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Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

91 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

stuckinhell 4y ago
This weekend I've played around in depth with Stable Diffusion with Controlnet, negative prompts, and inpainting. It didn't take long to convince me that this AI is "learning" art, in some kind of very similar way a Human is. Controlnet + SD was really mind blowing all around. I understand why artists are depressed now, but people are already training hypermodels, textual inversions, and loras. Who knows what the future will bring ? My two favorite hyper models are around oil paintings, and cars(for my husband, he is getting an AI car calendar for his birthday, let's see if he figures it out :) This genie isn't going back into the bottle.
- hospitalJail 4y ago
  >This genie isn't going back into the bottle. I don't think that impacts legal things, however you are correct, AI art can never go away. If the legal hammer falls on the bad side of this, corporations/people with decent sized assets are unable to use these tools without paying some sort of royalty. >I understand why artists are depressed now As someone who isnt an artist, I wish I could sketch something quickly, use controlnet, and have my idea turned into reality in a few seconds. Non artists are basically at the whim of other creators + the randomness of txt2img. Heck, it seems there is something I want changed with nearly every AI art picture, with actual art skills, you could fix these.
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    have you tried inpainting ?
    - hospitalJail 4y ago
      Yes. Just to be clear on my point, if I could sketch something, I could probably have perfect AI art in 10-15 minutes. Without those skills, it takes ~1-2 hours.
      - stuckinhell 4y ago
        Ah gotcha, just asking because I've had near miraculous results with inpainting/outpainting using controlnet and hypermodel tweaks.
quadcore 4y ago
Fair use would work if we could find an artist for a given generated picture - but we can't. Generate a picture and there is no artist for it closer than the ones who made the pictures in the training set. I really hope these lawyers wont mess that up, it's an easy win.
- jrm4 4y ago
  I mean, a big problem is that "fair use" is pretty broken already. It's just a really sloppy legal test that ends up bowing to trends, non-expert opinions and utter randomness as much as it does legal rigor.
  - quadcore 4y ago
    Lawyers just need to keep pounding on the fact there is no artist for a given generated picture - closer than the training set.
- shagie 4y ago
  I believe that a further restriction of fair use to what is produced by a generative AI would also give a lot of tools for large copyright holders (e.g. Disney) for suing and removing fan art for anything that "is in the style of" or "makes use of the same characters" including uses that would previously be considered beneath their notice and thus not worth their time (the amount the lawyers would cost combined with the difficulty in doing it). The lawyers won't "mess it up" but rather that the large copyright holders will be able to use this to enforce these restrictions on human generated fan art just as easily as they (and other humans) will be able to enforce it on generative AI. While it won't be possible to excise the idea of "draw like Disney" from someone's brain, it will be possible to sue the creator to remove the work.
  - quadcore 4y ago
    "is in the style of" or "makes use of the same characters" No because in that case you're talking about, there is at least an artist. There is no artist for a generated picture - closer than the training set.
labrador 4y ago
"legal earthquake" Why is everyone talking in apocalyptic terms about AI? A new legal framework will have to be constructed around this, just like with any new technology. Copyright holders will get relief or we don't have a legal system that works. Have we lost faith in our system so much that we think we live in a disaster movie?
- is_true 4y ago
  I think it's accurate. The foundations of those models are prior material which might be copyrighted.
  - inopinatus 4y ago
    The premise is rejected reductio ad absurdum, since it inescapably also implies that artists shouldn’t study art.
- loldk 4y ago
  [dead]
- NBJack 4y ago
  Because it's good clickbait-generating content. Much like their picture of Mickey promoting a McDonald's.
  - labrador 4y ago
    Back in the 70's it was the population bomb and the coming ice age. I just wish they'd leave AI alone. I like it.
mdorazio 4y ago
This is a pretty good summary of the complexity of the issue legally (worth reading the whole thing). The plaintiffs pretty clearly either don’t know how ML works or are deliberately misconstruing the facts. But the real question is how a judge and/or jury will look at this given how tricky the debate is (as evidenced by comments in the many posts about GPT-like models right here on HN). There are a lot of emotions around this space right now. I’m very curious to see how the legal teams break things down logically and with precedents.
- jrm4 4y ago
  I see why you're saying what you are about the "facts," but I'm not at all convinced that it's so clear-cut that the plaintiffs are all that wrong. Which is to say, compare these models to e.g. simple image compression. If compressed images can violate, the argument that "this is merely VERY GOOD and VERSATILE image compression" probably has enough legal legs to do something with.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    It is a bit like saying a random number generator is a form of image compression since it is a small program the output of which contains every copyrightable image. Compression has the property that almost all inputs are reconstructable. Generative models have the property that almost all inputs are not reconstructable.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      Compression with extra steps is still compression. Most people don't understand the math involved in LZF-encoding, and lossy audio encoding seems even more strange, so "diffusion" just sounds like a somewhat-lossier form of compression if described in a certain way. I was very dismissive of the anti-AI-image crowd until I saw that Anne Graham Lotz pic. Only a single known source image of her exists, although many copies of it are distributed far and wide across the internet, and using her name in a prompt results in an image that seems very much like a lossy reproduction of the "original." It's an edge case, to be sure, but that demonstration looks like lossy compression, even though it's not.
roenxi 4y ago
I downloaded the Llama model using a torrent. That is, I think, enough of a counterexample to show that lawsuits will not stop this. Raw economics are at play here and the legal system usually loses to economic realities. 1) We just need 1 jurisdiction that allows model training. 2) There is no mechanism to stop model distribution short of banning general purpose computing and the internet. That would cause more harm than good. 3) It is already hard and going to get harder to prove these models were trained on any particular piece of art.
- celeritascelery 4y ago
  I think copyright is a real world counter example to this kind of argument (that raw economics will override the legal protection). If you are selling anything, you have to respect copyright. So if training on copyrighted images becomes illegal, it doesn’t mean that people won’t be able to create stable diffusion models (they will do it regardless). But it does mean that businesses won’t be able to use them, which removes almost all financial benefits from creating them.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    Proof both ways is difficult. How will a company prove that an image was generated with an illegally-trained model? Unless there becomes some requirement that models be kept around for a century.
    - shagie 4y ago
      They can't. They can make it easier to sue the creator of a work for infringing on existing art or characters ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti... ) used in the work.
    - zirgs 4y ago
      It's impossible to reconstruct the dataset from the model.
- 4y ago
GaggiX 4y ago
>Building cutting-edge generative AI would require getting licenses from thousands—perhaps even millions—of copyright holders. The process would likely be so slow and expensive that only a handful of large companies could afford to do it. Even then, the resulting models likely wouldn’t be as good. And smaller companies might be locked out of the industry altogether. Isn't this what Adobe has done? The results are actually really good.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  An open AI, no matter how it's trained is inherently more "ethical" than any AI Adobe trains. I'd rather a million artists have their work "stolen", including my own if it ensures future generations wont be locked into Adobe like my work is.
endisneigh 4y ago
It doesn't really matter if you can't put the AI back in the bottle so to speak. If (in the USA) it's found that AI generated images (based on copyrighted materials) are not fair use, then effectively it will be poisonous to use in your (USA-based) company. This will definitely prevent it from being mainstream. That being said, nothing is stopping Getty images, for example, from releasing their own image generator, trained from images they own copyright to. Or creative common work, etc.
- sebstefan 4y ago
  That's what Adobe Firefly is already doing, it's trained on Adobe Stock photos along with copyright-free content https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html
  - Bedon292 4y ago
    The tricky bit is that those stock photos include generative images too. Many of which aren't labeled as generative. So I wonder if theirs is already including potentially problematic content.
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      I would be surprised if they hadn't externalized that risk when they started their stock photo library. Generally, whenever a company buys a photo, there's a release form where the claimed-author of the photo has to state that they own the rights to the photo. So, the infringement is on the part of the seller, and you have a high barrier to sue Adobe for that.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > So, the infringement is on the part of the seller, and you have a high barrier to sue Adobe for that. No, you don’t, Adobe just has a low barrier to suck the source of the image into the case as an additio al defendano and a potential additional de¹1¹fense against any claim of willful infringement. OTOH, Adobe would like potential plaintiffs to think that it works the way you describe.
ltbarcly3 4y ago
Title is incorrect, it could be an earthquake for companies trying to make money by using AI to create derivative works, however. Probably a headline in 2001: "Copyright lawsuits are a legal earthquake for the mp3 music format and the algorithms used to decompress it"
shinycode 4y ago
In France, an artist owns its art for life, even if it’s sold. So let’s say an artist creates a new style, like Picasso did and an other artist creates art that is really close to Picasso. He will lose in court because of IP. Now an AI does the same thing and suddenly no copyright ? What should be done maybe is explicitly asking for every art generated to ask to pay for it and this money goes for the copyrights. But unlimited free art without restrictions nor credit to the original author is stealing IP. Or you remove everything with IP from the training set because it’s cheating.
- fauxpause_ 4y ago
  AI is a tool that can be produce copies of work. So is paint. Should we ban paint? Also I doubt your claim is true. There’s no way there’s a copyright claim on “paintings that feel like Picasso style”.
  - shinycode 4y ago
    Yes that’s covered by law https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Commande-artistique/1-immeuble-1-aeuvre/Reglementation-et-bonnes-pratiques https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Comm... > Le droit moral de l’artiste est «perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible». Il est lié à la personne de l’auteur qui ne peut y renoncer ni le céder à autrui > The moral right of the artist is "perpetual, inalienable and imprescriptible". It is linked to the person of the author who can neither renounce it nor transfer it to another person https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Commande-artistique/1-immeuble-1-aeuvre/Reglementation-et-bonnes-pratiques https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Comm... > Le code de la propriété intellectuelle entend par contrefaçon tous les actes d'utilisation non autorisée de l'œuvre. En cas de reprise partielle de cette dernière, elle s'apprécie en fonction des ressemblances entre les œuvres. La simple tentative n'est pas punissable. La loi incrimine au titre du délit de contrefaçon : - «toute reproduction, représentation ou diffusion, par quelque moyen que ce soit, d'une œuvre de l'esprit en violation des droits de l'auteur, tels qu'ils sont définis et réglementés par la loi » (CPI, art. L. 335-3). - «le débit [acte de diffusion, notamment par vente, de marchandises contrefaisantes], l'exportation et l'importation des ouvrages "contrefaisants" » (CPI, art. L. 335.2 al. 3). > The Intellectual Property Code defines infringement as all acts of unauthorized use of a work. In the case of partial use of the work, it is assessed according to the similarities between the works. The simple attempt is not punishable. The law incriminates under the offence of counterfeiting: - "any reproduction, representation or dissemination, by any means whatsoever, of a work of the mind in violation of the author's rights, as defined and regulated by law" (CPI, art. L. 335-3). - "the debit [act of distribution, notably by sale, of infringing goods], the export and import of 'infringing' works" (CPI, art. L. 335.2 al. 3).
ytreacj 4y ago
[flagged]
- d23 4y ago
  I think this comment would be a better jumping off point for discussion if it were responding to a specific individual and showing curiosity rather than making multiple broad assumptions about the community at large.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  Not everyone on hn shares that opinion. Ai products are great but not when trained using stolen ip. At the moment there is no way to prevent openai’s products from ripping code or web content and then spitting it out without royalties. And that’s quite an issue.
- dmm 4y ago
  Is there a name for this fallacy? Where differing views within a diverse community are interpreted as individual hypocrisy?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tremon 4y ago
    Not sure if there's a more specific word for it, but it's basically just a straw man attack: constructing a single "opponent" from disjointed pieces of information. As such, you could also classify it as a hasty generalization or a composition error.
- Jevon23 4y ago
  Just compare the comments on any AI art story with the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418760
yyyk 4y ago
The lawsuit would simply hand over the AI art market to Adobe who trained their AI using their stock photos. Same thing elsewhere - huge companies can pay just enough people (and intimidate the rest) to keep legal.
redox99 4y ago
It's pretty funny that most people that hate AI art and want it banned because of copyright violations, don't understand that the only difference that will make is that instead of having open models, you will only have closed models owned by Adobe who will license all the imagery from Getty, Disney, etc. AI art isn't going away, and it better be open instead of in full control of just 2 or 3 companies.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  Yea I agree, AI isn't going away. It'll be like how many financial instruments are banned to retail consumers, but are used by the rich and powerful to become more rich and powerful. AI isn't going away, we need open models that everyone can use.
- seydor 4y ago
  Can they even license those works to train a model? And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI.
  - redox99 4y ago
    > Can they even license those works to train a model? Adobe is already creating such AI with these kinds of partners, so yes > And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI. No because a single image of Darth Vader alone won't work. You need a pretrained base model, trained with millions of images. Only then you can feed such base model a single image and get something decent.
    - seydor 4y ago
      > Adobe is already creating such AI with these kinds of partners, so yes So, nobody has contested them yet. I smell a class-action lawsuit for them from the original makers of their clipart library. The base model can be trained on open source images. Or people may use adobe's software for that. From just a few images of Darth you can make basically anything, so yes it's quite doable already. It seems to me there is no way to put this cat back in the bag ever again. In the case of Darth Vader, there is probably a trademark involved as well, but the vast majority of photos , celebs etc don't have that.
hashmap 4y ago
Shouldn't it be decided on an image-by-image basis? If the resulting image doesn't infringe copyright, what's the relevance of how it was made? That's how it's worked up until this point. I mean, maybe because the impact is so severe we should HAVE new laws affording more protections to artists, but that's a different argument right?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Copyright holders have been attacking copyright-infringing tools for quite a while now, there's nothing new about that. Imagine an image-generating ML dataset that has been trained on nothing but images of Mickey Mouse. Surely the Disney corporation would come after that, I have no doubt about that. Why does commingling Mickey with other inputs change that, if the tool can still reproduce images of Mickey Mouse when asked for that?
jojobas 4y ago
Humans regurgitate other people's work all the time, and these image generators are well capable of creating non-infringing images. How is AI regurgitating other people's work any different? Basically there needs to be a copyright-court-like oracle used in training, so as to suppress output that's quoting the sources to much.
bugglebeetle 4y ago
> Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had “technical inaccuracies” and was “stretching the truth a lot.” Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images. >In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a user’s prompt into a latent representation: a list of numbers summarizing the contents of the image. Just as you can identify a point on the Earth’s surface based on its latitude and longitude, Stable Diffusion characterizes images based on their “coordinates” in the “picture space.” It then converts this latent representation into an image. Regardless of the lawsuit, this seems like a quite spurious, self-serving argument in and of itself. If the “coordinates” of the image were not equivalent to the image, how would it be possible to fine tune the model on a set of images and recreate their style? This is setting aside the myriad examples where SD regurgitates fairly close copies of individual works. This is a bit like training a model on the works of Shakespeare, but then claiming that the tensors resulting from ingesting the data are not actually Shakespeare’s writing. Oh really, where’d they come from then? Thin air?
- GaggiX 4y ago
  If trained correctly the model could easily reproduce any arbitrary image if you know its coordinate in the latent space (and you use deterministic sampler), regardless of whether the image is present in the dataset or not, it's also easy to imagine as the coordinates are as big as the samples generated by the diffusion model. You can take an image and use DDIM inversion to find the coordinates.
  - threepio 4y ago
    > You can take an image and use DDIM inversion to find the coordinates I'd like to try this. Any suggestions where I can learn how to implement this technique?
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    You can use SD models to draw portraits of people (or anime characters, say) based on their description.
pitaj 4y ago
Our copyright systems are broken, and have been broken for decades at this point. I don't think copyright should be a thing, ESPECIALLY at the current durations. It's obvious to me that reform is necessary. Here's what I propose: - Reduce the duration of existing copyrights to 20 years. - Reduce the duration of new copyrights to 5 years (maybe 10). - Provide some form of remittance for individual copyright holders which depends on the income for their living, if the 20 years is not enough. - Require that what is copyrighted must be submitted to the Library of Congress. When the copyright expires, it is to be released to the public in full. - Strengthen fair use protections. Make it clear that critiques, reviews, parodies, etc are covered. - Improve takedown requests. Punish fraudulent takedowns by forcing the filer to pay any lost income to the recipient. Require the takedown requests to have specific information about where the copyright violation occurred and how it isn't fair use. - No criminal prosecution for copyright offenses.
- shagie 4y ago
  As a photographer, I do not want to lose the ability to be the sole seller of the photographs that I create in 5 or 10 (or 20) years. That I don't sell many nor is it my declared profession doesn't change how I should be compensated for the photographs that I sell. The Library of Congress only applies to the United States and has little sway on any of the rest of the signatories of the Berne Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention and the TRIPS agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement The changing the term of protection provided by the Berne Convention or TRIPS would mean that the United States would be leaving those treaty... which has quite a few implications for how other countries would treat copyrighted works within the US. > TRIPS requires member states to provide strong protection for intellectual property rights. For example, under TRIPS: > Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)[8] > Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
  - pitaj 4y ago
    I don't believe anyone has a right to a monopoly on information, even if they created it. I don't believe in the validity of intellectual property in general. Even 5, 10, or 20 years is a compromise. The Library of Congress is just an example, I'm sure some international agreement could be made for an independent entity. As for the Berne Convention or TRIPS, I wasn't just talking about the US. The international copyright laws should also be reformed.
honeybadger1 4y ago
Is human recollection also an infringement on copyright?
- tremon 4y ago
  Yes. See the song "Happy Birthday" for an example: it only entered public domain a few years ago.
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    It was likely in the public domain the whole time.
modriano 4y ago
Hmm. Graphic-media artists tend to have much less wealth and capacity to enforce their copyrights when compared to the music or film industries, but Getty has both the funds and the political connections (the Koch brothers own about 19% of Getty [0]) to vigorously defend their copyrights. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/getty-images-to-receive-500-million-investment-from-koch-equity-1543247558 https://www.wsj.com/articles/getty-images-to-receive-500-mil...
fireflymetavrse 4y ago
"“Stability AI has copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images,” Getty wrote in its lawsuit." The hypocrisy of Getty Image is insane here, given it's dark past.
nonbirithm 4y ago
"Napster copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for peer-to-peer file sharing" I think the only effective way of slowing down AI isn't copyright enforcement, but trade secrets. If Midjourney can control who has access to its service and what kinds of content its users can generate, democratized models/piracy can do nothing to change that. The reason why there's so much more interest in AI art than AI voice cloning is that there's not yet a publicly available AI voice model with good enough performance. When that model is released or leaked there will be a similar panic around the effectiveness of modern AI voice tools, because anyone good or bad can get their hands on them without being forced to go through the company's content filter.

91 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

This weekend I've played around in depth with Stable Diffusion with Controlnet, negative prompts, and inpainting. It didn't take long to convince me that this AI is "learning" art, in some kind of very similar way a Human is. Controlnet + SD was really mind blowing all around. I understand why artists are depressed now, but people are already training hypermodels, textual inversions, and loras. Who knows what the future will bring ? My two favorite hyper models are around oil paintings, and cars(for my husband, he is getting an AI car calendar for his birthday, let's see if he figures it out :) This genie isn't going back into the bottle.

hospitalJail 4y ago
>This genie isn't going back into the bottle. I don't think that impacts legal things, however you are correct, AI art can never go away. If the legal hammer falls on the bad side of this, corporations/people with decent sized assets are unable to use these tools without paying some sort of royalty. >I understand why artists are depressed now As someone who isnt an artist, I wish I could sketch something quickly, use controlnet, and have my idea turned into reality in a few seconds. Non artists are basically at the whim of other creators + the randomness of txt2img. Heck, it seems there is something I want changed with nearly every AI art picture, with actual art skills, you could fix these.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  have you tried inpainting ?
  - hospitalJail 4y ago
    Yes. Just to be clear on my point, if I could sketch something, I could probably have perfect AI art in 10-15 minutes. Without those skills, it takes ~1-2 hours.
    - stuckinhell 4y ago
      Ah gotcha, just asking because I've had near miraculous results with inpainting/outpainting using controlnet and hypermodel tweaks.

quadcore 4y ago

Fair use would work if we could find an artist for a given generated picture - but we can't. Generate a picture and there is no artist for it closer than the ones who made the pictures in the training set. I really hope these lawyers wont mess that up, it's an easy win.

jrm4 4y ago
I mean, a big problem is that "fair use" is pretty broken already. It's just a really sloppy legal test that ends up bowing to trends, non-expert opinions and utter randomness as much as it does legal rigor.
- quadcore 4y ago
  Lawyers just need to keep pounding on the fact there is no artist for a given generated picture - closer than the training set.
shagie 4y ago
I believe that a further restriction of fair use to what is produced by a generative AI would also give a lot of tools for large copyright holders (e.g. Disney) for suing and removing fan art for anything that "is in the style of" or "makes use of the same characters" including uses that would previously be considered beneath their notice and thus not worth their time (the amount the lawyers would cost combined with the difficulty in doing it). The lawyers won't "mess it up" but rather that the large copyright holders will be able to use this to enforce these restrictions on human generated fan art just as easily as they (and other humans) will be able to enforce it on generative AI. While it won't be possible to excise the idea of "draw like Disney" from someone's brain, it will be possible to sue the creator to remove the work.
- quadcore 4y ago
  "is in the style of" or "makes use of the same characters" No because in that case you're talking about, there is at least an artist. There is no artist for a generated picture - closer than the training set.

labrador 4y ago

"legal earthquake" Why is everyone talking in apocalyptic terms about AI? A new legal framework will have to be constructed around this, just like with any new technology. Copyright holders will get relief or we don't have a legal system that works. Have we lost faith in our system so much that we think we live in a disaster movie?

is_true 4y ago
I think it's accurate. The foundations of those models are prior material which might be copyrighted.
- inopinatus 4y ago
  The premise is rejected reductio ad absurdum, since it inescapably also implies that artists shouldn’t study art.
loldk 4y ago
[dead]
NBJack 4y ago
Because it's good clickbait-generating content. Much like their picture of Mickey promoting a McDonald's.
- labrador 4y ago
  Back in the 70's it was the population bomb and the coming ice age. I just wish they'd leave AI alone. I like it.

mdorazio 4y ago

This is a pretty good summary of the complexity of the issue legally (worth reading the whole thing). The plaintiffs pretty clearly either don’t know how ML works or are deliberately misconstruing the facts. But the real question is how a judge and/or jury will look at this given how tricky the debate is (as evidenced by comments in the many posts about GPT-like models right here on HN). There are a lot of emotions around this space right now. I’m very curious to see how the legal teams break things down logically and with precedents.

jrm4 4y ago
I see why you're saying what you are about the "facts," but I'm not at all convinced that it's so clear-cut that the plaintiffs are all that wrong. Which is to say, compare these models to e.g. simple image compression. If compressed images can violate, the argument that "this is merely VERY GOOD and VERSATILE image compression" probably has enough legal legs to do something with.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  It is a bit like saying a random number generator is a form of image compression since it is a small program the output of which contains every copyrightable image. Compression has the property that almost all inputs are reconstructable. Generative models have the property that almost all inputs are not reconstructable.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    Compression with extra steps is still compression. Most people don't understand the math involved in LZF-encoding, and lossy audio encoding seems even more strange, so "diffusion" just sounds like a somewhat-lossier form of compression if described in a certain way. I was very dismissive of the anti-AI-image crowd until I saw that Anne Graham Lotz pic. Only a single known source image of her exists, although many copies of it are distributed far and wide across the internet, and using her name in a prompt results in an image that seems very much like a lossy reproduction of the "original." It's an edge case, to be sure, but that demonstration looks like lossy compression, even though it's not.

roenxi 4y ago

I downloaded the Llama model using a torrent. That is, I think, enough of a counterexample to show that lawsuits will not stop this. Raw economics are at play here and the legal system usually loses to economic realities. 1) We just need 1 jurisdiction that allows model training. 2) There is no mechanism to stop model distribution short of banning general purpose computing and the internet. That would cause more harm than good. 3) It is already hard and going to get harder to prove these models were trained on any particular piece of art.

celeritascelery 4y ago
I think copyright is a real world counter example to this kind of argument (that raw economics will override the legal protection). If you are selling anything, you have to respect copyright. So if training on copyrighted images becomes illegal, it doesn’t mean that people won’t be able to create stable diffusion models (they will do it regardless). But it does mean that businesses won’t be able to use them, which removes almost all financial benefits from creating them.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Proof both ways is difficult. How will a company prove that an image was generated with an illegally-trained model? Unless there becomes some requirement that models be kept around for a century.
  - shagie 4y ago
    They can't. They can make it easier to sue the creator of a work for infringing on existing art or characters ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti... ) used in the work.
  - zirgs 4y ago
    It's impossible to reconstruct the dataset from the model.
4y ago

GaggiX 4y ago

>Building cutting-edge generative AI would require getting licenses from thousands—perhaps even millions—of copyright holders. The process would likely be so slow and expensive that only a handful of large companies could afford to do it. Even then, the resulting models likely wouldn’t be as good. And smaller companies might be locked out of the industry altogether. Isn't this what Adobe has done? The results are actually really good.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
An open AI, no matter how it's trained is inherently more "ethical" than any AI Adobe trains. I'd rather a million artists have their work "stolen", including my own if it ensures future generations wont be locked into Adobe like my work is.

endisneigh 4y ago

It doesn't really matter if you can't put the AI back in the bottle so to speak. If (in the USA) it's found that AI generated images (based on copyrighted materials) are not fair use, then effectively it will be poisonous to use in your (USA-based) company. This will definitely prevent it from being mainstream. That being said, nothing is stopping Getty images, for example, from releasing their own image generator, trained from images they own copyright to. Or creative common work, etc.

sebstefan 4y ago
That's what Adobe Firefly is already doing, it's trained on Adobe Stock photos along with copyright-free content https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html
- Bedon292 4y ago
  The tricky bit is that those stock photos include generative images too. Many of which aren't labeled as generative. So I wonder if theirs is already including potentially problematic content.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    I would be surprised if they hadn't externalized that risk when they started their stock photo library. Generally, whenever a company buys a photo, there's a release form where the claimed-author of the photo has to state that they own the rights to the photo. So, the infringement is on the part of the seller, and you have a high barrier to sue Adobe for that.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > So, the infringement is on the part of the seller, and you have a high barrier to sue Adobe for that. No, you don’t, Adobe just has a low barrier to suck the source of the image into the case as an additio al defendano and a potential additional de¹1¹fense against any claim of willful infringement. OTOH, Adobe would like potential plaintiffs to think that it works the way you describe.

ltbarcly3 4y ago

Title is incorrect, it could be an earthquake for companies trying to make money by using AI to create derivative works, however. Probably a headline in 2001: "Copyright lawsuits are a legal earthquake for the mp3 music format and the algorithms used to decompress it"

shinycode 4y ago

In France, an artist owns its art for life, even if it’s sold. So let’s say an artist creates a new style, like Picasso did and an other artist creates art that is really close to Picasso. He will lose in court because of IP. Now an AI does the same thing and suddenly no copyright ? What should be done maybe is explicitly asking for every art generated to ask to pay for it and this money goes for the copyrights. But unlimited free art without restrictions nor credit to the original author is stealing IP. Or you remove everything with IP from the training set because it’s cheating.

fauxpause_ 4y ago
AI is a tool that can be produce copies of work. So is paint. Should we ban paint? Also I doubt your claim is true. There’s no way there’s a copyright claim on “paintings that feel like Picasso style”.
- shinycode 4y ago
  Yes that’s covered by law https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Commande-artistique/1-immeuble-1-aeuvre/Reglementation-et-bonnes-pratiques https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Comm... > Le droit moral de l’artiste est «perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible». Il est lié à la personne de l’auteur qui ne peut y renoncer ni le céder à autrui > The moral right of the artist is "perpetual, inalienable and imprescriptible". It is linked to the person of the author who can neither renounce it nor transfer it to another person https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Commande-artistique/1-immeuble-1-aeuvre/Reglementation-et-bonnes-pratiques https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Arts-plastiques/Comm... > Le code de la propriété intellectuelle entend par contrefaçon tous les actes d'utilisation non autorisée de l'œuvre. En cas de reprise partielle de cette dernière, elle s'apprécie en fonction des ressemblances entre les œuvres. La simple tentative n'est pas punissable. La loi incrimine au titre du délit de contrefaçon : - «toute reproduction, représentation ou diffusion, par quelque moyen que ce soit, d'une œuvre de l'esprit en violation des droits de l'auteur, tels qu'ils sont définis et réglementés par la loi » (CPI, art. L. 335-3). - «le débit [acte de diffusion, notamment par vente, de marchandises contrefaisantes], l'exportation et l'importation des ouvrages "contrefaisants" » (CPI, art. L. 335.2 al. 3). > The Intellectual Property Code defines infringement as all acts of unauthorized use of a work. In the case of partial use of the work, it is assessed according to the similarities between the works. The simple attempt is not punishable. The law incriminates under the offence of counterfeiting: - "any reproduction, representation or dissemination, by any means whatsoever, of a work of the mind in violation of the author's rights, as defined and regulated by law" (CPI, art. L. 335-3). - "the debit [act of distribution, notably by sale, of infringing goods], the export and import of 'infringing' works" (CPI, art. L. 335.2 al. 3).

ytreacj 4y ago

[flagged]

d23 4y ago
I think this comment would be a better jumping off point for discussion if it were responding to a specific individual and showing curiosity rather than making multiple broad assumptions about the community at large.
gumballindie 4y ago
Not everyone on hn shares that opinion. Ai products are great but not when trained using stolen ip. At the moment there is no way to prevent openai’s products from ripping code or web content and then spitting it out without royalties. And that’s quite an issue.
dmm 4y ago
Is there a name for this fallacy? Where differing views within a diverse community are interpreted as individual hypocrisy?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tremon 4y ago
  Not sure if there's a more specific word for it, but it's basically just a straw man attack: constructing a single "opponent" from disjointed pieces of information. As such, you could also classify it as a hasty generalization or a composition error.
Jevon23 4y ago
Just compare the comments on any AI art story with the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418760

yyyk 4y ago

The lawsuit would simply hand over the AI art market to Adobe who trained their AI using their stock photos. Same thing elsewhere - huge companies can pay just enough people (and intimidate the rest) to keep legal.

redox99 4y ago

It's pretty funny that most people that hate AI art and want it banned because of copyright violations, don't understand that the only difference that will make is that instead of having open models, you will only have closed models owned by Adobe who will license all the imagery from Getty, Disney, etc. AI art isn't going away, and it better be open instead of in full control of just 2 or 3 companies.

stuckinhell 4y ago
Yea I agree, AI isn't going away. It'll be like how many financial instruments are banned to retail consumers, but are used by the rich and powerful to become more rich and powerful. AI isn't going away, we need open models that everyone can use.
seydor 4y ago
Can they even license those works to train a model? And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI.
- redox99 4y ago
  > Can they even license those works to train a model? Adobe is already creating such AI with these kinds of partners, so yes > And if they can, then everyone can. I can buy the rights to a single photograph of Darth Vader and create an entire series TV about his life using AI. No because a single image of Darth Vader alone won't work. You need a pretrained base model, trained with millions of images. Only then you can feed such base model a single image and get something decent.
  - seydor 4y ago
    > Adobe is already creating such AI with these kinds of partners, so yes So, nobody has contested them yet. I smell a class-action lawsuit for them from the original makers of their clipart library. The base model can be trained on open source images. Or people may use adobe's software for that. From just a few images of Darth you can make basically anything, so yes it's quite doable already. It seems to me there is no way to put this cat back in the bag ever again. In the case of Darth Vader, there is probably a trademark involved as well, but the vast majority of photos , celebs etc don't have that.

hashmap 4y ago

Shouldn't it be decided on an image-by-image basis? If the resulting image doesn't infringe copyright, what's the relevance of how it was made? That's how it's worked up until this point. I mean, maybe because the impact is so severe we should HAVE new laws affording more protections to artists, but that's a different argument right?

deleted 4y ago
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yencabulator 4y ago
Copyright holders have been attacking copyright-infringing tools for quite a while now, there's nothing new about that. Imagine an image-generating ML dataset that has been trained on nothing but images of Mickey Mouse. Surely the Disney corporation would come after that, I have no doubt about that. Why does commingling Mickey with other inputs change that, if the tool can still reproduce images of Mickey Mouse when asked for that?

jojobas 4y ago

Humans regurgitate other people's work all the time, and these image generators are well capable of creating non-infringing images. How is AI regurgitating other people's work any different? Basically there needs to be a copyright-court-like oracle used in training, so as to suppress output that's quoting the sources to much.

bugglebeetle 4y ago

> Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had “technical inaccuracies” and was “stretching the truth a lot.” Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images. >In reality, Stable Diffusion works by first converting a user’s prompt into a latent representation: a list of numbers summarizing the contents of the image. Just as you can identify a point on the Earth’s surface based on its latitude and longitude, Stable Diffusion characterizes images based on their “coordinates” in the “picture space.” It then converts this latent representation into an image. Regardless of the lawsuit, this seems like a quite spurious, self-serving argument in and of itself. If the “coordinates” of the image were not equivalent to the image, how would it be possible to fine tune the model on a set of images and recreate their style? This is setting aside the myriad examples where SD regurgitates fairly close copies of individual works. This is a bit like training a model on the works of Shakespeare, but then claiming that the tensors resulting from ingesting the data are not actually Shakespeare’s writing. Oh really, where’d they come from then? Thin air?

GaggiX 4y ago
If trained correctly the model could easily reproduce any arbitrary image if you know its coordinate in the latent space (and you use deterministic sampler), regardless of whether the image is present in the dataset or not, it's also easy to imagine as the coordinates are as big as the samples generated by the diffusion model. You can take an image and use DDIM inversion to find the coordinates.
- threepio 4y ago
  > You can take an image and use DDIM inversion to find the coordinates I'd like to try this. Any suggestions where I can learn how to implement this technique?
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  You can use SD models to draw portraits of people (or anime characters, say) based on their description.

pitaj 4y ago

Our copyright systems are broken, and have been broken for decades at this point. I don't think copyright should be a thing, ESPECIALLY at the current durations. It's obvious to me that reform is necessary. Here's what I propose: - Reduce the duration of existing copyrights to 20 years. - Reduce the duration of new copyrights to 5 years (maybe 10). - Provide some form of remittance for individual copyright holders which depends on the income for their living, if the 20 years is not enough. - Require that what is copyrighted must be submitted to the Library of Congress. When the copyright expires, it is to be released to the public in full. - Strengthen fair use protections. Make it clear that critiques, reviews, parodies, etc are covered. - Improve takedown requests. Punish fraudulent takedowns by forcing the filer to pay any lost income to the recipient. Require the takedown requests to have specific information about where the copyright violation occurred and how it isn't fair use. - No criminal prosecution for copyright offenses.

shagie 4y ago
As a photographer, I do not want to lose the ability to be the sole seller of the photographs that I create in 5 or 10 (or 20) years. That I don't sell many nor is it my declared profession doesn't change how I should be compensated for the photographs that I sell. The Library of Congress only applies to the United States and has little sway on any of the rest of the signatories of the Berne Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention and the TRIPS agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement The changing the term of protection provided by the Berne Convention or TRIPS would mean that the United States would be leaving those treaty... which has quite a few implications for how other countries would treat copyrighted works within the US. > TRIPS requires member states to provide strong protection for intellectual property rights. For example, under TRIPS: > Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)[8] > Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
- pitaj 4y ago
  I don't believe anyone has a right to a monopoly on information, even if they created it. I don't believe in the validity of intellectual property in general. Even 5, 10, or 20 years is a compromise. The Library of Congress is just an example, I'm sure some international agreement could be made for an independent entity. As for the Berne Convention or TRIPS, I wasn't just talking about the US. The international copyright laws should also be reformed.

honeybadger1 4y ago

Is human recollection also an infringement on copyright?

tremon 4y ago
Yes. See the song "Happy Birthday" for an example: it only entered public domain a few years ago.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  It was likely in the public domain the whole time.

modriano 4y ago

Hmm. Graphic-media artists tend to have much less wealth and capacity to enforce their copyrights when compared to the music or film industries, but Getty has both the funds and the political connections (the Koch brothers own about 19% of Getty [0]) to vigorously defend their copyrights. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/getty-images-to-receive-500-million-investment-from-koch-equity-1543247558 https://www.wsj.com/articles/getty-images-to-receive-500-mil...

fireflymetavrse 4y ago

"“Stability AI has copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images,” Getty wrote in its lawsuit." The hypocrisy of Getty Image is insane here, given it's dark past.

nonbirithm 4y ago

"Napster copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for peer-to-peer file sharing" I think the only effective way of slowing down AI isn't copyright enforcement, but trade secrets. If Midjourney can control who has access to its service and what kinds of content its users can generate, democratized models/piracy can do nothing to change that. The reason why there's so much more interest in AI art than AI voice cloning is that there's not yet a publicly available AI voice model with good enough performance. When that model is released or leaked there will be a similar panic around the effectiveness of modern AI voice tools, because anyone good or bad can get their hands on them without being forced to go through the company's content filter.