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I was also tempted to quote the expression/idea dichotomy, but looking at the examples, you’re totally right: the example you showed is aiming to land directly
by dahart 4y ago
I was also tempted to quote the expression/idea dichotomy, but looking at the examples, you’re totally right: the example you showed is aiming to land directly on the line between legal and illegal, it is legitimately hard to reason about, it is different than borrowing either the idea or the expression, and it absolutely is sketchy (and will probably be tested in court if it gets much more attention).
The problem here is that it does more than just clone the idea/concept/vibes, it really does tread into copying the implementation details. It matches lighting & composition, it matches subject and color, it can mimic the equipment used & props. People have done this manually, and been sued for it. Mostly it happens when an unknown artist steals the style of a specific well-known, best-selling artist. But now we’ve built a machine to near-copy anything in any style, with the intent of borrowing as much of the expression as legally possible, which seems like it probably can’t end well from a legal perspective. And because the technology for building these kind of machines is essentially public knowledge now, it’s hard to imagine this won’t be a problem from now on.
- toss1 4y agoYup. Or even more clearly with example [0]. Input request for an image of a person named "Ann Graham Lotz", it returned the exact image in the training set, slightly degraded. MIT Tech Review reports research with hundreds of similar results [1]. "The researchers, from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, ETH Zürich, and Princeton, got their results by prompting Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen with captions for images, such as a person’s name, many times. Then they analyzed whether any of the images they generated matched original images in the model’s database. The group managed to extract over 100 replicas of images in the AI’s training set. " [0] https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-prove-ai-art-generators-204500956.html https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-prove-ai-art-generators-2... [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/03/1067786/ai-models-spit-out-photos-of-real-people-and-copyrighted-images/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/03/1067786/ai-model...
- zone411 4y agoThey only found images that had been replicated 100+ times in Stable Diffusion's training set. Stable Diffusion did a poor job deduplicating.
- toss1 4y agoYup; you identify a new mode of failure! If it cannot recognize one image as identical to another, it ends up overtraining and over-generalizing on the dups.... Again, showing zero of anything resembling abstract understanding; merely a statistical correlation of blobs within each image with the text, e.g., finding the common set of pixels in each image that corresponds to "astronaut" and filtering out the rest. Obviously, this is far more useful than color-key-deletion or whole-image search. But, it isn't intelligent abstraction.