to show a copyright registration on all their movies.

xeyownt 4y ago

I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago
Think of it as this way: in order to create 5 very different illustrations you need to talk with 5 people. in the end 5 people will get money when they finish with their work. an AI consumes these artists past output and instead of paying to these artists it will gather income to the owner. So by using the output of 5 people who have spent decades on perfecting their craft, the AI generates income by stealing their work, and the money flows to the owner only, who doesn't give back anything to these people. so in essence AI in this form kills income stream for humans, since it gives back nothing.
- theRealMe 4y ago
  Throughout history almost all skills have been learned/copied from other people. Especially things like art are learned by studying previous work. What specifically is the defining reason that people can learn by copying other peoples styles but ai cannot? Are we supposed to halt technological progress to avoid antiquated job destruction?
  - lofaszvanitt 4y ago
    For a human it takes time, it takes effort, in order to copy/learn someone's style. And the outcome is not guaranteed to be a success. There is no problem with AI, but if you generate an image with words, something like: make a painting in the style of "X artist", then maybe compensate people for their work and everybody else included, whose expertise was used during the creation of given art. So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life. The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work. I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.

consumer451 4y ago

A lawyer who works on YouTube channel Corridor Crew posted a decent breakdown on this lawsuit recently as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857

mensetmanusman 4y ago

“LLMs are illegal because anything they see is owned by other people” The Disney protection act rears its head…