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LAION is a German company and what StableDiffusion is doing seems to be covered under UrhG § 44b. If artists don't want their work inspected by bots they have t

LAION is a German company and what StableDiffusion is doing seems to be covered under UrhG § 44b. If artists don't want their work inspected by bots they have the option to put a robots.txt on their site. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html#p0328 https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur...

bobwaycott 4y ago
While this may very well be covered, I think the general problem in meatspace is that there was no advance notice given to exercise the option to place the proper robots.txt directives to opt out of having one’s artwork collected for model training before it happened, while still preserving the ability to have one’s artwork findable by search engines and the like. I’m sure there are more than a handful of people who have no idea that a robots.txt file can be used to prevent AI data collection—and some may even be surprised to learn the file that’s been used for search engine crawlers is also going to double for AI crawlers. To push a bit further, there’s something that just feels particularly off about assuming everyone’s content is up for grabs unless the producers do the work to opt out. I think there’s an especially palpable bit of irony looking at it from the EU’s perspective—where cookies must be opt-in, but grabbing all your copyrighted material so companies can do whatever they like with it places the burden on the owner to opt-out. It just feels backward. Perhaps one should have to expressly opt-in to allowing their work to be accessible as training data. At least then there will be a clear signal that the producer of the work can’t later complain, as they willingly granted permission.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  I wonder if these authors would have complained so loudly if they had known that other artists were looking at their output to learn how to create their own work? Absolutely none of them sprung from the womb, tablet in hand, to create their work ex nihilo, based on nothing other than their own entirely original thoughts.
- astrange 4y ago
  Their art wasn't collected for model training. The #1 artist supposedly being copied in SD1.5 is not in the training data. Artists just don't know how the model works and think you need to put in an "art" image to get an "art" image out, but of course that's not true.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    > and think you need to put in an "art" image to get an "art" image out, but of course that's not While you don't need that to generate an image, it's something SD can actual do extremely well with ControlNet, Textual Inversion, LoRA, img2img and so on. That's an area where things are going to get interesting in the future, as you can take any image, feed it into SD and produce hundreds of AI images from it. Very easily, without much effort and within minutes. The delineating line between original work and derivative becomes extremely blurry here, as what you are copying is not "the image", but just concepts within the image, that can be a pose, camera angle, scene layout, art style or really anything. You can "copy" it with as much variation as you want, you can remix it with other images, text prompts and so on. Where does "looking at reference" stop and "doing a copyright violation" start? The spooky part with AI art that it stops images from being singular entities, with AI you can explode every piece into millions of possible variations. AI is so fast at generating art that a future where we could generate movies in real time might not be far away. It's already fast enough to produce images and text stories faster than you can consume them. There might be a fundamental shift in art consumption ahead of us.
bugglebeetle 4y ago
None of this voids the terms of international copyright agreements and someone on Hacker News should know better than to claim that a robots.txt on a personal site would cover all instances of an image being scraped. I’m not saying that artists will necessarily come out on the winning end of this battle, but it’s also specious to claim that company says what they did is legal, therefore it is.
pizzalife 4y ago
The existence of a robots.txt file has no legal meaning. The lack of one certainly does not mean the content being served is free to use in any way.
- grumbel 4y ago
  It's right there in the law: "A reservation of use in the case of works which are available online is effective only if it is made in a machine-readable format."
  - d1sxeyes 4y ago
    Hm. That to me seems to be quite a badly written law. Is a copyright notice written in plain German in the website footer 'machine-readable'? Is there some definition of 'machine-readable' somewhere? It's also far from clear to me whether a court would find training an LLM to constitute text and data mining 'for the purpose of gathering information, in particular regarding patterns, trends and correlations'.
    - grumbel 4y ago
      > That to me seems to be quite a badly written law. It's pretty normal for a law to not be specific on the technicalities so they don't have to update the law whenever the software changes. The de facto standard to prevent bots from scraping your sites has been robots.txt for almost 30 years. If artists didn't mind Google scraping their images, putting them on their site, adding ads and making billions, I really don't see them having much of a justification to call out StableDiffusion for "stealing" their stuff. In general artists would be in a lot of trouble if taking stuff from the Internet would be outlawed, as that's where they get all their reference images from too. Either way, I am sure we'll see quite a few lawsuits going forward, laws are always open to interpretation, especially when new technology archives. But long term I really see copyright in general being in a lot of trouble, since derivatives and remixes are becoming completely trivial with AI. Where does the original work stop and the copyright violation starts is being rather difficult to decide when you can just wander around latent space and create literally thousands of similar images in minutes, with as much or as little variation as you want.

bobwaycott 4y ago

While this may very well be covered, I think the general problem in meatspace is that there was no advance notice given to exercise the option to place the proper robots.txt directives to opt out of having one’s artwork collected for model training before it happened, while still preserving the ability to have one’s artwork findable by search engines and the like. I’m sure there are more than a handful of people who have no idea that a robots.txt file can be used to prevent AI data collection—and some may even be surprised to learn the file that’s been used for search engine crawlers is also going to double for AI crawlers. To push a bit further, there’s something that just feels particularly off about assuming everyone’s content is up for grabs unless the producers do the work to opt out. I think there’s an especially palpable bit of irony looking at it from the EU’s perspective—where cookies must be opt-in, but grabbing all your copyrighted material so companies can do whatever they like with it places the burden on the owner to opt-out. It just feels backward. Perhaps one should have to expressly opt-in to allowing their work to be accessible as training data. At least then there will be a clear signal that the producer of the work can’t later complain, as they willingly granted permission.

Karunamon 4y ago
I wonder if these authors would have complained so loudly if they had known that other artists were looking at their output to learn how to create their own work? Absolutely none of them sprung from the womb, tablet in hand, to create their work ex nihilo, based on nothing other than their own entirely original thoughts.
astrange 4y ago
Their art wasn't collected for model training. The #1 artist supposedly being copied in SD1.5 is not in the training data. Artists just don't know how the model works and think you need to put in an "art" image to get an "art" image out, but of course that's not true.
- grumbel 4y ago
  > and think you need to put in an "art" image to get an "art" image out, but of course that's not While you don't need that to generate an image, it's something SD can actual do extremely well with ControlNet, Textual Inversion, LoRA, img2img and so on. That's an area where things are going to get interesting in the future, as you can take any image, feed it into SD and produce hundreds of AI images from it. Very easily, without much effort and within minutes. The delineating line between original work and derivative becomes extremely blurry here, as what you are copying is not "the image", but just concepts within the image, that can be a pose, camera angle, scene layout, art style or really anything. You can "copy" it with as much variation as you want, you can remix it with other images, text prompts and so on. Where does "looking at reference" stop and "doing a copyright violation" start? The spooky part with AI art that it stops images from being singular entities, with AI you can explode every piece into millions of possible variations. AI is so fast at generating art that a future where we could generate movies in real time might not be far away. It's already fast enough to produce images and text stories faster than you can consume them. There might be a fundamental shift in art consumption ahead of us.

bugglebeetle 4y ago

None of this voids the terms of international copyright agreements and someone on Hacker News should know better than to claim that a robots.txt on a personal site would cover all instances of an image being scraped. I’m not saying that artists will necessarily come out on the winning end of this battle, but it’s also specious to claim that company says what they did is legal, therefore it is.

pizzalife 4y ago

The existence of a robots.txt file has no legal meaning. The lack of one certainly does not mean the content being served is free to use in any way.

grumbel 4y ago
It's right there in the law: "A reservation of use in the case of works which are available online is effective only if it is made in a machine-readable format."
- d1sxeyes 4y ago
  Hm. That to me seems to be quite a badly written law. Is a copyright notice written in plain German in the website footer 'machine-readable'? Is there some definition of 'machine-readable' somewhere? It's also far from clear to me whether a court would find training an LLM to constitute text and data mining 'for the purpose of gathering information, in particular regarding patterns, trends and correlations'.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    > That to me seems to be quite a badly written law. It's pretty normal for a law to not be specific on the technicalities so they don't have to update the law whenever the software changes. The de facto standard to prevent bots from scraping your sites has been robots.txt for almost 30 years. If artists didn't mind Google scraping their images, putting them on their site, adding ads and making billions, I really don't see them having much of a justification to call out StableDiffusion for "stealing" their stuff. In general artists would be in a lot of trouble if taking stuff from the Internet would be outlawed, as that's where they get all their reference images from too. Either way, I am sure we'll see quite a few lawsuits going forward, laws are always open to interpretation, especially when new technology archives. But long term I really see copyright in general being in a lot of trouble, since derivatives and remixes are becoming completely trivial with AI. Where does the original work stop and the copyright violation starts is being rather difficult to decide when you can just wander around latent space and create literally thousands of similar images in minutes, with as much or as little variation as you want.