15 ms·

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 cre

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.
mrtksn 4y ago
The discussion over novelty is useless, all these legal structures like copyrights patents royalties and licenses are about creating business structures to allow artist or inventors be compensated. They were already imperfect in it and now suddenly a new technology drags their work into the wilderness with no stuctures for compensation. The images created by the AI are indeed novel but they feed on the work of people who spent decades building this style. Of course artist themselves feed from each other but they usually don't interfere with the business. So let's say, if an artist developed a particular style and someone wants to hire them for a business project like a game they can't feasibly just learn that style and use it so they hire the artist. Later other people catch on this style and develop over it. It only works because monetising through copying the style is not very feasible. Suddenly you have a machine that makes it feasible. Instead of hiring the artist or licensing their works, you train your machine on it and start generating any number of images of that style or combination with other style without paying the people who come up with all that. How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending years of developing that style/method? I'm fine with getting rid of all that copyright and license stuff but let's not pretend that what's happening now is a fair endeavour.
- mikeg8 4y ago
  I never thought of it from that perspective before, thanks for sparking that thought experiment.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  This is no different than professional calligraphers losing their jobs because of the printing press and then later due to customizable fonts on printers. I have a ton of respect for calligraphers and believe they are artists, but at the same time I don't think that the millions of people who create custom fonts or use custom fonts are doing a bad thing.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    Artist function is not limited to the act of producing the creation. Their value comes from creating the methods of exploring ideas or feelings and not from the output itself. Guernica is not invaluable because no one else can draw it and Picasso is not infamous because drew the best lines. Just to be clear, I think art made with AI also can have value because it's a tool after all. My concern is, it breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's not OK.
davidgaw 4y ago
Exactly. The tool is incomplete, in a sense, as while it shows the work of original art produced by the AI and the human images it was trained on, it has no way to show the imagery on which the human artists were trained to produce their images. (The model behind a human mind is vastly more complex than that of a deep learning model, but the principle is analogous.)
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Im sure its very random, but why is it that 99% of the time someone says this about some AI artwork its an image of a beautiful woman? I am pretty convinced at this point that in a lot people's heads, the fight to claim pictures like this as "real" or novel art is unconsciously just an urge to claim the beautiful woman as their own! Just thousands of men every day, generating beautiful ladies, yelling at people on the internet that they are real and they need to be protected... Maybe its all just coincidental or something, but if you just step back and look at it, its very... interesting.
esperent 4y ago
> Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art. You're jumping to a conclusion that the data doesn't warrant, I suspect because it's a conclusion that suits you. They're doing something like a "reverse image search" from an AI generated image over the original dataset and returning a few examples that have a high degree of similarity. There's no guarantee that the images they return are actually the ones combined to create the AI image. In fact their results are dubious - see Saurik's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34671149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34671149 I don't have an opinion regarding the question of whether SD creates art or not. To be honest, as someone who enjoys art or kind-of-art in many forms, it's not important to me (although, of course, I can see why it is important to someone who makes a living from art or AI generated images). However, this website doesn't add anything except noise to either side of the debate, from what I can see.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  I have to be correcting you here, stable diffusion does not combine images.
- semicolon_storm 4y ago
  Until somebody comes out with a better way to trace back output images to training data, this is the best "data" we have so far. Before this, there were anecdotal examples of SD outputting an image with some Shutterstock watermark or very similar to some artist's work, but the prompts also seemed highly specific or were asking for something in that artist's style. This tool at least lets us start to trace back the average image, and so far it does seem SD is adding something novel to its outputs.
  - gwern 4y ago
    > Until somebody comes out with a better way to trace back output images to training data, this is the best "data" we have so far. There are many better ways, in the sense that they actually do something like estimate the causal effect of a specific training datapoint, like leave-one-out cross-validation training or surrogates to Shapley value, or using nonparametric models to trace backwards. This is a whole subfield of ML research.* (The primary summary is: "it's hard and the easy approaches don't work." Which why he's not doing any of those but an easy incorrect thing.) * I'm not entirely sure why anyone cared so much... Research topics can be kinda arbitrary. But in this case, I think there was something of a fad around 2017 that there were going to be 'data marketplaces' where you would be trying to estimate the value of each datapoint to price it. This turned out to not exist as a business model: you either used big public data for free for generic model capabilities, or you had small proprietary data you'd die rather than sell to a competitor.
romwell 4y ago
>Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art. You seem to be taking their word that the examples they explicitly provided are truth. That is, that they show you all the important sources for the AI, without which the output would be drastically different. As other comments show, this is not the case.
humanizersequel 4y ago
Does it even matter? This is my hangup about luddite hand wringing with claims that the existence of Stable Diffusion and tools like it constitute some violation of the rights of the artists whose data was included in the training set. Existing laws on copyright infringement and whatnot don't persecute the paintbrushes, they go after the artist who published infringing material. Why should this be any different?
thepasswordis 4y ago
Here's another example: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1ecefeff-cc12-46e5-9935-cdd87c47d72f https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1ecefeff-cc12-46e5-...
Lockal 4y ago
> Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art Fiasco of a tool to detect the source of plagiarism does not mean that Stable Diffusion creates novel art. When you need a character with dyed hair tips, SD will occasionally spit out copyrighted Harley Quinn portrait from DC Comics, Stable Attribution won't mention Paul Dini and Bruce Timm as character authors, but tool may show you some other pictures of people with colored head. Good luck with lawyers, what I can say.

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.

mrtksn 4y ago

The discussion over novelty is useless, all these legal structures like copyrights patents royalties and licenses are about creating business structures to allow artist or inventors be compensated. They were already imperfect in it and now suddenly a new technology drags their work into the wilderness with no stuctures for compensation. The images created by the AI are indeed novel but they feed on the work of people who spent decades building this style. Of course artist themselves feed from each other but they usually don't interfere with the business. So let's say, if an artist developed a particular style and someone wants to hire them for a business project like a game they can't feasibly just learn that style and use it so they hire the artist. Later other people catch on this style and develop over it. It only works because monetising through copying the style is not very feasible. Suddenly you have a machine that makes it feasible. Instead of hiring the artist or licensing their works, you train your machine on it and start generating any number of images of that style or combination with other style without paying the people who come up with all that. How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending years of developing that style/method? I'm fine with getting rid of all that copyright and license stuff but let's not pretend that what's happening now is a fair endeavour.

mikeg8 4y ago
I never thought of it from that perspective before, thanks for sparking that thought experiment.
gitfan86 4y ago
This is no different than professional calligraphers losing their jobs because of the printing press and then later due to customizable fonts on printers. I have a ton of respect for calligraphers and believe they are artists, but at the same time I don't think that the millions of people who create custom fonts or use custom fonts are doing a bad thing.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Artist function is not limited to the act of producing the creation. Their value comes from creating the methods of exploring ideas or feelings and not from the output itself. Guernica is not invaluable because no one else can draw it and Picasso is not infamous because drew the best lines. Just to be clear, I think art made with AI also can have value because it's a tool after all. My concern is, it breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's not OK.

davidgaw 4y ago

Exactly. The tool is incomplete, in a sense, as while it shows the work of original art produced by the AI and the human images it was trained on, it has no way to show the imagery on which the human artists were trained to produce their images. (The model behind a human mind is vastly more complex than that of a deep learning model, but the principle is analogous.)

beepbooptheory 4y ago

Im sure its very random, but why is it that 99% of the time someone says this about some AI artwork its an image of a beautiful woman? I am pretty convinced at this point that in a lot people's heads, the fight to claim pictures like this as "real" or novel art is unconsciously just an urge to claim the beautiful woman as their own! Just thousands of men every day, generating beautiful ladies, yelling at people on the internet that they are real and they need to be protected... Maybe its all just coincidental or something, but if you just step back and look at it, its very... interesting.

esperent 4y ago

> Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art. You're jumping to a conclusion that the data doesn't warrant, I suspect because it's a conclusion that suits you. They're doing something like a "reverse image search" from an AI generated image over the original dataset and returning a few examples that have a high degree of similarity. There's no guarantee that the images they return are actually the ones combined to create the AI image. In fact their results are dubious - see Saurik's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34671149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34671149 I don't have an opinion regarding the question of whether SD creates art or not. To be honest, as someone who enjoys art or kind-of-art in many forms, it's not important to me (although, of course, I can see why it is important to someone who makes a living from art or AI generated images). However, this website doesn't add anything except noise to either side of the debate, from what I can see.

bioemerl 4y ago
I have to be correcting you here, stable diffusion does not combine images.
semicolon_storm 4y ago
Until somebody comes out with a better way to trace back output images to training data, this is the best "data" we have so far. Before this, there were anecdotal examples of SD outputting an image with some Shutterstock watermark or very similar to some artist's work, but the prompts also seemed highly specific or were asking for something in that artist's style. This tool at least lets us start to trace back the average image, and so far it does seem SD is adding something novel to its outputs.
- gwern 4y ago
  > Until somebody comes out with a better way to trace back output images to training data, this is the best "data" we have so far. There are many better ways, in the sense that they actually do something like estimate the causal effect of a specific training datapoint, like leave-one-out cross-validation training or surrogates to Shapley value, or using nonparametric models to trace backwards. This is a whole subfield of ML research.* (The primary summary is: "it's hard and the easy approaches don't work." Which why he's not doing any of those but an easy incorrect thing.) * I'm not entirely sure why anyone cared so much... Research topics can be kinda arbitrary. But in this case, I think there was something of a fad around 2017 that there were going to be 'data marketplaces' where you would be trying to estimate the value of each datapoint to price it. This turned out to not exist as a business model: you either used big public data for free for generic model capabilities, or you had small proprietary data you'd die rather than sell to a competitor.

romwell 4y ago

>Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art. You seem to be taking their word that the examples they explicitly provided are truth. That is, that they show you all the important sources for the AI, without which the output would be drastically different. As other comments show, this is not the case.

humanizersequel 4y ago

Does it even matter? This is my hangup about luddite hand wringing with claims that the existence of Stable Diffusion and tools like it constitute some violation of the rights of the artists whose data was included in the training set. Existing laws on copyright infringement and whatnot don't persecute the paintbrushes, they go after the artist who published infringing material. Why should this be any different?

thepasswordis 4y ago

Here's another example: https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1ecefeff-cc12-46e5-9935-cdd87c47d72f https://www.stableattribution.com/?image=1ecefeff-cc12-46e5-...

Lockal 4y ago

> Based on some of the examples they explicitly provided, it is clear to me Stable Diffusion creates novel art Fiasco of a tool to detect the source of plagiarism does not mean that Stable Diffusion creates novel art. When you need a character with dyed hair tips, SD will occasionally spit out copyrighted Harley Quinn portrait from DC Comics, Stable Attribution won't mention Paul Dini and Bruce Timm as character authors, but tool may show you some other pictures of people with colored head. Good luck with lawyers, what I can say.