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From the twitter thread: "Same prompt as above but for Pikachu. Again, somehow Firefly does not fully get these famous characters. Maybe a training data copyri

by ftxbro 4y ago

From the twitter thread: "Same prompt as above but for Pikachu. Again, somehow Firefly does not fully get these famous characters. Maybe a training data copyright issue?" Comment in hacker news thread some days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35247720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35247720 : "Adobe employee, not in Creative Cloud. [...] The team is going to great lengths to make this ethical and fair (try and generate a photo of a copyrighted character like Hello Kitty or Darth Vader)."

reedciccio 4y ago
Trademark rather than copyright but yeah, a plausible explanation is that Adobe played it safe and avoided pissing off litigious companies.
- mftb 4y ago
  Also their customers are you know... artists.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Long term, if Adobe is clearly worse than the competition as a result of being legally/ethically conservative they will lose users. They will get a lot of likes on twitter but companies will not pay for a firefly subscription if it's worse than Stable Diffusion.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    It's not like no artists use Midjourney. I'm an artist myself, absolutely love Midjourney, and have absolutely no problem with it being trained on any and all art -- just like human artists have been doing for millenia.
- shagie 4y ago
  Copyright is the proper form of IP for fictional characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Or trademark. But in both cases, artists are particularly well protected in making artistic commentary. Artists' tools should permit fair use, and disagreement can be directed at the artist.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Commentary - yes. However, if it is found that the model itself is not sufficiently transformative and including copyrighted fictional characters in it is seen as an infringing derivative work, then even though the output of it may be used in non-infringing ways then litigious companies would still have an argument about copyright infringement on the model. Until that is settled, its likely that Adobe is taking the "we're not going to deal with any licensed properties in the model to avoid any lawsuits."
the88doctor 4y ago
The thread author said Firefly was only trained on properly licensed photos which definitely supports the hypothesis that it sucks because it is doing things legally. Unfortunately that seems to make it suck even when the prompt does not reference any protected IP (e.g. the woman in red in a crowd example).
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Learning off of works of other artists is not illegal.
  - rondini 4y ago
    I think that the law is woefully unequipped to handle this situation, but there is definitely an ethical concern over training your models on copyrighted work. Adobe isn't going to scrape images off of social media to train their image generator and that will always put them behind companies that do. I can't say whether that's fair but I have very little faith that regulators will understand this issue enough to find a solution.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    We don't know that yet, we may find out soon. https://vox.com/recode/23580554/generative-ai-chatgpt-openai-stable-diffusion-legal-battles-napster-copyright-peter-kafka-column https://vox.com/recode/23580554/generative-ai-chatgpt-openai...
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      Exactly, so insisting on it being illegal now is inaccurate. You can bet that companies which have access to massive IP stockpiles, like Adobe, will absolutely be pushing things in a direction so that anything you see or hear cannot be used for inspiration without a hefty fee which is at their sole discretion.
      - _coveredInBees 4y ago
        The correct interpretation is that relying on tools like MidJourney can be a liability for the exact reason that this can go any which way and the legality issue is rather gray. So the point still stands that many companies would rather have a more clear-cut tool like Adobe Firefly without having to worry about potential liability.
jamilton 4y ago
It's interesting that the outputs still vaguely resemble the subjects of the prompts. It implies to me that there's still a little bit of the characters in the dataset, but not very much. If you look up "Pikachu" in Adobe Stock [1] there actually are a lot of results. They're mostly figurines, pokemon cards, quokka, and Machu Pichu. Very few direct illustrations. And of course there might be filtering used on the dataset before it was used to train the model, a lot of the images that have Pokemon imagery are marked "Editorial use only". 1: https://stock.adobe.com/search?filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aphoto%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aillustration%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Azip_vector%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Avideo%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Atemplate%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3A3d%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aimage%5D=1&order=relevance&safe_search=1&k=pikachu&search_page=1&search_type=usertyped&acp=&aco=pikachu&get_facets=0 https://stock.adobe.com/search?filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aphot...
- millimeterman 4y ago
  My uninformed speculation is that this might be an artifact of the embedding layer (e.g. CLIP), not the image training data. Presumably, the dataset for training the embedding layer (which is trained separately and then fixed) is not stripped of copyrighted content. So it will have learned that "Pikachu" is related to words such as "yellow" and "rat". Therefore, even if the image dataset didn't have a single picture of Pikachu, the image generator will still likely produce a yellow rat. Just one that doesn't actually resemble Pikachu.
  - jamilton 4y ago
    That seems plausible to me. I assume if Adobe felt like even these results were too legally risky they could create a new embedding layer with fewer copyrighted concepts (so Deadpool would always output a spooky looking pool). I don't think that's likely though.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > It implies to me that there's still a little bit of the characters in the dataset, but not very much. I suspect there are a lot of the characters in the training data, but (postulating) there might be a post-generation adversarial selection step where anything that is recognizable as a someone else's IP gets filtered out of the results, so anything sufficiently Pikachu-like won't be shown, leaving behind the vague yellow monsters.
deleted 4y ago
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fazqq 4y ago
[flagged]

by ftxbro 4y ago

reedciccio 4y ago

Trademark rather than copyright but yeah, a plausible explanation is that Adobe played it safe and avoided pissing off litigious companies.

mftb 4y ago
Also their customers are you know... artists.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Long term, if Adobe is clearly worse than the competition as a result of being legally/ethically conservative they will lose users. They will get a lot of likes on twitter but companies will not pay for a firefly subscription if it's worse than Stable Diffusion.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  It's not like no artists use Midjourney. I'm an artist myself, absolutely love Midjourney, and have absolutely no problem with it being trained on any and all art -- just like human artists have been doing for millenia.
shagie 4y ago
Copyright is the proper form of IP for fictional characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...
- Terretta 4y ago
  Or trademark. But in both cases, artists are particularly well protected in making artistic commentary. Artists' tools should permit fair use, and disagreement can be directed at the artist.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Commentary - yes. However, if it is found that the model itself is not sufficiently transformative and including copyrighted fictional characters in it is seen as an infringing derivative work, then even though the output of it may be used in non-infringing ways then litigious companies would still have an argument about copyright infringement on the model. Until that is settled, its likely that Adobe is taking the "we're not going to deal with any licensed properties in the model to avoid any lawsuits."

the88doctor 4y ago

The thread author said Firefly was only trained on properly licensed photos which definitely supports the hypothesis that it sucks because it is doing things legally. Unfortunately that seems to make it suck even when the prompt does not reference any protected IP (e.g. the woman in red in a crowd example).

Robotbeat 4y ago
Learning off of works of other artists is not illegal.
- rondini 4y ago
  I think that the law is woefully unequipped to handle this situation, but there is definitely an ethical concern over training your models on copyrighted work. Adobe isn't going to scrape images off of social media to train their image generator and that will always put them behind companies that do. I can't say whether that's fair but I have very little faith that regulators will understand this issue enough to find a solution.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  We don't know that yet, we may find out soon. https://vox.com/recode/23580554/generative-ai-chatgpt-openai-stable-diffusion-legal-battles-napster-copyright-peter-kafka-column https://vox.com/recode/23580554/generative-ai-chatgpt-openai...
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Exactly, so insisting on it being illegal now is inaccurate. You can bet that companies which have access to massive IP stockpiles, like Adobe, will absolutely be pushing things in a direction so that anything you see or hear cannot be used for inspiration without a hefty fee which is at their sole discretion.
    - _coveredInBees 4y ago
      The correct interpretation is that relying on tools like MidJourney can be a liability for the exact reason that this can go any which way and the legality issue is rather gray. So the point still stands that many companies would rather have a more clear-cut tool like Adobe Firefly without having to worry about potential liability.

jamilton 4y ago

It's interesting that the outputs still vaguely resemble the subjects of the prompts. It implies to me that there's still a little bit of the characters in the dataset, but not very much. If you look up "Pikachu" in Adobe Stock [1] there actually are a lot of results. They're mostly figurines, pokemon cards, quokka, and Machu Pichu. Very few direct illustrations. And of course there might be filtering used on the dataset before it was used to train the model, a lot of the images that have Pokemon imagery are marked "Editorial use only". 1: https://stock.adobe.com/search?filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aphoto%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aillustration%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Azip_vector%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Avideo%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Atemplate%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3A3d%5D=1&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aimage%5D=1&order=relevance&safe_search=1&k=pikachu&search_page=1&search_type=usertyped&acp=&aco=pikachu&get_facets=0 https://stock.adobe.com/search?filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aphot...

millimeterman 4y ago
My uninformed speculation is that this might be an artifact of the embedding layer (e.g. CLIP), not the image training data. Presumably, the dataset for training the embedding layer (which is trained separately and then fixed) is not stripped of copyrighted content. So it will have learned that "Pikachu" is related to words such as "yellow" and "rat". Therefore, even if the image dataset didn't have a single picture of Pikachu, the image generator will still likely produce a yellow rat. Just one that doesn't actually resemble Pikachu.
- jamilton 4y ago
  That seems plausible to me. I assume if Adobe felt like even these results were too legally risky they could create a new embedding layer with fewer copyrighted concepts (so Deadpool would always output a spooky looking pool). I don't think that's likely though.
sangnoir 4y ago
> It implies to me that there's still a little bit of the characters in the dataset, but not very much. I suspect there are a lot of the characters in the training data, but (postulating) there might be a post-generation adversarial selection step where anything that is recognizable as a someone else's IP gets filtered out of the results, so anything sufficiently Pikachu-like won't be shown, leaving behind the vague yellow monsters.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fazqq 4y ago

[flagged]