3 ms·

Interestingly it shows the tenuous nature of the plaintiffs case, even before getting into the plaintiff's large errors. Since reasonably simplified informatio

by 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.
  - km3r 4y ago
    > I think the market for artists is doomed. Art is the creative aspect not the skill in creating things. Art will be fine, those who just are scribes for painting are doomed.
  - jerf 4y ago
    I agree, actually. There are interests enough in having something like this that someone will even pay artists to make the art to feed the model, and as the models improve, they'll probably need increasingly less training data, too. A human artist does not need thousands of samples to copy Picasso's or Monet's style. They need extensive training and practice to get to the point they can copy anybody's style at all (I'm completely incapable of it for all practical purposes, for instance), but once they have the training they can do a passable job of copying a style off of just a single sample. Skilled artists who have studied history and go beyond the surface of the art can even do a more-than-passable job. e.g., there's copying Dali's color tone, realism level, and general look, and then there's understanding the why of what he is doing and being able to translate that out with some skill. You may never 100% match Dali directly, but a human doesn't necessarily need a lot of data to reach this level. And of course there will be a valid market in copying his tone, realism level, and general look even without a deeper level of semantic copying. A lot of the AI art is already this, but the person crafting the prompt and then performing a conscious selection of the result can bring their own semantics to the art in the process, it is not strictly speaking necessary to have copied them from the original artist. This is actually part of what is going through my mind when I expect this will be solved via legislation. Well... for a given value of "solved". I expect whenever Congress gets around to this, any law they will end up passing will have HN up in arms and I expect to be armed with a torch & pitchfork myself, such is my confidence in Congress on this front. But even given that Congress is going to royally mess it up, it may yet be less messed up than the inevitable hodgepodge of conflicting precedents that will precede Congress' efforts, because while in my opinion there is no coherent legal principle that will hold the decisions together, the lawsuits will arise, the decisions will be made, and the precedents will be set. The mere inability to retain logical coherence does not stop our legal system.
- simiones 4y ago
  I think it's not going to be that hard to argue that the company is infringing the copyright of those whose images they are using. Especially once the judge is show how similar the output of SD can be to a particular artist's images with the right prompts (proving that SD has memorized a significant amount of those images).
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    Some artists images just don't contain much entropy though? If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"? I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others. This seems like a bad test because generic barely-creative works are much more easily generated by AI engines regardless of the source training data. I wonder if we're going to see IP troll style behavior from artists drawing many obvious things so they'll have standing to sue (and negotiate a 'fuck off' settlement) with AI art engines.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      This example has already been countered multiple times. You can not copyright a solid blue painting, you can only copyright an 'installation' of such. People in these discussions act as if copyright only came into being and hasn't been legislated/litigated for quite a while now. But then, these people can't even be bothered to look at copyright requirements that there be at the least an 'anonymous artist' that created the work to be copyrighted (and hint, a prompt writer does not count as such, anymore than a machinist inputting CAD requirements suddenly owns copyright to each factory part their machine spits out).
    - simiones 4y ago
      > If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"? Probably not, though even this may be debatable given the specific prompt and specific similarities (for example, if it generated the exact color and exact aspect ratio for a prompt like "Yves Klein IKB 79", I could see an argument for infringement; if it generated the same thing for a prompt like "filled-in 16:5 rectangle with color #0000FF", it would be arguable that it isn't). > I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others. The important question in copyright is, theoretically, if you actually copied the specific piece or if you happened to create a similar-looking piece by accident. The difficulty of proving one or the other varies with the specific circumstances. For example, it's rather hard to claim you happened to paint a picture almost identical with Picasso's Guernica. It's rather easy to claim that signing an empty piece of canvas was entirely your idea and you weren't copying Dali's signed empty canvases. Similarly for AI, the copyright discussion will come down to how much of its output is identifiable pieces of other's artworks, especially when prompted for such. I personally haven't played with it, but if it's possible to get SD or other similar models to produce identical or very similar copies of (pieces of) some artist's works using relatively simple prompts*, it should be a pretty slam-dunk case of copyright infringement. * by this I mean prompts that don't themselves encode the information, like I showed in my "16:7 rectangle with solid color #0000FF" example.

by quitit 4y ago

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.
- km3r 4y ago
  > I think the market for artists is doomed. Art is the creative aspect not the skill in creating things. Art will be fine, those who just are scribes for painting are doomed.
- jerf 4y ago
  I agree, actually. There are interests enough in having something like this that someone will even pay artists to make the art to feed the model, and as the models improve, they'll probably need increasingly less training data, too. A human artist does not need thousands of samples to copy Picasso's or Monet's style. They need extensive training and practice to get to the point they can copy anybody's style at all (I'm completely incapable of it for all practical purposes, for instance), but once they have the training they can do a passable job of copying a style off of just a single sample. Skilled artists who have studied history and go beyond the surface of the art can even do a more-than-passable job. e.g., there's copying Dali's color tone, realism level, and general look, and then there's understanding the why of what he is doing and being able to translate that out with some skill. You may never 100% match Dali directly, but a human doesn't necessarily need a lot of data to reach this level. And of course there will be a valid market in copying his tone, realism level, and general look even without a deeper level of semantic copying. A lot of the AI art is already this, but the person crafting the prompt and then performing a conscious selection of the result can bring their own semantics to the art in the process, it is not strictly speaking necessary to have copied them from the original artist. This is actually part of what is going through my mind when I expect this will be solved via legislation. Well... for a given value of "solved". I expect whenever Congress gets around to this, any law they will end up passing will have HN up in arms and I expect to be armed with a torch & pitchfork myself, such is my confidence in Congress on this front. But even given that Congress is going to royally mess it up, it may yet be less messed up than the inevitable hodgepodge of conflicting precedents that will precede Congress' efforts, because while in my opinion there is no coherent legal principle that will hold the decisions together, the lawsuits will arise, the decisions will be made, and the precedents will be set. The mere inability to retain logical coherence does not stop our legal system.
simiones 4y ago
I think it's not going to be that hard to argue that the company is infringing the copyright of those whose images they are using. Especially once the judge is show how similar the output of SD can be to a particular artist's images with the right prompts (proving that SD has memorized a significant amount of those images).
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Some artists images just don't contain much entropy though? If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"? I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others. This seems like a bad test because generic barely-creative works are much more easily generated by AI engines regardless of the source training data. I wonder if we're going to see IP troll style behavior from artists drawing many obvious things so they'll have standing to sue (and negotiate a 'fuck off' settlement) with AI art engines.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    This example has already been countered multiple times. You can not copyright a solid blue painting, you can only copyright an 'installation' of such. People in these discussions act as if copyright only came into being and hasn't been legislated/litigated for quite a while now. But then, these people can't even be bothered to look at copyright requirements that there be at the least an 'anonymous artist' that created the work to be copyrighted (and hint, a prompt writer does not count as such, anymore than a machinist inputting CAD requirements suddenly owns copyright to each factory part their machine spits out).
  - simiones 4y ago
    > If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"? Probably not, though even this may be debatable given the specific prompt and specific similarities (for example, if it generated the exact color and exact aspect ratio for a prompt like "Yves Klein IKB 79", I could see an argument for infringement; if it generated the same thing for a prompt like "filled-in 16:5 rectangle with color #0000FF", it would be arguable that it isn't). > I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others. The important question in copyright is, theoretically, if you actually copied the specific piece or if you happened to create a similar-looking piece by accident. The difficulty of proving one or the other varies with the specific circumstances. For example, it's rather hard to claim you happened to paint a picture almost identical with Picasso's Guernica. It's rather easy to claim that signing an empty piece of canvas was entirely your idea and you weren't copying Dali's signed empty canvases. Similarly for AI, the copyright discussion will come down to how much of its output is identifiable pieces of other's artworks, especially when prompted for such. I personally haven't played with it, but if it's possible to get SD or other similar models to produce identical or very similar copies of (pieces of) some artist's works using relatively simple prompts*, it should be a pretty slam-dunk case of copyright infringement. * by this I mean prompts that don't themselves encode the information, like I showed in my "16:7 rectangle with solid color #0000FF" example.