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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 simil

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.

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.