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> Oh come on. I'm excited about new technologies and I think that image generation can be a net positive for the society, but can we not do that? What, summari

> Oh come on. I'm excited about new technologies and I think that image generation can be a net positive for the society, but can we not do that? What, summarize the submission? This is straight quoted from the link. > The point is that basically all Stable Diffusion / DALL-E / MidJourney output is some shade of this Yes, and that point is mistaken, or so generic as to be worthless. The network memorizes art for the same reason humans memorize art: because there's some art pieces we see so often that we can recall them easily. Ask an artist to duplicate Starry Night or Scream from memory, you'll probably get at least a passable imitation. The more capable the artist, the more faithful it will be. We know that SD can be made to plagiarize, given repeated training on a specific image. (This is just to say that a neural network can learn to regurgitate a sample, a capability that was not ever in question.) This is a far cry from the assertions that its art is generally plagiarized.

egypturnash 4y ago
A human artist is, however, not a machine built and owned by a corporation, who will draw anything you tell them to. A human artist has been trained in the ethics and laws of their craft along with the skills required to make images. A human artist, asked to clone Starry Night, will ask you what you are doing, and knows where the lines are between "a tribute", "plagiarism", and "outright forgery". A human artist, asked to do work in the style of another artist, will have a certain respect for the other artist's ownership of their style. This is not a thing that is at all protected by intellectual property law but it is still a thing artists are trained to respect. There are exceptions - drawing just like your boss may be your job, drawing just like a living artist for a couple pieces is a useful way to break down their style and take a few parts of it to influence later work without going over the "style swipe" line, building your own work on the obvious foundation of an influential, dead artist's style is fine - but there are lines professionals will be very reluctant to cross. For a relatively recent example of what happens if you break these unwritten laws, check out what happened when the American cartoonist Steve Giffen started doing a wholesale style swipe from the Argentinean cartoonist Muñoz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy Neural networks know none of these unwritten rules. Neither do the people who are training them. Feed it a bunch of work generated by a living artist and start making a profit off of that? Sure, no problem! Bonus points if your response to them getting pissed off about this is to call them a luddite who is resisting the inevitable, and should throw away a lifetime of passionate training and go get a new job.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  Well we’re in luck! The human artist is the person who is coming up with the prompt and then deciding what to do with the resulting image based on their own ethics. Stable Diffusion is just a tool for artists, not a “computer artist”. Funny enough, this notion in terms of liability pairs very well with our legal system! Even funnier, this notion in terms of authorship pairs very well with modern and contemporary art theory! And here’s some very relevant precedent in both a legal and artistic sense: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/richard-prince-wins-major-victory-in-landmark-copyright-suit-59404/ https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/richard-prin...
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    Richard Prince is a very rich jerkass who can afford to hire some very high-priced lawyers to argue that his work is right over the line of "sufficiently transformative" in the eyes of the law. He's well over the lines of the unwritten rules of professional artists that I'm talking about. The corporations engaging in massive abuse of the grey areas of fair use to build these systems are, functionally, also very rich jerkasses who can afford to hire some very high-priced lawyers to make similar arguments.
  - ForestCritter 4y ago
    The human giving the prompt is shopping, not creating. The only way a computer can compute an image is by copying the vectors of imagery made by humans and then labeled and plotted and fed to said computer. Humans paint, draw, do physical things to make art. Computers are fed plotline statistics that they can pull up to fullfil a shopping list. Humans generated the imagery, uploaded the imagery,labeled the imagery and wrote the code to manipulate the imagery. Now, I'm not a big proponent of copyright. If someone can paint just like Rembrant, then I applaud their skill. At the end of the day, 'AI' is not 'learning' ,it is replicating input data by filtering a large amount of data sets with appropriate labels ( affixed by humans) and using a statistical algorithm to approximate somebody's shopping list of art they wish they had the skill to create. I'll take the Rembrant forgery, thank you.

egypturnash 4y ago

A human artist is, however, not a machine built and owned by a corporation, who will draw anything you tell them to. A human artist has been trained in the ethics and laws of their craft along with the skills required to make images. A human artist, asked to clone Starry Night, will ask you what you are doing, and knows where the lines are between "a tribute", "plagiarism", and "outright forgery". A human artist, asked to do work in the style of another artist, will have a certain respect for the other artist's ownership of their style. This is not a thing that is at all protected by intellectual property law but it is still a thing artists are trained to respect. There are exceptions - drawing just like your boss may be your job, drawing just like a living artist for a couple pieces is a useful way to break down their style and take a few parts of it to influence later work without going over the "style swipe" line, building your own work on the obvious foundation of an influential, dead artist's style is fine - but there are lines professionals will be very reluctant to cross. For a relatively recent example of what happens if you break these unwritten laws, check out what happened when the American cartoonist Steve Giffen started doing a wholesale style swipe from the Argentinean cartoonist Muñoz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy Neural networks know none of these unwritten rules. Neither do the people who are training them. Feed it a bunch of work generated by a living artist and start making a profit off of that? Sure, no problem! Bonus points if your response to them getting pissed off about this is to call them a luddite who is resisting the inevitable, and should throw away a lifetime of passionate training and go get a new job.

williamcotton 4y ago
Well we’re in luck! The human artist is the person who is coming up with the prompt and then deciding what to do with the resulting image based on their own ethics. Stable Diffusion is just a tool for artists, not a “computer artist”. Funny enough, this notion in terms of liability pairs very well with our legal system! Even funnier, this notion in terms of authorship pairs very well with modern and contemporary art theory! And here’s some very relevant precedent in both a legal and artistic sense: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/richard-prince-wins-major-victory-in-landmark-copyright-suit-59404/ https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/richard-prin...
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Richard Prince is a very rich jerkass who can afford to hire some very high-priced lawyers to argue that his work is right over the line of "sufficiently transformative" in the eyes of the law. He's well over the lines of the unwritten rules of professional artists that I'm talking about. The corporations engaging in massive abuse of the grey areas of fair use to build these systems are, functionally, also very rich jerkasses who can afford to hire some very high-priced lawyers to make similar arguments.
- ForestCritter 4y ago
  The human giving the prompt is shopping, not creating. The only way a computer can compute an image is by copying the vectors of imagery made by humans and then labeled and plotted and fed to said computer. Humans paint, draw, do physical things to make art. Computers are fed plotline statistics that they can pull up to fullfil a shopping list. Humans generated the imagery, uploaded the imagery,labeled the imagery and wrote the code to manipulate the imagery. Now, I'm not a big proponent of copyright. If someone can paint just like Rembrant, then I applaud their skill. At the end of the day, 'AI' is not 'learning' ,it is replicating input data by filtering a large amount of data sets with appropriate labels ( affixed by humans) and using a statistical algorithm to approximate somebody's shopping list of art they wish they had the skill to create. I'll take the Rembrant forgery, thank you.