22 ms·

Stable Attribution

747 points by mkeeter 4y ago

version_five 4y ago
This appears to be just looking for the nearest neighbors of the image in embedding space and calling those the source data. This by definition would find similar looking images, but it's not strictly correct to call it attribution. To some extent all of the training data is responsible for the result - as an example, the model is also learning from negative examples. The result here may feel satisfying, but it's overly simplistic and it's misrepresenting what it is to call it attribution. (The silly story they have on the site doesn't really score any points either, it reminds me of RIAA et al)
- fortyseven 4y ago
  I fed it several very different images and yeah, that was my experience as well. There were many, many details that weren't present in the 'evidence' it provided.
- azeemba 4y ago
  Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would be valuable. I don't think such a solution can work just based on the resulting image though. It probably needs to input prompt to have any chance of working.
  - csomar 4y ago
    > Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would be valuable. Wouldn't the attribution be basically all the dataset with various attribution probabilities? It's kind of like a reverse neural network.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    I'd like to say AI trained on say patent database would prevent many patents that shoudn't be granted in the first place but my guess is that lawyers would quickly adapt to writing them in a way that doesn't trigger AI
- ertian 4y ago
  Yeah, it seems like it'll just as happily 'attribute' human-made images as well, which calls the whole thing into question. If it's really showing the images that stable diffusion has 'stolen from', and it'll do the same for humans, does that not mean people are equally guilty?
  - fastball 4y ago
    Maybe Stability AI is playing 4D chess and made this website themselves as a sorta "false flag" to help demonstrate that what SD is doing is no different than what humans do, to help them win any legal battles.
    - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
      How is what any of these image generators are doing any different from myself when I (try to) make art? I draw on my experiences and senses and try to reproduce a picture and those experiences include natural things I've seen as well as art others have made. More so how are these image generators any different from text generators like ChatGTP? I feel like if first tool out from these AI gates was a bot that wrote good-enough-to-use code, no one would have batted an eye. Everyone would just go "yeah we told you that those pesky programmers would eventually automate themselves out of jobs", but since it is rendering pictures which most of the populace can appreciate and it is a skill that is easy enough for literally any child to pick up, but requires a lot of dedication to master all of a sudden this is theft and should be illegal. I really hope this lawsuit or whatever doesn't go anywhere, because it will not change anything. The genie is already out of the bottle as far as image generators are concerned - however it means that we the people won't get whatever comes next. Whatever comes next will be tightly held by big corporations and they alone will reap the benefits, whatever they may be.
      - dns_snek 4y ago
        > More so how are these image generators any different from text generators like ChatGTP? I've spotted this pattern a couple of times and this sort of circular reasoning seems concerning. Whenever one of (Stable diffusion, Copilot, ChatGPT) comes up in a discussion, their legitimacy seems to be swiftly justified by existence of the other two, even though they're all uniquely problematic in how they wash away attribution and licensing.
- vintermann 4y ago
  So it is the opposite of attribution. It just makes up a plausible-looking story of attribution and passes it off as the truth. If you passed it a hand-painted image from 1850 which was not in SD's training dataset, it can happily declare that it was inspired by someone's piece from 2019. There's no actual causal inference going on. It has more in common with using an AI language model as a "bullshit generator" than it has with human attribution. Which isn't a coincidence, since nearest neighbour similarity searches ARE a type of machine learning, just a much simpler one than SD. Anti AI people who are upset about attribution, should learn the technology and try to create an actual attribution model: one that has a notion of causality, which could say who influenced who. Causal model requires causal assumptions, but you can probably get far with the simple assumption that "works from the future do not influence works from the past".
  - jfoster 4y ago
    You can literally take a photo right now, upload it, and it will find similar photos from the SD dataset.
    - Aransentin 4y ago
      As an obvious example, I uploaded a photograph I took of a painting I have by Julie Hagen-Schwarz* that's been in private possession since 1882 and never put online: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=7730efac-bf52-4077-8bfc-9141bd4bff22 https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=7730efac-bf52-4077-... It still finds ostensible "source images" for the art. So, yes, it's clear this service is pretty much bogus. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Wilhelmine_Hagen-Schwarz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Wilhelmine_Hagen-Schwarz
  - wilimitis 4y ago
    Why do you close the space for people who are pro-ai AND pro-attribution? The entire ai space wreaks of this divisiveness, and is likely why it will continue to die out as another "art-fad". There is seemingly little willingness to integrate into the existing art world in good faith.
granularity 4y ago
I like the concept, but if you upload a photo you took, the page will tell you: "These human-made source images were used by AI ... to generate this image." Where "this image" is your photo.
- version_five 4y ago
  Exactly, because it's not actually probing attribution, it's just finding the most similar images in the training data. You can just go to https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2Fknn.laion.ai&index=laion5B-H-14&useMclip=false https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2... and do this yourself without the hyperbole
throwaway69123 4y ago
I just tried this with an image I took with my phone and it gave me 10-15 images that the "ai" used to generate my image, proving this is an absolute fraud of a concept.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  I assumed fraud, but also just dumb. The genie isn’t going back on the bottle.
- FL410 4y ago
  TBH I think misrepresenting this as identifying the "actual" source training material to make an image is way worse than what SD is doing. That's just a blatant lie.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Even if this did work, why would people want such a piece of software?
- version_five 4y ago
  Linking training data to the output of an ML model is an extremely important area of research. It potentially takes away much of the "black box" aspect by understanding what a model is basing it's decision on. For example, sample attribution can be used to inform data collection, to see if a model is operating correctly, or to decide whether the output should be trusted - there's currently lots of talk about chatGPT making stuff up and not sourcing it's output. This would be the answer. The page in this thread doesn't do attribution, as I said in my other comment. But if it was possible, it would be very important to the field
goldemerald 4y ago
This is a great website, but not in the way the authors intended. Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art. Here's a random example https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=a2666aee-0a1a-411b-b0f9-0a06e39897c9 https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=a2666aee-0a1a-411b-... I will admit this is a nice tool for verifying the creations of SD aren't pure copies, so I think it will be useful for a time. But as AI-generated images start to taint future datasets, attribution is going to be significantly more complicated.
- tantalor 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago
    [dead]
  - th3h4mm3r 4y ago
    A little bit luddist imho
  - dymk 4y ago
    What's a camera to you?
    - imgabe 4y ago
      Who is making the art, the camera or the human operating it? Does a paintbrush also make art? A chisel? These are tools that humans use. So is the AI. It doesn’t act of it’s own accord. A human has to give it a prompt and often refine the output.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Yeah this is probably the future, it seems like the vast majority of the time the output is very unique, but if there is far too much source material for a particular prompt, it copies. Say a prompt like “Mona Lisa”. So now you can just use this tool to verify your output is safe.
steponlego 4y ago
This thing is running scripts from 30+ domains, I would classify it spyware at best. All my fans fired up, Canvas inspection, you name it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
blitz_skull 4y ago
Am I the only person who looks at this and thinks, “So what?” I mean it’s technically impressive, I guess. But why would anyone care or pay for this product?
- cocacola1 4y ago
  I suppose it depends on how much you care about attribution for art.
  - dymk 4y ago
    "We" (as in the internet at large) already didn't care about attribution. Half of Instagram/Youtube/Tik-Tok and approximately 99% of Reddit was already reposted content with no attribution or backlinking.
- scotty79 4y ago
  It's a nice way to find human artists that create images in the donain you are interested in. To commission some work ... or just to refine your prompts.
throwaway-blaze 4y ago
I was taught to paint by instructors, and then refined my abilities by studying paintings of the old masters, right down to their brushwork and core techniques visible in the paintings to all who see them. Now I go and create a painting called Sunflowers. Does Van Gogh's estate own some of my work?
- jxf 4y ago
  No one is necessarily saying that you owe Van Gogh a cut. What they _are_ saying is not to claim that you didn't train on Van Gogh or to pretend that you don't know what you practiced on.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    As an author, often I don't even remember where I got some fragment of an idea. The good stuff just gets embedded in my subconsciousness and turns into the way I think. Should every HN comment I write include a full list of everything I've ever read? What about a commercial work like a book, should that include a list of everything I've read or heard in the past 35 years of my life? That's a lot of attribution to keep track of ... edit: I guess my question is where does derivativity end and creativity begin?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jxf 4y ago
      I think you're applying the wrong standard. If you think your work has been clearly influenced by something, you might call that out in the acknowledgements of your work, for example. What Stable Diffusion does is effectively say "it doesn't matter how this was made" for every single artifact it creates, providing neither attribution nor acknowledgement. This happens even when it's clearly been influenced by, and in some cases is directly copying, elements or a whole of a very small set of highly influential inputs. If a human author did that, people would probably be upset, if not outright accuse them of plagiarism.
  - 4y ago
whatshisface 4y ago
To actually accomplish something like this purports to be (the linked tool only searches for similar images and doesn't tell you anything about how information ended up inside the model), you could try removing individual images or sets of images from the same artist from the training dataset to see what outputs the resulting model would lose the ability to create. It would be expensive to do that for more than a few images, but given how helpful it would be for the debate about copyright and AI, I think it would be great if some researchers could try it.
- version_five 4y ago
  Your idea is the gold standard in explaining the influence of training data. People may be interested in this paper and more modern variations: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04730 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04730 It attempts to do as you suggest in a tractable way, to understand which training data is most influential.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Has the output of this tool been measured against the gold standard so that we can tell whether or not it is working?
    - version_five 4y ago
      No, this tool (Stable Attribution) doesn't actually do training sample attribution. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483
- cypress66 4y ago
  Are these models actually "stable" (heh)? Or would changing anything in the dataset result in a butterfly effect so to speak, thus a completely different output for the same prompt?
  - nickvincent 4y ago
braingenious 4y ago
I wonder how this Super Altruistic Startup is going to monetize outside of becoming the art equivalent of patent trolls, wildly throwing out lawsuits at anything that their algorithm pegs as AI-generated along with a positive “similar” outcome from a reverse image search. I have yet to hear firsthand from any professional artist a single incident of Stable Diffusion causing them harm or lost revenue, but I have heard from a lot of armchair lawyers salivating about the idea of demonizing/criminalizing anybody that uses a piece of novel software.
patientplatypus 4y ago
[dead]
armchairhacker 4y ago
This is a really great approach and much better than "ban all AI-generated content because we can't find out who made what it was derived from". Even if it only finds similar matches and not true attribution, I actually think that is better. Say I come up with a neat design but I'm not very famous, and later someone more famous comes up with the same design on their own. I don't deserve attribution, but I would argue I deserve recognition. Regardless of whether or not the popular design was inspired by or derived from the original; having a model like this match the popular design with original, see that the original was created earlier, and give it recognition would be vindicating. In fact, what if we create a neural network like this one to trace out huge DAGs linking every media with its similar-but-earlier and similar-but-later counterparts? It would show the evolution of culture on a large scale, how various memes and pieces of culture get created, where "artistic geniuses" likely get their inspirations from; and it would function as a great recommendation engine. As for copyright and royalties - the site's intro never mentioned them, just "attribution" and "people's identities". And honestly, I don't think people deserve a cut from art generated from AI using their art unless the art is extremely similar. Because most of the time they are not that similar: the AI takes one artist's work (which would not be enough training data on its own) and mixes it with many others, like humans do, and I don't believe the two are different in a way that makes the AI mixer preserve copyright.
- benatkin 4y ago
  It isn't nearly a viable solution to the problem. It's a cool app with a manifesto on the front page.
scotty79 4y ago
Very nice initiative but undermined by the fact that it doesn't give attribution. Only asks for providing one and depends on the honesty of the users about that. Maybe just do reverse image search in google for the first approximation of attribution?
nickvincent 4y ago
Yes, this doesn't use attribution techniques like influence functions or Shapley values that are popular in machine learning research, but I am pretty convinced that even a nearest neighbors search is better than the current baseline offered by "AI art systems": shrug our shoulders and say nothing about the role of human-created training data in producing the outputs. As far as I know, nobody is even thinking about doing the very expensive experiments needed to get ground truth data for formal attribution techniques in the generative AI context (for a given prompt, retrain your model so you can see how the output changes when a particular training example or group of examples is omitted or added), so we're nowhere near building true attribution systems for these very large models. Centering the training data will be net good for public discourse on the topic. That said, I see why people want to push back on some of the language used here.
saurik 4y ago
I gave it a photo I had Stable Diffusion 1.4 generate from the prompt "avatar for saurik". If you dig through the CLIP database, you will find that the model was trained on a ridiculously large number of copies of my Twitter profile photo due to it being included when people screenshot popular tweets I've posted (which, notably, also means that it is rather low resolution). https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=e89f1e94-067b-4ab8-b1f5-d601bb55825d https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=e89f1e94-067b-4ab8-... https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1434747464/square_400x400.png https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1434747464/square_400x4... Given that I only said "saurik" and SD came up with something that not only looks more than quite a bit like me but is more than quite a bit similar to the pose of my profile photo, I'd say clearly that photo would be one of the most important photographs in the database to show up when asking "which human-made source images were used by AI to generate this image"... ...and yet, whatever algorithm is being used here--which I'm guessing is merely "(full) images similar to this (full) image" as opposed to "images that were used to make this image"--isn't finding it; which, to me, means this website is adding more noise than signal to the discussion (in that I think people might learn the wrong lessons or draw the wrong conclusions).
- codetrotter 4y ago
  Am I seeing the same thing you are in those two images you linked to? The first one, generated by AI has you looking at the camera. The other one has you looking at an instrument. They don’t look much like each other to me, in terms of pose or anything. The first images suggested by Stable Attribution looks a lot more like the AI image to me, in terms of pose and everything.
  - csande17 4y ago
    That's the point. The website is finding images that look similar, not the images the algorithm actually used to generate that picture for the prompt "avatar for saurik".
  - Retr0id 4y ago
    I think you're missing the point. How does Stable Diffusion know "what does saurik look like?". The answer is of course that it's seen saurik's profile pic in training data. Stable Attribution is not showing that. As another comment[1] points out: > This appears to be just looking for the nearest neighbors of the image in embedding space and calling those the source data. Stylistically similar images are not the same as source images. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483
cush 4y ago
What a gorgeous site. Love the aesthetic and the idea! In Who Owns the Future, Jerron Lanier proposes that the only path to an economy with a sustainable middle class not ruled by Google and Facebook is through this kind of attribution and subsequent micro-royalties. It's a fascinating read
minimaxir 4y ago
This seems like https://haveibeentrained.com https://haveibeentrained.com with counterproductive pretentiousness.
GaggiX 4y ago
Calling the nearest neighbors of the CLIP embeddings of an image "attribution" feels really misleading, the model has been influenced by the entire dataset it was trained on, just by finding the most semantically similar images does not mean the AI is just using that speficific group of images as references, they probably have almost no influence compared to the entire size of the dataset. P.S. I'm having fun uploading actual photos and art just to see what the site tell me with confidence "These human-made source images were used by AI to generate this image". Edit: https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval, this site has always been there to explore the LAION dataset using CLIP image/text embeddings and without the need to mislead the user. Edit 2: As it's showed in this tweet: https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824 https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824, they are just using CLIP-L/14 and find the most semantically similar images.
- __forward__ 4y ago
  Yeah this needs to be higher up, very misleading! To be fair though, they do point it out in their FAQ: "Version 1 of Stable Attribution’s algorithm decodes an image generated by an AI model into the most similar examples from the data that the model was trained with." To me it actually seems like this language intentionally obscures that they are 'only' using similarity search. Imo this does a huge disservice to AI communication, providing fake explanations where even cutting edge research has poor insight into these models.
- ausbah 4y ago
  I don't think this is right. it's possible to fine tune these models with a few pieces from a select artist such that when you say "[art] is the style of [new artist]" you will get new pieces in the style of that artist. those few select pieces have clearly had disproportionate influence on the generated images, even if just via conditioning in the prompt
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    Okay but here we're are talking about the standard SD 1/2 model trained on the LAION dataset, the site only do CLIP retrieval on the LAION dataset, the only thing that makes this website different from Google/Yandex/etc image reverse search.
throwaway1851 4y ago
[flagged]
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Pushing back against a deliberately misleading presentation isn't emotional.
mattbee 4y ago
I like this because they are trying to show how AI is a copyright laundry. I can see other commenters picking apart its method of heuristically guessing at source images from training data. That obviously won't be accurate, or a full picture, but I wonder if it would convince a judge. An interesting challenge for these heuristics would be to take the picture under test along with its prompt, retrain the model without the training pictures it identifies, and regenerate using the same prompt to see whether the output is remotely similar. Obviously that would be hilariously expensive and slow for a casual web service like this, but not beyond the realms of possibility for a wealthy copyright-holder. e.g. if an prompt for an image includes "in the style of Kincade", and you could subtract all of Kinkade's copyrighted images from the training data, would the model still be able to produce anything like his work? If not, Thomas Kinkade might have a copyright case against people who publish AI art "in the style of Kincade", because he could show that his input was the major contributor to any lucrative output, even if nobody could pin down the cause & effect.
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  Kind of a sidebar, but interesting you chose Thomas Kinkade, who has been dead 10 years, and yet new "Thomas Kinkade Studios" work with his signature (i.e. "in the style of Thomas Kinade") is still being produced by by his family, who are probably stoked to be able to use an AI to quickly create "new" works.
  - tough 4y ago
    The point is they will want a moat around that and probably won't be so happy anyone with a GPU or 1$ can do it too
  - mattbee 4y ago
    Haha, OK, not greatly in touch with the visual arts me, was just grasping for a monumentally successful modern painter. But I don't think it changes my point - I'm sure his estate would like to use copyright law to keep the exclusive right to produce works in his style.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
fwlr 4y ago
Uploading works by real human artists gives you a batch of results that resemble a reference board (mood board, inspiration board, etc) the artist could have been looking at while creating their original work of art. Obviously it’s not the actual reference board, the only way to get that is to ask the artist yourself, but it sure looks like what you’d expect their reference board to look like. This site is grift, of course, and I doubt its creators expect it to sway anyone who knows it’s just doing a nearest neighbor search of image embedding vectors. But it’s oddly humanizing to see that the AI uses reference boards too.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  The AI does NOT build or use reference boards for specific prompts. The only reference it has is the prompt itself, which gets distilled down into a list of 512 numbers, each one of which the AI associates with a particular image feature (or set of features). The only reference material it has is the training set. Most images are not actually retained in the model; but certain statistically significant or repeated images will be. So if the model is regurgitating a training set image, this will alert you to that fact. But you are correct that it is not strictly speaking "attribution". You still need a human to say whether or not the images are just "in the same style" or close enough to actually be a straight copy. This is also only talking about the "type prompt, insert bacon" kind of AI art. There are plenty of people who are feeding other people's work into an AI as a sort of automated tracing tool, and this won't catch them if they're not tracing images that were in the training set. Unfortunately these are also the most egregious and awful abuses of AI art generators.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    In a literal sense, no, it does not use reference boards. I was being glib, perhaps too glib. A less objectionable rephrasing might be “the AI is composing a bunch of visual features together into a coherent image; it’s cool that this tool can show you images in the training set where the AI might have learned those visual features from.” It may still be inaccurate to say “reference boards” at all, because the temporality is reversed: human artist has a reference board, then does some black box process in their brain to draw inspiration from them, then outputs the final art piece. The AI draws on all the training data to produce the final image and it’s only by analyzing the final image that you can reconstruct which images in the training set were important. Mostly I was just tickled by the fact that you can now get something that looks like a reference board for the generated image. There are some parallels to the human process, but maybe there are not enough parallels or the parallels don’t run deep enough to make it sensible to call this “the AI is using a reference board”.
gfodor 4y ago
Ah, a nice visual proof that these AI systems are actually synthesizing images with a degree of inspiration from prior art similar to the way humans do.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Until you upload a human created image...
- heliumcraft 4y ago
  Actually no it isn't proof of anything, the site is highly misleading, it's just searching for similar images using CLIP image embeddings and then claiming those must be the source. https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824 https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824 Ironically they don't give attribution to where this technique comes from https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/
f38zf5vdt 4y ago
This is a company that allows you to search for images from a training dataset that have a high cosine similarity with a given image. It appears to be the same as the open source software published by LAION. https://github.com/rom1504/clip-retrieval https://github.com/rom1504/clip-retrieval It does not appear to actually show you how images were used to train a generative AI.
simonw 4y ago
Upload a photo you took to prove to yourself that this tool is misleading (if not straight up fraudulent), then downvote and move on. You can already run exactly this kind of image similarity search against the Stable Diffusion training set using existing tools - https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2Fknn.laion.ai&index=laion5B-H-14&useMclip=false https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2... for example
- pjgalbraith 4y ago
  It's actually just the exact same tool rebranded with a fancy landing page. The worst part is this "attribution tool" didn't even give attribution to the original author https://twitter.com/rom1504/status/1622381709424558081?s=20&t=b_cbLs7N7hREKgC9gpnctQ https://twitter.com/rom1504/status/1622381709424558081?s=20&...
- astrange 4y ago
  But you can't downvote stories.
  - consumer451 4y ago
    You can flag though, and this fraud (or near fraud) deserves it.
anothernewdude 4y ago
That's not how the AI works. It also ignores all the work from the Language model that goes into the art. The language model can fill massive gaps in the image generation. All the negative examples are also instructing the AI how to make an image, not just the most similar images. This is a bad joke that reinforces poor understanding of how image generation works.
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
The story sounds like either satire or blatant misrepresentation of reality. The Internet was full of images without attribution way before Stable Diffusion appeared. Why do people feel compelled to invent nonsensical narratives to demonize AI?
- sva_ 4y ago
  Sounds almost like a biblical story about some past paradise. If only you hadn't eaten the fruit, then everything would be alright.
madsmith 4y ago
I gave it a picture of the Mahi Mahi and jambalaya I was having in a restaurant. It showed me pictures of food. Fair enough. But it’s completely disingenuous to say it’s finding attribution to any images you give it. Finding similar pictures in an embedding space does not mean any of those pictures are part of the attribution chain any more than anything else.
strangescript 4y ago
I am influenced by everything I have ever seen, read, or heard. No one is asking me to attribute where my influences came from when I create something. Yes, AI is still a bit crude now, but in 10 years this is going to like an old man yelling at the wind. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-unrestrained-demon-a-lightbulb-demon-is-displayed-as-a-news-photo/517351124?adppopup=true https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-unrestrai...
spullara 4y ago
This is a great way to show that Stable Diffusion doesn't copy.
- m00x 4y ago
  It doesn't show anything, it's all a lie.
geuis 4y ago
I agree with several other commenters on this. I went through maybe 20 different images, and in every case there were no clearly identifiable ties back to the "sources". If anything, I'm more impressed at what SD is able to do. However, I have definitely found at least a handful of generated images over the last few months that were almost 100% the same as the training image. I don't have the references handy, but it shouldn't be too hard to replicate. I was looking at different artists I liked on Artstation but that had few examples of their work. I then used a fairly standard prompt and only changed references to the artists I was testing out. In several of those instances, the generated images in SD were near 1-1 with one of the source images the AI was trained on.
poxrud 4y ago
I find the original images that were used to generate the art to be much more beautiful and emotion evoking than the strange and lifeless AI images. Maybe it’s just my subconscious but for me something always seems off with the AI generated art.
qwerty456127 4y ago
Is there still any chance for a human to come up with something new an AI can't? Haven't all the possible ideas ans/or "sub-ideas" already been implemented and fed into "AIs"? I suspect the humanity is omniscient and it's only problem is lack of possibility to keep everything it knows in a mind simultaneously and connect the dots. An "AI" seems to be a solution to this problem. Even an individual human could be almost omniscient if he could simultaneously put everything he has ever knew/thought/seen into his working memory.
pdntspa 4y ago
Interesting... I get zero results for every image I give it, all made with SD 1.4/1.5
- m00x 4y ago
  Because the website is a grift and fraudulent on the what it claims to do. Anyone with a slight expertise in AI would immediately know that none of this is accurate.
EGreg 4y ago
How would it know?
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
the copyright people are insufferable. In my experience those who complain the most about copyright and "AI art theft" and whatnot, either 1) have a vested business interest in not automating this kind of stuff (e.g. they churn out low-effort quickturnaround copy / design), so the automation is coming for yet another mind-numbing half-automated (sorry non-stop CMD+C / CMD+V isn't really "creating" anything novel or of value). Yeah those SEO spam gigs will be written by robots now, how quaint. 2) are copyright justice warriors who are raging for the sake of it, meaning they aren't even designers, artists, writers or anything like that. 3) do create some kind of art / text etc., but of a quality that is not putting them at risk of getting the badge of honor that is "in style of <copyright justice warrior>". At the core of all this rage is just envy at someone being smarter and more successful than you are - in computer science, in statistics, in business, in art, in writing. Yeah someone did something so good it made it into Stable Diffision as a "named prompt". Yeah someone was actually capable of creating Stable Diffusion. Protectionists are disgusting.
dang 4y ago
Related ongoing thread: Getty Images v. Stability AI – Complaint - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 - (194 comments and counting)
waffletower 4y ago
This site is broken from my vantage. I uploaded a Stable Diffusion render of a banal trash can sitting on a lawn. It returned a picture of fiery ruins floating in the sky. While the attributions it returned for this image I did not upload looked somewhat similar in style, they were definitely different enough to indicate that Stable Diffusion created something new and different -- assuming that Stable Attribution is definitive in the referencing relevant training sources. I don't believe that it is.
0xrisk 4y ago
we built https://haveibeentrained.com https://haveibeentrained.com that does the same CLIP retrieval process, and arranged for artists to be able to opt out of future trainings with Stability and LAION. If this is just CLIP retrieval, that raises some ethical problems with the pretense of this site. It could make artists look silly for depending on an overstated claim of provenance, or worse still have artists pursue AI artists because an image looked kind of like their own artwork, with nothing more behind it.
breck 4y ago
First, it's a beautiful site. Second, a rant. Look, if you are a photographer or artist or writer, your individual contributions to civilization are zero. I'm sorry I have to be the one to break the bad news to you. It's just the mathematical truth. We are still in the childish (c)opywrong era of civilization where people born in privilege were brainwashed into thinking they were special snowflakes and their creative contributions to humanity are far more valuable than they actually are. Your contributions, I don't care if you are a modern day Da Vinci, are but a grain of sand on a Mount Everest of human creation. That photo you took? Far far far easier than the immense amount of effort it took to build that camera and get it into your hands. That book you wrote? Far far far easier than the thousands of years it took to evolve the letters and words you used to write it. That song you sang? Trivial compared to the collective efforts of hundreds of millions of people who pioneered music theory and instruments. People who clamor for attribution ironically spend relatively little time digging into the details of all histories of all the ideas they are building upon. I'm not saying go out and plagiarize. I'm not saying stop creating. I am saying to wake up and think from root principles about ideas and the absolute stupidity of the (c)opywrong regime. All these big AI models are ignoring (c)opywrong law, and you should too. Even better, contribute to the fight to pass and amendment to abolish (c)opywrong once and for all. </endrant>
low_tech_punk 4y ago
I wish there is similar tool for the text-based generative models such as GTP-3.
jfoster 4y ago
This seems to be a similar image finder applied to the dataset used to train Stable Diffusion, I think? I uploaded a photo I took a few minutes earlier and it showed me similar photos. My point is that it doesn't seem to prove that any of the images it finds are actually the source images.
anigbrowl 4y ago
無駄だ
margorczynski 4y ago
When writing code on my n-th job I should pay something to the n-1 companies I've worked before as my skills were honed working on their proprietary code? If I ever hear that Oracle is searching for executives I'll point them out to you, sure you'll get along just fine
raydiatian 4y ago
Rather than retroactively tell the community to self police, maybe we could ask our lawmakers to implement attribution legislation
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
waterproof 4y ago
This site don’t even provide actual attribution to the original artists? And yet they encourage you to share those same images without attribution. Wild.
dqpb 4y ago
This is complete and utter bullshit.
vivegi 4y ago
If the training data set is truly open, the raw inputs (or URLs to the sources) should be available. Isn't a direct image lookup on the source data a better way to do attribution? (For example: using methods similar to a Google Image Search) At least from a legal perspective, protection (i.e., indemnification) should be offered to those who are clearly attributing their sources (which means they shouldn't be violating copyrights in the first place) and if they don't use clear attribution of sources, they should hold the burden of proof to show that they are not violating copyrights.
alphatozeta 4y ago
basically an advert for chroma, the vector db company, since this is essentially running a semantic similarity search. wouldn't be surprised if they're running something like clip-interrogator or just clip itself and then an approximate vector similarity search over the database of image, vector pairs in their dataset.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  The company is not a vector db company (it's unclear what Chroma is going from their Twitter other than "data engines for every machine learning system in the world"), otherwise attacking one of the best developments for vectors would be a weird business move. https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1594809321606770690 https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1594809321606770690
Thorentis 4y ago
So now we have to address the issue of whether or not all art is derivative. If I go to art school, and learn from the masters, do I need to be giving attribution to all the artists whose work I studied before creating my own masterpieces? Underlying this whole push to give attribution via AIs, there seems to be the general understanding that these AIs like SD are doing something very different to "creating" art, but are merely "combining art". I agree with this view, but it doesn't seem to be explicitly said very much.
dzink 4y ago
From the beginning of using Stable Diffusion in local and cloud instances, I’ve been promoting SD to generate objects I know nobody has ever drawn before. “Airplane by Tesla”, “Taylor Swift flying in the clouds”, “Little girl riding on an ira descent unicorn and chasing butterflies in the clouds”, “Turkey as a Judge” etc. I highly encourage everyone to try doing that. The results are absolutely atrocious in the beginning and it takes many many runs short and long, with seeds guiding the model to get closer and closer to what I ask. It took a long time to get one instance of SD to make the invention look plausible, and then trying on a new model copy/instance takes the results back to crap. That makes me suspect your guidance trains the instance you are using and your prompts and feedback create the work substantially. The model truly generates novel content based on input of the generator and it takes effort to replicate a work it was trained on, likely by using multiple keywords the original was captioned with in many places. So you can get replicas if you try, but you can also draw replicas with brushes if you have enough skill as well. To reiterate: try to generate content you know nobody has ever drawn before (and google to verify it is truly original) and see how much effort it takes to get an actually good result. Now sub-trained models can be steered in different directions, so it’s possible that Midjourney or a heavily sub-trained cloud instance overfit to the originals, so this is not universal, but every copy of the model is likely different and molded by the prompts and feedback it’s been given.
- convexfunction 4y ago
  Sorry, but you're reading into noise. Anyone can reproduce an image anyone else made by only knowing the model checkpoint, positive and negative prompt, seed, sampler and sampling steps, &c &c they used. (Well, in principle, and usually in practice too. Interfaces might give different results now compared to a version from a few months ago because implementations of certain things changed, or if you use xformers then all your outputs are slightly non-deterministic, other exceptions that prove the rule like that.) Some prompts I've come up with generate excellent and definitely novel results (without necessarily much work put into refining the prompt), others are extremely hard to get working well with hours of work even if I know it's something that isn't novel.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  > The results are absolutely atrocious in the beginning and it takes many many runs short and long, with seeds guiding the model to get closer and closer to what I ask. It took a long time to get one instance of SD to make the invention look plausible, and then trying on a new model copy/instance takes the results back to crap. This is simply not how any of this works and is only your imagination. Stable Diffusion is deterministic and has no instance memory. The seeds are random and length of session or starting a new instance has no effect on the randomness of seeds. Every seed is as random as the last, regardless of how long an instance has been running.
intrasight 4y ago
As one of my best friends told me in 1971 (we were six!), every image and sound that we produce has already been produced somewhere else in the infinite universe.
- renonce 4y ago
  The observable universe has only 10^80 atoms. A small image of 128x128 pixels has more variations than that.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    The two measure have nothing to do with each other.
sogen 4y ago
Isn’t AI art derivative work? If yes, they are infringing on copyrighted work.
can16358p 4y ago
How does it even work? AFAIK SD works in a "convoluted" latent space that is a result of all the training data, it's not like it takes a few images and smashes them together to create a new one.
- dqpb 4y ago
  It doesn't work. It's bullshit.
convexfunction 4y ago
Yeah, it's bullshit, but digging into a specific point from their FAQ: > Usually, the image the model creates doesn’t exist in its training data - it’s new - but because of the training process, the most influential images are the most visually similar ones, especially in the details. Would be cool if this were true, but I don't think it is, because the prompt you used and the captions on the training images are being completely ignored. If two different words tend to be used in captions for very visually similar images, and you use just one of those words in your inference prompt, I'm pretty sure the images that were captioned with the word you used are much more "influential" on your output than the images that were captioned with the word you didn't use. (Like, "equestrian" vs "mountie" or "cowboy" or something.)
- convexfunction 4y ago
  Not to mention that the totality of all other images is in most cases probably more "influential" than the few most visually similar images! Consider the thought experiment: 1. Take the prompt you used, and use it with a model checkpoint that was trained identically to whatever model you're using, except that the top 21 images this website shows you are removed. In most cases, while your outputs won't be identical (I assume), you can probably get something pretty similar. 2. Now, take that same prompt, and use it with a model checkpoint that was only trained on the top 21 images this website shows you. (AFAIK you can't really do this because Stability hasn't released a "completely untrained" version of any of their models... though maybe they have and nobody cares because it's useless for most purposes.) I'm not completely sure what you'd get, but my bet would be that you get either nonsense or a memorized replica of one of the training images, not the same output image you got previously.
puppycodes 4y ago
I think we need to rethink the concept of attribution and how we can collectivize participation rather than define absolute owners. It feels like theres a lot of old ideas that we force on new systems. Sometimes they really just dont work that way. When art or design is generated, copied, or remixed it gains new contexts that often are just as meaningful as the original. In my opinion at least, its what makes the internet beautiful.
convexfunction 4y ago
You ever feel like this specific propaganda war is actually unwinnable? Many people are extremely motivated to bullshit the public (usually sincerely though I kind of doubt it in this case), and from I've seen, the public are far more willing to believe the 3 extremely online artists who they've heard an opinion on the topic from than the 1 software engineer/data scientist who actually knows half a thing about machine learning they've heard an opinion on the topic from, let alone the growing cornucopia papers and high-production-value websites that seem to say "it's just a plagiarism machine" if you don't know anything about the subject vs the approximately one website I've ever seen that says "no, you are being lied to". I'd like to believe this isn't one of those things where we can only move on by everyone who believes the various correlated falsities dying, but I don't think I can.
- nwienert 4y ago
  It is a plagiarism machine - software engineer with years of ML experience.
Imnimo 4y ago
How did this get to the front page of HN? This is so transparently asinine. In what universe does finding a nearest neighbor constitute attribution?
mnming 4y ago
Off topic, I really like the scrolling animation on the site, I wonder what tools did they use to make it.
adita01xu 4y ago
[dead]
mikewarot 4y ago
I would like to be able to take my 300,000 photos and throw them at something like at the embedded latent space behind StableDiffusion, to have it rate them, add keywords, etc. This would allow me to them put the top 1000 on Flickr.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  That is more for CLIP than Stable Diffusion.
esskay 4y ago
This is a bit flawed. By providing a non-ai photo it just picks up similar photos and claims they were used to generate it. It's a nice, but as I say, flawed concept.
wiz21c 4y ago
Attribution is half of the problem. I'm not happy at all with people putting my code behind the closed wall of AI to regurgitate some other code inspired from it... I say : my code as in "the text of my program", not "the idea of my code" (I have no problem with people re-using my ideas as they are mostly ideas that I have learnt from someone else).
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I gave it a photo I took of my dog. It gave me a bunch of images that had nothing to do with my dog. It's interesting, but not all that useful.
sinuhe69 4y ago
Haha, I just uploaded a photo of mine to test and SA promptly reported a dozens supposedly human-made "sources" for my photo! I find it hilarious! No, that's not how attribution should work.
okamiueru 4y ago
So, this is just a reverse image search, or does do anything more clever, like finding stronger matches in the latent space? For example the "style" could match, but a composition is completely different, etc. So, even if it fails at correctly attributing source data. I'm wondering if it doesn't also fail at the concept of attribution. So far it just shows you some pictures with no attribution, and saying that whoever made those, made that. Am I missing something? Why doesn't it know who the "human made sources" were made by?
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  From what I can tell, it's just using the latent space to find similar images. Which is interesting, and potentially useful, but the fact that they are claiming that this is about 'attribution' puts it into scam territory IMO.
xyproto 4y ago
Should human artists also strive to attribute every other artist they have been inspired by when publishing an image? No.
fromtheabyss 4y ago
Hip hop, rap, and dj mixes are derivatives of art. Each is legally allowed without attribution. AI will be legally permitted to do the same.
hayley-patton 4y ago
Here's a fixed point of Cliff Click's Twitter picture: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1e52d4cc-6ad4-4ac2-b034-99ea661d205b https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1e52d4cc-6ad4-4ac2-... Download the first input picture, search for it, and somehow the picture is AI generated ripping off itself, and somehow influenced by other images despite the first input and the output being bit-identical.
jaimex2 4y ago
Everything is a remix. I don't know what it's trying to achieve other than to waste everyone's time. Those human artists saw art from other artists who saw art from other artists who saw art from other artists etc.
HenriTEL 4y ago
> people who saw it knew who made it Yeah for a small subset of insiders to a small subset of creators. Really that was already a fiction prior to stable diffusion. And then why human-made artwork would not need attribution of prior work that influenced it but AI made work would require some. We could extend the right to cite there and if we can't make it obvious that more than 10% of a given image was from another one, attribution makes no sense.
pk-protect-ai 4y ago
Utter bullshit. Even image of Pele on a main page of the site does not have any actual style dependencies from the images proposed by the site. I have uploaded my image made by SD: https://ibb.co/3NxPdNw https://ibb.co/3NxPdNw The list of proposed sources seems to be very random. EDIT: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=541edf3c-6281-4177-b564-a13087e39ce9 https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=541edf3c-6281-4177-... Bullshit. People learning every day to draw they are learning from other images. They using others styles and some time they are coming up with a unique style which was never used before. SD does the same. You can't recover original images. You can have similar style or composition, but you will never recover original image.
Hellmitioksldf 4y ago
Apparently A.I. has a double standard? Have not seen Artists doing the same thing before very much. Perhaps an inspipred by but not all the images they have seen which lead them to be able to draw a new enough image.
martopix 4y ago
Oops, the random image it chose as an example to show me was pretty nsfw :D
sweetrobot2k 4y ago
Zzzzzz
nephanth 4y ago
Uh what? That's not how it works, SD doesn't just get inspiration from a few similar images. It uses the weights trained from every image, every time. If you want attribution, you need to give it to the whole dataset, or not at all

747 points by mkeeter 4y ago

This appears to be just looking for the nearest neighbors of the image in embedding space and calling those the source data. This by definition would find similar looking images, but it's not strictly correct to call it attribution. To some extent all of the training data is responsible for the result - as an example, the model is also learning from negative examples. The result here may feel satisfying, but it's overly simplistic and it's misrepresenting what it is to call it attribution. (The silly story they have on the site doesn't really score any points either, it reminds me of RIAA et al)

fortyseven 4y ago
I fed it several very different images and yeah, that was my experience as well. There were many, many details that weren't present in the 'evidence' it provided.
azeemba 4y ago
Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would be valuable. I don't think such a solution can work just based on the resulting image though. It probably needs to input prompt to have any chance of working.
- csomar 4y ago
  > Yea it feels misleading. I think finding attribution is genuinely a hard problem and a solution in this space would be valuable. Wouldn't the attribution be basically all the dataset with various attribution probabilities? It's kind of like a reverse neural network.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I'd like to say AI trained on say patent database would prevent many patents that shoudn't be granted in the first place but my guess is that lawyers would quickly adapt to writing them in a way that doesn't trigger AI
ertian 4y ago
Yeah, it seems like it'll just as happily 'attribute' human-made images as well, which calls the whole thing into question. If it's really showing the images that stable diffusion has 'stolen from', and it'll do the same for humans, does that not mean people are equally guilty?
- fastball 4y ago
  Maybe Stability AI is playing 4D chess and made this website themselves as a sorta "false flag" to help demonstrate that what SD is doing is no different than what humans do, to help them win any legal battles.
  - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    How is what any of these image generators are doing any different from myself when I (try to) make art? I draw on my experiences and senses and try to reproduce a picture and those experiences include natural things I've seen as well as art others have made. More so how are these image generators any different from text generators like ChatGTP? I feel like if first tool out from these AI gates was a bot that wrote good-enough-to-use code, no one would have batted an eye. Everyone would just go "yeah we told you that those pesky programmers would eventually automate themselves out of jobs", but since it is rendering pictures which most of the populace can appreciate and it is a skill that is easy enough for literally any child to pick up, but requires a lot of dedication to master all of a sudden this is theft and should be illegal. I really hope this lawsuit or whatever doesn't go anywhere, because it will not change anything. The genie is already out of the bottle as far as image generators are concerned - however it means that we the people won't get whatever comes next. Whatever comes next will be tightly held by big corporations and they alone will reap the benefits, whatever they may be.
    - dns_snek 4y ago
      > More so how are these image generators any different from text generators like ChatGTP? I've spotted this pattern a couple of times and this sort of circular reasoning seems concerning. Whenever one of (Stable diffusion, Copilot, ChatGPT) comes up in a discussion, their legitimacy seems to be swiftly justified by existence of the other two, even though they're all uniquely problematic in how they wash away attribution and licensing.
vintermann 4y ago
So it is the opposite of attribution. It just makes up a plausible-looking story of attribution and passes it off as the truth. If you passed it a hand-painted image from 1850 which was not in SD's training dataset, it can happily declare that it was inspired by someone's piece from 2019. There's no actual causal inference going on. It has more in common with using an AI language model as a "bullshit generator" than it has with human attribution. Which isn't a coincidence, since nearest neighbour similarity searches ARE a type of machine learning, just a much simpler one than SD. Anti AI people who are upset about attribution, should learn the technology and try to create an actual attribution model: one that has a notion of causality, which could say who influenced who. Causal model requires causal assumptions, but you can probably get far with the simple assumption that "works from the future do not influence works from the past".
- jfoster 4y ago
  You can literally take a photo right now, upload it, and it will find similar photos from the SD dataset.
  - Aransentin 4y ago
    As an obvious example, I uploaded a photograph I took of a painting I have by Julie Hagen-Schwarz* that's been in private possession since 1882 and never put online: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=7730efac-bf52-4077-8bfc-9141bd4bff22 https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=7730efac-bf52-4077-... It still finds ostensible "source images" for the art. So, yes, it's clear this service is pretty much bogus. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Wilhelmine_Hagen-Schwarz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Wilhelmine_Hagen-Schwarz
- wilimitis 4y ago
  Why do you close the space for people who are pro-ai AND pro-attribution? The entire ai space wreaks of this divisiveness, and is likely why it will continue to die out as another "art-fad". There is seemingly little willingness to integrate into the existing art world in good faith.

granularity 4y ago

I like the concept, but if you upload a photo you took, the page will tell you: "These human-made source images were used by AI ... to generate this image." Where "this image" is your photo.

version_five 4y ago
Exactly, because it's not actually probing attribution, it's just finding the most similar images in the training data. You can just go to https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2Fknn.laion.ai&index=laion5B-H-14&useMclip=false https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2... and do this yourself without the hyperbole

throwaway69123 4y ago

I just tried this with an image I took with my phone and it gave me 10-15 images that the "ai" used to generate my image, proving this is an absolute fraud of a concept.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I assumed fraud, but also just dumb. The genie isn’t going back on the bottle.
FL410 4y ago
TBH I think misrepresenting this as identifying the "actual" source training material to make an image is way worse than what SD is doing. That's just a blatant lie.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

Even if this did work, why would people want such a piece of software?

version_five 4y ago
Linking training data to the output of an ML model is an extremely important area of research. It potentially takes away much of the "black box" aspect by understanding what a model is basing it's decision on. For example, sample attribution can be used to inform data collection, to see if a model is operating correctly, or to decide whether the output should be trusted - there's currently lots of talk about chatGPT making stuff up and not sourcing it's output. This would be the answer. The page in this thread doesn't do attribution, as I said in my other comment. But if it was possible, it would be very important to the field

goldemerald 4y ago

This is a great website, but not in the way the authors intended. Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art. Here's a random example https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=a2666aee-0a1a-411b-b0f9-0a06e39897c9 https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=a2666aee-0a1a-411b-... I will admit this is a nice tool for verifying the creations of SD aren't pure copies, so I think it will be useful for a time. But as AI-generated images start to taint future datasets, attribution is going to be significantly more complicated.

tantalor 4y ago
[flagged]
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
  [dead]
- th3h4mm3r 4y ago
  A little bit luddist imho
- dymk 4y ago
  What's a camera to you?
  - imgabe 4y ago
    Who is making the art, the camera or the human operating it? Does a paintbrush also make art? A chisel? These are tools that humans use. So is the AI. It doesn’t act of it’s own accord. A human has to give it a prompt and often refine the output.
Gigachad 4y ago
Yeah this is probably the future, it seems like the vast majority of the time the output is very unique, but if there is far too much source material for a particular prompt, it copies. Say a prompt like “Mona Lisa”. So now you can just use this tool to verify your output is safe.

steponlego 4y ago

This thing is running scripts from 30+ domains, I would classify it spyware at best. All my fans fired up, Canvas inspection, you name it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

blitz_skull 4y ago

Am I the only person who looks at this and thinks, “So what?” I mean it’s technically impressive, I guess. But why would anyone care or pay for this product?

cocacola1 4y ago
I suppose it depends on how much you care about attribution for art.
- dymk 4y ago
  "We" (as in the internet at large) already didn't care about attribution. Half of Instagram/Youtube/Tik-Tok and approximately 99% of Reddit was already reposted content with no attribution or backlinking.
scotty79 4y ago
It's a nice way to find human artists that create images in the donain you are interested in. To commission some work ... or just to refine your prompts.

throwaway-blaze 4y ago

I was taught to paint by instructors, and then refined my abilities by studying paintings of the old masters, right down to their brushwork and core techniques visible in the paintings to all who see them. Now I go and create a painting called Sunflowers. Does Van Gogh's estate own some of my work?

jxf 4y ago
No one is necessarily saying that you owe Van Gogh a cut. What they _are_ saying is not to claim that you didn't train on Van Gogh or to pretend that you don't know what you practiced on.
- Swizec 4y ago
  As an author, often I don't even remember where I got some fragment of an idea. The good stuff just gets embedded in my subconsciousness and turns into the way I think. Should every HN comment I write include a full list of everything I've ever read? What about a commercial work like a book, should that include a list of everything I've read or heard in the past 35 years of my life? That's a lot of attribution to keep track of ... edit: I guess my question is where does derivativity end and creativity begin?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jxf 4y ago
    I think you're applying the wrong standard. If you think your work has been clearly influenced by something, you might call that out in the acknowledgements of your work, for example. What Stable Diffusion does is effectively say "it doesn't matter how this was made" for every single artifact it creates, providing neither attribution nor acknowledgement. This happens even when it's clearly been influenced by, and in some cases is directly copying, elements or a whole of a very small set of highly influential inputs. If a human author did that, people would probably be upset, if not outright accuse them of plagiarism.
- 4y ago

whatshisface 4y ago

To actually accomplish something like this purports to be (the linked tool only searches for similar images and doesn't tell you anything about how information ended up inside the model), you could try removing individual images or sets of images from the same artist from the training dataset to see what outputs the resulting model would lose the ability to create. It would be expensive to do that for more than a few images, but given how helpful it would be for the debate about copyright and AI, I think it would be great if some researchers could try it.

version_five 4y ago
Your idea is the gold standard in explaining the influence of training data. People may be interested in this paper and more modern variations: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04730 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04730 It attempts to do as you suggest in a tractable way, to understand which training data is most influential.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Has the output of this tool been measured against the gold standard so that we can tell whether or not it is working?
  - version_five 4y ago
    No, this tool (Stable Attribution) doesn't actually do training sample attribution. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483
cypress66 4y ago
Are these models actually "stable" (heh)? Or would changing anything in the dataset result in a butterfly effect so to speak, thus a completely different output for the same prompt?
- nickvincent 4y ago

braingenious 4y ago

I wonder how this Super Altruistic Startup is going to monetize outside of becoming the art equivalent of patent trolls, wildly throwing out lawsuits at anything that their algorithm pegs as AI-generated along with a positive “similar” outcome from a reverse image search. I have yet to hear firsthand from any professional artist a single incident of Stable Diffusion causing them harm or lost revenue, but I have heard from a lot of armchair lawyers salivating about the idea of demonizing/criminalizing anybody that uses a piece of novel software.

patientplatypus 4y ago

[dead]

armchairhacker 4y ago

This is a really great approach and much better than "ban all AI-generated content because we can't find out who made what it was derived from". Even if it only finds similar matches and not true attribution, I actually think that is better. Say I come up with a neat design but I'm not very famous, and later someone more famous comes up with the same design on their own. I don't deserve attribution, but I would argue I deserve recognition. Regardless of whether or not the popular design was inspired by or derived from the original; having a model like this match the popular design with original, see that the original was created earlier, and give it recognition would be vindicating. In fact, what if we create a neural network like this one to trace out huge DAGs linking every media with its similar-but-earlier and similar-but-later counterparts? It would show the evolution of culture on a large scale, how various memes and pieces of culture get created, where "artistic geniuses" likely get their inspirations from; and it would function as a great recommendation engine. As for copyright and royalties - the site's intro never mentioned them, just "attribution" and "people's identities". And honestly, I don't think people deserve a cut from art generated from AI using their art unless the art is extremely similar. Because most of the time they are not that similar: the AI takes one artist's work (which would not be enough training data on its own) and mixes it with many others, like humans do, and I don't believe the two are different in a way that makes the AI mixer preserve copyright.

benatkin 4y ago
It isn't nearly a viable solution to the problem. It's a cool app with a manifesto on the front page.

scotty79 4y ago

Very nice initiative but undermined by the fact that it doesn't give attribution. Only asks for providing one and depends on the honesty of the users about that. Maybe just do reverse image search in google for the first approximation of attribution?

nickvincent 4y ago

Yes, this doesn't use attribution techniques like influence functions or Shapley values that are popular in machine learning research, but I am pretty convinced that even a nearest neighbors search is better than the current baseline offered by "AI art systems": shrug our shoulders and say nothing about the role of human-created training data in producing the outputs. As far as I know, nobody is even thinking about doing the very expensive experiments needed to get ground truth data for formal attribution techniques in the generative AI context (for a given prompt, retrain your model so you can see how the output changes when a particular training example or group of examples is omitted or added), so we're nowhere near building true attribution systems for these very large models. Centering the training data will be net good for public discourse on the topic. That said, I see why people want to push back on some of the language used here.

saurik 4y ago

I gave it a photo I had Stable Diffusion 1.4 generate from the prompt "avatar for saurik". If you dig through the CLIP database, you will find that the model was trained on a ridiculously large number of copies of my Twitter profile photo due to it being included when people screenshot popular tweets I've posted (which, notably, also means that it is rather low resolution). https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=e89f1e94-067b-4ab8-b1f5-d601bb55825d https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=e89f1e94-067b-4ab8-... https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1434747464/square_400x400.png https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1434747464/square_400x4... Given that I only said "saurik" and SD came up with something that not only looks more than quite a bit like me but is more than quite a bit similar to the pose of my profile photo, I'd say clearly that photo would be one of the most important photographs in the database to show up when asking "which human-made source images were used by AI to generate this image"... ...and yet, whatever algorithm is being used here--which I'm guessing is merely "(full) images similar to this (full) image" as opposed to "images that were used to make this image"--isn't finding it; which, to me, means this website is adding more noise than signal to the discussion (in that I think people might learn the wrong lessons or draw the wrong conclusions).

codetrotter 4y ago
Am I seeing the same thing you are in those two images you linked to? The first one, generated by AI has you looking at the camera. The other one has you looking at an instrument. They don’t look much like each other to me, in terms of pose or anything. The first images suggested by Stable Attribution looks a lot more like the AI image to me, in terms of pose and everything.
- csande17 4y ago
  That's the point. The website is finding images that look similar, not the images the algorithm actually used to generate that picture for the prompt "avatar for saurik".
- Retr0id 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point. How does Stable Diffusion know "what does saurik look like?". The answer is of course that it's seen saurik's profile pic in training data. Stable Attribution is not showing that. As another comment[1] points out: > This appears to be just looking for the nearest neighbors of the image in embedding space and calling those the source data. Stylistically similar images are not the same as source images. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670483

cush 4y ago

What a gorgeous site. Love the aesthetic and the idea! In Who Owns the Future, Jerron Lanier proposes that the only path to an economy with a sustainable middle class not ruled by Google and Facebook is through this kind of attribution and subsequent micro-royalties. It's a fascinating read

minimaxir 4y ago

This seems like https://haveibeentrained.com https://haveibeentrained.com with counterproductive pretentiousness.

GaggiX 4y ago

Calling the nearest neighbors of the CLIP embeddings of an image "attribution" feels really misleading, the model has been influenced by the entire dataset it was trained on, just by finding the most semantically similar images does not mean the AI is just using that speficific group of images as references, they probably have almost no influence compared to the entire size of the dataset. P.S. I'm having fun uploading actual photos and art just to see what the site tell me with confidence "These human-made source images were used by AI to generate this image". Edit: https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval, this site has always been there to explore the LAION dataset using CLIP image/text embeddings and without the need to mislead the user. Edit 2: As it's showed in this tweet: https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824 https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824, they are just using CLIP-L/14 and find the most semantically similar images.

__forward__ 4y ago
Yeah this needs to be higher up, very misleading! To be fair though, they do point it out in their FAQ: "Version 1 of Stable Attribution’s algorithm decodes an image generated by an AI model into the most similar examples from the data that the model was trained with." To me it actually seems like this language intentionally obscures that they are 'only' using similarity search. Imo this does a huge disservice to AI communication, providing fake explanations where even cutting edge research has poor insight into these models.
ausbah 4y ago
I don't think this is right. it's possible to fine tune these models with a few pieces from a select artist such that when you say "[art] is the style of [new artist]" you will get new pieces in the style of that artist. those few select pieces have clearly had disproportionate influence on the generated images, even if just via conditioning in the prompt
- GaggiX 4y ago
  Okay but here we're are talking about the standard SD 1/2 model trained on the LAION dataset, the site only do CLIP retrieval on the LAION dataset, the only thing that makes this website different from Google/Yandex/etc image reverse search.

throwaway1851 4y ago

[flagged]

minimaxir 4y ago
Pushing back against a deliberately misleading presentation isn't emotional.

mattbee 4y ago

I like this because they are trying to show how AI is a copyright laundry. I can see other commenters picking apart its method of heuristically guessing at source images from training data. That obviously won't be accurate, or a full picture, but I wonder if it would convince a judge. An interesting challenge for these heuristics would be to take the picture under test along with its prompt, retrain the model without the training pictures it identifies, and regenerate using the same prompt to see whether the output is remotely similar. Obviously that would be hilariously expensive and slow for a casual web service like this, but not beyond the realms of possibility for a wealthy copyright-holder. e.g. if an prompt for an image includes "in the style of Kincade", and you could subtract all of Kinkade's copyrighted images from the training data, would the model still be able to produce anything like his work? If not, Thomas Kinkade might have a copyright case against people who publish AI art "in the style of Kincade", because he could show that his input was the major contributor to any lucrative output, even if nobody could pin down the cause & effect.

kthejoker2 4y ago
Kind of a sidebar, but interesting you chose Thomas Kinkade, who has been dead 10 years, and yet new "Thomas Kinkade Studios" work with his signature (i.e. "in the style of Thomas Kinade") is still being produced by by his family, who are probably stoked to be able to use an AI to quickly create "new" works.
- tough 4y ago
  The point is they will want a moat around that and probably won't be so happy anyone with a GPU or 1$ can do it too
- mattbee 4y ago
  Haha, OK, not greatly in touch with the visual arts me, was just grasping for a monumentally successful modern painter. But I don't think it changes my point - I'm sure his estate would like to use copyright law to keep the exclusive right to produce works in his style.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

fwlr 4y ago

Uploading works by real human artists gives you a batch of results that resemble a reference board (mood board, inspiration board, etc) the artist could have been looking at while creating their original work of art. Obviously it’s not the actual reference board, the only way to get that is to ask the artist yourself, but it sure looks like what you’d expect their reference board to look like. This site is grift, of course, and I doubt its creators expect it to sway anyone who knows it’s just doing a nearest neighbor search of image embedding vectors. But it’s oddly humanizing to see that the AI uses reference boards too.

kmeisthax 4y ago
The AI does NOT build or use reference boards for specific prompts. The only reference it has is the prompt itself, which gets distilled down into a list of 512 numbers, each one of which the AI associates with a particular image feature (or set of features). The only reference material it has is the training set. Most images are not actually retained in the model; but certain statistically significant or repeated images will be. So if the model is regurgitating a training set image, this will alert you to that fact. But you are correct that it is not strictly speaking "attribution". You still need a human to say whether or not the images are just "in the same style" or close enough to actually be a straight copy. This is also only talking about the "type prompt, insert bacon" kind of AI art. There are plenty of people who are feeding other people's work into an AI as a sort of automated tracing tool, and this won't catch them if they're not tracing images that were in the training set. Unfortunately these are also the most egregious and awful abuses of AI art generators.
- fwlr 4y ago
  In a literal sense, no, it does not use reference boards. I was being glib, perhaps too glib. A less objectionable rephrasing might be “the AI is composing a bunch of visual features together into a coherent image; it’s cool that this tool can show you images in the training set where the AI might have learned those visual features from.” It may still be inaccurate to say “reference boards” at all, because the temporality is reversed: human artist has a reference board, then does some black box process in their brain to draw inspiration from them, then outputs the final art piece. The AI draws on all the training data to produce the final image and it’s only by analyzing the final image that you can reconstruct which images in the training set were important. Mostly I was just tickled by the fact that you can now get something that looks like a reference board for the generated image. There are some parallels to the human process, but maybe there are not enough parallels or the parallels don’t run deep enough to make it sensible to call this “the AI is using a reference board”.

gfodor 4y ago

Ah, a nice visual proof that these AI systems are actually synthesizing images with a degree of inspiration from prior art similar to the way humans do.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
Until you upload a human created image...
heliumcraft 4y ago
Actually no it isn't proof of anything, the site is highly misleading, it's just searching for similar images using CLIP image embeddings and then claiming those must be the source. https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824 https://twitter.com/kurumuz/status/1622379532958285824 Ironically they don't give attribution to where this technique comes from https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/

f38zf5vdt 4y ago

This is a company that allows you to search for images from a training dataset that have a high cosine similarity with a given image. It appears to be the same as the open source software published by LAION. https://github.com/rom1504/clip-retrieval https://github.com/rom1504/clip-retrieval It does not appear to actually show you how images were used to train a generative AI.

simonw 4y ago

Upload a photo you took to prove to yourself that this tool is misleading (if not straight up fraudulent), then downvote and move on. You can already run exactly this kind of image similarity search against the Stable Diffusion training set using existing tools - https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2Fknn.laion.ai&index=laion5B-H-14&useMclip=false https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/?back=https%3A%2F%2... for example

pjgalbraith 4y ago
It's actually just the exact same tool rebranded with a fancy landing page. The worst part is this "attribution tool" didn't even give attribution to the original author https://twitter.com/rom1504/status/1622381709424558081?s=20&t=b_cbLs7N7hREKgC9gpnctQ https://twitter.com/rom1504/status/1622381709424558081?s=20&...
astrange 4y ago
But you can't downvote stories.
- consumer451 4y ago
  You can flag though, and this fraud (or near fraud) deserves it.

anothernewdude 4y ago

That's not how the AI works. It also ignores all the work from the Language model that goes into the art. The language model can fill massive gaps in the image generation. All the negative examples are also instructing the AI how to make an image, not just the most similar images. This is a bad joke that reinforces poor understanding of how image generation works.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

The story sounds like either satire or blatant misrepresentation of reality. The Internet was full of images without attribution way before Stable Diffusion appeared. Why do people feel compelled to invent nonsensical narratives to demonize AI?

sva_ 4y ago
Sounds almost like a biblical story about some past paradise. If only you hadn't eaten the fruit, then everything would be alright.

madsmith 4y ago

I gave it a picture of the Mahi Mahi and jambalaya I was having in a restaurant. It showed me pictures of food. Fair enough. But it’s completely disingenuous to say it’s finding attribution to any images you give it. Finding similar pictures in an embedding space does not mean any of those pictures are part of the attribution chain any more than anything else.

strangescript 4y ago

I am influenced by everything I have ever seen, read, or heard. No one is asking me to attribute where my influences came from when I create something. Yes, AI is still a bit crude now, but in 10 years this is going to like an old man yelling at the wind. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-unrestrained-demon-a-lightbulb-demon-is-displayed-as-a-news-photo/517351124?adppopup=true https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-unrestrai...

spullara 4y ago

This is a great way to show that Stable Diffusion doesn't copy.

m00x 4y ago
It doesn't show anything, it's all a lie.

geuis 4y ago

I agree with several other commenters on this. I went through maybe 20 different images, and in every case there were no clearly identifiable ties back to the "sources". If anything, I'm more impressed at what SD is able to do. However, I have definitely found at least a handful of generated images over the last few months that were almost 100% the same as the training image. I don't have the references handy, but it shouldn't be too hard to replicate. I was looking at different artists I liked on Artstation but that had few examples of their work. I then used a fairly standard prompt and only changed references to the artists I was testing out. In several of those instances, the generated images in SD were near 1-1 with one of the source images the AI was trained on.

poxrud 4y ago

I find the original images that were used to generate the art to be much more beautiful and emotion evoking than the strange and lifeless AI images. Maybe it’s just my subconscious but for me something always seems off with the AI generated art.

qwerty456127 4y ago

Is there still any chance for a human to come up with something new an AI can't? Haven't all the possible ideas ans/or "sub-ideas" already been implemented and fed into "AIs"? I suspect the humanity is omniscient and it's only problem is lack of possibility to keep everything it knows in a mind simultaneously and connect the dots. An "AI" seems to be a solution to this problem. Even an individual human could be almost omniscient if he could simultaneously put everything he has ever knew/thought/seen into his working memory.

pdntspa 4y ago

Interesting... I get zero results for every image I give it, all made with SD 1.4/1.5

m00x 4y ago
Because the website is a grift and fraudulent on the what it claims to do. Anyone with a slight expertise in AI would immediately know that none of this is accurate.

EGreg 4y ago

How would it know?

wellthisisgreat 4y ago

the copyright people are insufferable. In my experience those who complain the most about copyright and "AI art theft" and whatnot, either 1) have a vested business interest in not automating this kind of stuff (e.g. they churn out low-effort quickturnaround copy / design), so the automation is coming for yet another mind-numbing half-automated (sorry non-stop CMD+C / CMD+V isn't really "creating" anything novel or of value). Yeah those SEO spam gigs will be written by robots now, how quaint. 2) are copyright justice warriors who are raging for the sake of it, meaning they aren't even designers, artists, writers or anything like that. 3) do create some kind of art / text etc., but of a quality that is not putting them at risk of getting the badge of honor that is "in style of <copyright justice warrior>". At the core of all this rage is just envy at someone being smarter and more successful than you are - in computer science, in statistics, in business, in art, in writing. Yeah someone did something so good it made it into Stable Diffision as a "named prompt". Yeah someone was actually capable of creating Stable Diffusion. Protectionists are disgusting.

dang 4y ago

Related ongoing thread: Getty Images v. Stability AI – Complaint - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668565 - (194 comments and counting)

waffletower 4y ago

This site is broken from my vantage. I uploaded a Stable Diffusion render of a banal trash can sitting on a lawn. It returned a picture of fiery ruins floating in the sky. While the attributions it returned for this image I did not upload looked somewhat similar in style, they were definitely different enough to indicate that Stable Diffusion created something new and different -- assuming that Stable Attribution is definitive in the referencing relevant training sources. I don't believe that it is.

0xrisk 4y ago

we built https://haveibeentrained.com https://haveibeentrained.com that does the same CLIP retrieval process, and arranged for artists to be able to opt out of future trainings with Stability and LAION. If this is just CLIP retrieval, that raises some ethical problems with the pretense of this site. It could make artists look silly for depending on an overstated claim of provenance, or worse still have artists pursue AI artists because an image looked kind of like their own artwork, with nothing more behind it.

breck 4y ago

First, it's a beautiful site. Second, a rant. Look, if you are a photographer or artist or writer, your individual contributions to civilization are zero. I'm sorry I have to be the one to break the bad news to you. It's just the mathematical truth. We are still in the childish (c)opywrong era of civilization where people born in privilege were brainwashed into thinking they were special snowflakes and their creative contributions to humanity are far more valuable than they actually are. Your contributions, I don't care if you are a modern day Da Vinci, are but a grain of sand on a Mount Everest of human creation. That photo you took? Far far far easier than the immense amount of effort it took to build that camera and get it into your hands. That book you wrote? Far far far easier than the thousands of years it took to evolve the letters and words you used to write it. That song you sang? Trivial compared to the collective efforts of hundreds of millions of people who pioneered music theory and instruments. People who clamor for attribution ironically spend relatively little time digging into the details of all histories of all the ideas they are building upon. I'm not saying go out and plagiarize. I'm not saying stop creating. I am saying to wake up and think from root principles about ideas and the absolute stupidity of the (c)opywrong regime. All these big AI models are ignoring (c)opywrong law, and you should too. Even better, contribute to the fight to pass and amendment to abolish (c)opywrong once and for all. </endrant>

low_tech_punk 4y ago

I wish there is similar tool for the text-based generative models such as GTP-3.

jfoster 4y ago

This seems to be a similar image finder applied to the dataset used to train Stable Diffusion, I think? I uploaded a photo I took a few minutes earlier and it showed me similar photos. My point is that it doesn't seem to prove that any of the images it finds are actually the source images.

anigbrowl 4y ago

無駄だ

margorczynski 4y ago

When writing code on my n-th job I should pay something to the n-1 companies I've worked before as my skills were honed working on their proprietary code? If I ever hear that Oracle is searching for executives I'll point them out to you, sure you'll get along just fine

raydiatian 4y ago

Rather than retroactively tell the community to self police, maybe we could ask our lawmakers to implement attribution legislation

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

waterproof 4y ago

This site don’t even provide actual attribution to the original artists? And yet they encourage you to share those same images without attribution. Wild.

dqpb 4y ago

This is complete and utter bullshit.

vivegi 4y ago

If the training data set is truly open, the raw inputs (or URLs to the sources) should be available. Isn't a direct image lookup on the source data a better way to do attribution? (For example: using methods similar to a Google Image Search) At least from a legal perspective, protection (i.e., indemnification) should be offered to those who are clearly attributing their sources (which means they shouldn't be violating copyrights in the first place) and if they don't use clear attribution of sources, they should hold the burden of proof to show that they are not violating copyrights.

alphatozeta 4y ago

basically an advert for chroma, the vector db company, since this is essentially running a semantic similarity search. wouldn't be surprised if they're running something like clip-interrogator or just clip itself and then an approximate vector similarity search over the database of image, vector pairs in their dataset.

minimaxir 4y ago
The company is not a vector db company (it's unclear what Chroma is going from their Twitter other than "data engines for every machine learning system in the world"), otherwise attacking one of the best developments for vectors would be a weird business move. https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1594809321606770690 https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1594809321606770690

Thorentis 4y ago

So now we have to address the issue of whether or not all art is derivative. If I go to art school, and learn from the masters, do I need to be giving attribution to all the artists whose work I studied before creating my own masterpieces? Underlying this whole push to give attribution via AIs, there seems to be the general understanding that these AIs like SD are doing something very different to "creating" art, but are merely "combining art". I agree with this view, but it doesn't seem to be explicitly said very much.

dzink 4y ago

From the beginning of using Stable Diffusion in local and cloud instances, I’ve been promoting SD to generate objects I know nobody has ever drawn before. “Airplane by Tesla”, “Taylor Swift flying in the clouds”, “Little girl riding on an ira descent unicorn and chasing butterflies in the clouds”, “Turkey as a Judge” etc. I highly encourage everyone to try doing that. The results are absolutely atrocious in the beginning and it takes many many runs short and long, with seeds guiding the model to get closer and closer to what I ask. It took a long time to get one instance of SD to make the invention look plausible, and then trying on a new model copy/instance takes the results back to crap. That makes me suspect your guidance trains the instance you are using and your prompts and feedback create the work substantially. The model truly generates novel content based on input of the generator and it takes effort to replicate a work it was trained on, likely by using multiple keywords the original was captioned with in many places. So you can get replicas if you try, but you can also draw replicas with brushes if you have enough skill as well. To reiterate: try to generate content you know nobody has ever drawn before (and google to verify it is truly original) and see how much effort it takes to get an actually good result. Now sub-trained models can be steered in different directions, so it’s possible that Midjourney or a heavily sub-trained cloud instance overfit to the originals, so this is not universal, but every copy of the model is likely different and molded by the prompts and feedback it’s been given.

convexfunction 4y ago
Sorry, but you're reading into noise. Anyone can reproduce an image anyone else made by only knowing the model checkpoint, positive and negative prompt, seed, sampler and sampling steps, &c &c they used. (Well, in principle, and usually in practice too. Interfaces might give different results now compared to a version from a few months ago because implementations of certain things changed, or if you use xformers then all your outputs are slightly non-deterministic, other exceptions that prove the rule like that.) Some prompts I've come up with generate excellent and definitely novel results (without necessarily much work put into refining the prompt), others are extremely hard to get working well with hours of work even if I know it's something that isn't novel.
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
> The results are absolutely atrocious in the beginning and it takes many many runs short and long, with seeds guiding the model to get closer and closer to what I ask. It took a long time to get one instance of SD to make the invention look plausible, and then trying on a new model copy/instance takes the results back to crap. This is simply not how any of this works and is only your imagination. Stable Diffusion is deterministic and has no instance memory. The seeds are random and length of session or starting a new instance has no effect on the randomness of seeds. Every seed is as random as the last, regardless of how long an instance has been running.

intrasight 4y ago

As one of my best friends told me in 1971 (we were six!), every image and sound that we produce has already been produced somewhere else in the infinite universe.

renonce 4y ago
The observable universe has only 10^80 atoms. A small image of 128x128 pixels has more variations than that.
- intrasight 4y ago
  The two measure have nothing to do with each other.

sogen 4y ago

Isn’t AI art derivative work? If yes, they are infringing on copyrighted work.

can16358p 4y ago

How does it even work? AFAIK SD works in a "convoluted" latent space that is a result of all the training data, it's not like it takes a few images and smashes them together to create a new one.

dqpb 4y ago
It doesn't work. It's bullshit.

convexfunction 4y ago

Yeah, it's bullshit, but digging into a specific point from their FAQ: > Usually, the image the model creates doesn’t exist in its training data - it’s new - but because of the training process, the most influential images are the most visually similar ones, especially in the details. Would be cool if this were true, but I don't think it is, because the prompt you used and the captions on the training images are being completely ignored. If two different words tend to be used in captions for very visually similar images, and you use just one of those words in your inference prompt, I'm pretty sure the images that were captioned with the word you used are much more "influential" on your output than the images that were captioned with the word you didn't use. (Like, "equestrian" vs "mountie" or "cowboy" or something.)

convexfunction 4y ago
Not to mention that the totality of all other images is in most cases probably more "influential" than the few most visually similar images! Consider the thought experiment: 1. Take the prompt you used, and use it with a model checkpoint that was trained identically to whatever model you're using, except that the top 21 images this website shows you are removed. In most cases, while your outputs won't be identical (I assume), you can probably get something pretty similar. 2. Now, take that same prompt, and use it with a model checkpoint that was only trained on the top 21 images this website shows you. (AFAIK you can't really do this because Stability hasn't released a "completely untrained" version of any of their models... though maybe they have and nobody cares because it's useless for most purposes.) I'm not completely sure what you'd get, but my bet would be that you get either nonsense or a memorized replica of one of the training images, not the same output image you got previously.

puppycodes 4y ago

I think we need to rethink the concept of attribution and how we can collectivize participation rather than define absolute owners. It feels like theres a lot of old ideas that we force on new systems. Sometimes they really just dont work that way. When art or design is generated, copied, or remixed it gains new contexts that often are just as meaningful as the original. In my opinion at least, its what makes the internet beautiful.

convexfunction 4y ago

You ever feel like this specific propaganda war is actually unwinnable? Many people are extremely motivated to bullshit the public (usually sincerely though I kind of doubt it in this case), and from I've seen, the public are far more willing to believe the 3 extremely online artists who they've heard an opinion on the topic from than the 1 software engineer/data scientist who actually knows half a thing about machine learning they've heard an opinion on the topic from, let alone the growing cornucopia papers and high-production-value websites that seem to say "it's just a plagiarism machine" if you don't know anything about the subject vs the approximately one website I've ever seen that says "no, you are being lied to". I'd like to believe this isn't one of those things where we can only move on by everyone who believes the various correlated falsities dying, but I don't think I can.

nwienert 4y ago
It is a plagiarism machine - software engineer with years of ML experience.

Imnimo 4y ago

How did this get to the front page of HN? This is so transparently asinine. In what universe does finding a nearest neighbor constitute attribution?

mnming 4y ago

Off topic, I really like the scrolling animation on the site, I wonder what tools did they use to make it.

adita01xu 4y ago

[dead]

mikewarot 4y ago

I would like to be able to take my 300,000 photos and throw them at something like at the embedded latent space behind StableDiffusion, to have it rate them, add keywords, etc. This would allow me to them put the top 1000 on Flickr.

minimaxir 4y ago
That is more for CLIP than Stable Diffusion.

esskay 4y ago

This is a bit flawed. By providing a non-ai photo it just picks up similar photos and claims they were used to generate it. It's a nice, but as I say, flawed concept.

wiz21c 4y ago

Attribution is half of the problem. I'm not happy at all with people putting my code behind the closed wall of AI to regurgitate some other code inspired from it... I say : my code as in "the text of my program", not "the idea of my code" (I have no problem with people re-using my ideas as they are mostly ideas that I have learnt from someone else).

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I gave it a photo I took of my dog. It gave me a bunch of images that had nothing to do with my dog. It's interesting, but not all that useful.

sinuhe69 4y ago

Haha, I just uploaded a photo of mine to test and SA promptly reported a dozens supposedly human-made "sources" for my photo! I find it hilarious! No, that's not how attribution should work.

okamiueru 4y ago

So, this is just a reverse image search, or does do anything more clever, like finding stronger matches in the latent space? For example the "style" could match, but a composition is completely different, etc. So, even if it fails at correctly attributing source data. I'm wondering if it doesn't also fail at the concept of attribution. So far it just shows you some pictures with no attribution, and saying that whoever made those, made that. Am I missing something? Why doesn't it know who the "human made sources" were made by?

sebzim4500 4y ago
From what I can tell, it's just using the latent space to find similar images. Which is interesting, and potentially useful, but the fact that they are claiming that this is about 'attribution' puts it into scam territory IMO.

xyproto 4y ago

Should human artists also strive to attribute every other artist they have been inspired by when publishing an image? No.

fromtheabyss 4y ago

Hip hop, rap, and dj mixes are derivatives of art. Each is legally allowed without attribution. AI will be legally permitted to do the same.

hayley-patton 4y ago

Here's a fixed point of Cliff Click's Twitter picture: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1e52d4cc-6ad4-4ac2-b034-99ea661d205b https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1e52d4cc-6ad4-4ac2-... Download the first input picture, search for it, and somehow the picture is AI generated ripping off itself, and somehow influenced by other images despite the first input and the output being bit-identical.

jaimex2 4y ago

Everything is a remix. I don't know what it's trying to achieve other than to waste everyone's time. Those human artists saw art from other artists who saw art from other artists who saw art from other artists etc.

HenriTEL 4y ago

> people who saw it knew who made it Yeah for a small subset of insiders to a small subset of creators. Really that was already a fiction prior to stable diffusion. And then why human-made artwork would not need attribution of prior work that influenced it but AI made work would require some. We could extend the right to cite there and if we can't make it obvious that more than 10% of a given image was from another one, attribution makes no sense.

pk-protect-ai 4y ago

Utter bullshit. Even image of Pele on a main page of the site does not have any actual style dependencies from the images proposed by the site. I have uploaded my image made by SD: https://ibb.co/3NxPdNw https://ibb.co/3NxPdNw The list of proposed sources seems to be very random. EDIT: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=541edf3c-6281-4177-b564-a13087e39ce9 https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=541edf3c-6281-4177-... Bullshit. People learning every day to draw they are learning from other images. They using others styles and some time they are coming up with a unique style which was never used before. SD does the same. You can't recover original images. You can have similar style or composition, but you will never recover original image.

Hellmitioksldf 4y ago

Apparently A.I. has a double standard? Have not seen Artists doing the same thing before very much. Perhaps an inspipred by but not all the images they have seen which lead them to be able to draw a new enough image.

martopix 4y ago

Oops, the random image it chose as an example to show me was pretty nsfw :D

sweetrobot2k 4y ago

Zzzzzz

nephanth 4y ago

Uh what? That's not how it works, SD doesn't just get inspiration from a few similar images. It uses the weights trained from every image, every time. If you want attribution, you need to give it to the whole dataset, or not at all