9 ms·

Greg Rutkowski was removed from Stable Diffusion; AI artists brought him back

59 points by ecliptik 3y ago

justinclift 3y ago
> While Lykon maintains he'll readily concede to Rutkowski, he said he believes he is acting on behalf of the greater good. Sounds pretty unethical. :(
- watchtower 3y ago
  Yup, that's pretty much it. Followed by the next sentence: > “If he contacts me asking for removal, I'll remove this.” Lykon said. ... as if Greg hadn't taken a clear stance.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    But he didn't specifically tell me to stop! There's no stopping this technology, but we can do without all of fake "for the good of humanity" stuff. If you want free pictures in someone's style without paying an artist for them, just be honest.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 3y ago
> Others sided with Lykon, alluding to the fact that Rutkowski's art has already been in circulation in SD1.5 for years. Fun fact: we have yet to reach the one year anniversary of the initial announcement of Stable Diffusion [0]. A lot has happened in one year! [0] https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement
Avisite 3y ago
I really dont think using his name in a prompt had as much to do with his style to some degree, but more that it had an unusual amount of influence on the resulting image compared to other artists. Like his name had an unusual weight to the model that made images higher quality. Images that are nowhere close to his style still had "by Greg Rutkowski" in it. in the same way they have "Masterpiece, Best Quality"
jsheard 3y ago
If Rutkowski didn't already exist, would AI artists ever be able to arrive at his style from first principles? It seems that all novelty entering the AI art ecosystem comes from riding the coattails of non-AI artists, they're literally incapable of producing, for example, fan-art of a newly revealed character until non-AI artists produce enough examples to train a LoRA on. Months on from the release of the new Zelda game I still can't find any on-model AI art of most of the distinctive characters. They just can't do it without a LoRA, and you can't make a LoRA without many existing examples, so they never could have put those characters to paper using AI if the design only existed in their head. Conventional artists have to do it first so that AI artists can follow.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  Artists using AI maybe could have. “AI artists” are largely a bunch of obnoxious trolls with a shallow understanding of art history, technique, etc, such that this seems unlikely. Almost all AI art I see is within a narrow range of stylized realism or anime/manga-derived work.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  There are novel artists using Stable Diffusion or Firefly as a photoshop-like-tool. Not txt2img, but stuff like inpainting, controlnet, contextual modification, LORAs trained on their own portfolio and such. They are obscure for the same reason most artists are obscure. But most "AI artists" you are talking about are would-be consumers looking for something specific, not creators looking to pull something novel out of their head.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Probably something similar? I don't see why not. I don't look at that kind of artwork all that much, but Rutkowski's pictures seem to have a very D&D/Tolkien-ish quality to me, to put it in some words. I'm pretty sure other artists made works in similar styles. I do recall purchasing a poster with a similar look around 20 years ago, when he'd have been 14-ish. He might be a prominent artist in the genre now, but he's far from the first or that unique.
neilv 3y ago
> “If he contacts me asking for removal, I'll remove this.” Lykon said. My interpretation of the article is that the entire reason this person created this was because the artist had objected to being in a generative model. When the artist was removed from the popular generative model, this person created a model/tuning specifically to put the artist back into one, and distributed it. They seemed to do this well aware that the artist didn't want to be in a generative model. That sounds aggressively adversarial and abusive, and so the quote above sounds disingenuous. Consider the analogy of a bully who is hitting a victim, and the bully demands that the victim ask the bully nicely to please stop. Humiliating the victim, and making the victim acknowledge the bully's power over them. Also, this is only after much damage is already done to the victim. And, in this case, after the bully has called over a mob to also beat the victim, and knowing that, even if the bully stops, the mob will continue. The person in this case might not have the self-image of a bully, but is instead thinking of it as the usual Internet get-out-of-jail-free card: such as when you post someone else's content, when you're pretty sure they don't want you to, and without even trying to get permission, but you think it's all OK if you say "I'll take this down if they ask me to". (Related: The YouTube copyright violation disclaimer "I don't own this! All rights to the owner!", maybe even referencing the "All rights reserved" of a traditional copyright notice.) Wherever you stand philosophically on copyright and related matters, and whatever jurisdiction and economic conditions you're under, it's maybe also helpful to consider the bullying question. One can stray into that accidentally, and that's harder to justify.
- arjun_krishna1 3y ago
  based
- wccrawford 3y ago
  If this person was genuine, they would have asked permission first. It wasn't like they had to ask a lot of people who are hard to contact. Just 1 person. I'd have had more respect for this person if they'd just said "Sorry not sorry." instead.
- olaulaja 3y ago
  The thing is, most styles don't have names, only artists using them. If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles, including as combinations (so you can't even do "influenced by rutkowski" styles). This obviously sucks for the user, and I don't think artists should be able to deny control over style just because it makes imitation easy. In this context, putting an artist back in the model is a pretty sensible form of disagreement/protest. I admit the "I'll take this down if they ask me to" is strange, but mostly because its too weak; the LoRA should just stay up, not demand another no from someone who already made their opinion clear.
cateye 3y ago
Greg Rutkowski's art style is similar to Gustave Moreau's, Rutkowski shouldn't be permitted to create his artwork.
- throwaway69123 3y ago
  There are too many artists applying human stylegan to their artwork! Something must be done to stop this unethical practice.
causality0 3y ago
A digital quagmire where Rutkowski himself struggled to differentiate between AI-generated pieces and his genuine works. Is this hyperbole or did he actually say this? How could someone spend tens of hours meticulously painting something and then not be able to tell if he did it?
- drdaeman 3y ago
  And if they're somehow (just theoretically) genuinely indistinguishable even to the author - this prompts to question the value of originality.
  - cheald 3y ago
    Nonsense. A neural net of sufficiently high parameter count can learn a function to reproduce any digital representation of information. This argument would suggest that anything which can be represented digitally is therefore of minimal value.
    - drdaeman 3y ago
      > This argument would suggest that anything which can be represented digitally is therefore of minimal value. Uh, not really like that. The original was about value in comparison, not an absolute value. I don't really see what's immediately wrong with an idea that anything digital has questionable value compared to its clones generated by a trained neural network (but absolute value of those could be still very high). It could be wrong - but it's not immediately obvious to me.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  I suppose that means that he's having a hard time explaining to how to distinguish the AI version from his works. Like there's nothing along the lines of "This is clearly not my work because I don't draw dragon wings this way" he can say. Not that he forgot what he drew and what he didn't.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  That reads to me as "he looked at the details of the AI art, and had a hard time finding obvious issue in the 'technique'", not that he forgot about art he made.
Loveaway 3y ago
Man I feel for the artists. Seen a lot of outcry among people I've worked with too. It just seems so unfair. Like what are we doing? We automated away one of the most pleasing, satisfing and skill intensive endeavours humans can undertake. A dreadful reality we'll probably have coming to our jobs soon enough too. Bitter truth is though, it's not going away. The genie is out of the bottle, and if you are a talented artist, you absolutly need to embrace AI. If you take a look at DeviantArt AI section for example you'll see: The bar has been raised. It's masterpiece next to masterpiece now. Talented artists + AI = Simply stunning work. It feels heartless, but what can we do, will you be able to stay competive without AI? It feels you'll be just hampering yourself for idealistics reasons.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  We didn't automate away art. We automated away the technical skill of digital illustration, which a totally different thing. Now, instead of artists also having to be illustrators, we've opened up being an artist to a wider audience.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    People know this but it doesn’t make things better. If you dedicated thousands of hours to mastering technical skill of illustration, it isn’t nice to see the value in that work obliterated overnight. What makes this so much worse than things like chess AI is that chess is done for fun and the final output is useless. While art is mostly for the output. While the process is fun, it’s fun because of the value of the output.
  - caconym_ 3y ago
    > we've opened up being an artist to a wider audience. No, we've opened up the ability for someone who writes a short textual description of an illustration to obtain an illustration ostensibly matching that description for a much lower cost than they might have paid for it before these technologies were available, e.g. by commissioning an artist. You're right that technique can be abstractly separated from other aspects of the artistic process, but you miss how the inability to guide the application of technique will cut your capacity for expression off at the knees. The prompt is the art, such as it is, and the ability to iterate on versions of the prompt and parameters of the model to random-walk your way to a result that approximates what you were imagining is a very poor substitute for the ability to lay down the brush strokes yourself.
vasco 3y ago
Interestingly enough, Rutkowski might have been the biggest artist beneficiary of this AI hype cycle.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  The only reason I know he exists is because of SD. The same goes for a few other artists. Now I even know roughly what his art like like.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
> "Legal doesn't always mean ethical." Right now it's not given that it's legal. Most people are assuming that it's ok under fair use, but until the SCOTUS rules on it it's an unknown. Given the potential economic impact on the original artist, the mechanical nature of the transformation and the fact that extracting the style of an artist's work could be deemed substantive, fair use is not in the least bit a slam dunk. One could argue that use of this sort of AI robs the original artist of the fruits of their labour, neutering copyright protections, and produces works that substitute for the originals, without adding any creative input other than commanding the output from a machine. Given the intent of copyright law, judges would likely be receptive to this argument.

59 points by ecliptik 3y ago

> While Lykon maintains he'll readily concede to Rutkowski, he said he believes he is acting on behalf of the greater good. Sounds pretty unethical. :(

watchtower 3y ago
Yup, that's pretty much it. Followed by the next sentence: > “If he contacts me asking for removal, I'll remove this.” Lykon said. ... as if Greg hadn't taken a clear stance.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  But he didn't specifically tell me to stop! There's no stopping this technology, but we can do without all of fake "for the good of humanity" stuff. If you want free pictures in someone's style without paying an artist for them, just be honest.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lolinder 3y ago

> Others sided with Lykon, alluding to the fact that Rutkowski's art has already been in circulation in SD1.5 for years. Fun fact: we have yet to reach the one year anniversary of the initial announcement of Stable Diffusion [0]. A lot has happened in one year! [0] https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement

Avisite 3y ago

I really dont think using his name in a prompt had as much to do with his style to some degree, but more that it had an unusual amount of influence on the resulting image compared to other artists. Like his name had an unusual weight to the model that made images higher quality. Images that are nowhere close to his style still had "by Greg Rutkowski" in it. in the same way they have "Masterpiece, Best Quality"

jsheard 3y ago

If Rutkowski didn't already exist, would AI artists ever be able to arrive at his style from first principles? It seems that all novelty entering the AI art ecosystem comes from riding the coattails of non-AI artists, they're literally incapable of producing, for example, fan-art of a newly revealed character until non-AI artists produce enough examples to train a LoRA on. Months on from the release of the new Zelda game I still can't find any on-model AI art of most of the distinctive characters. They just can't do it without a LoRA, and you can't make a LoRA without many existing examples, so they never could have put those characters to paper using AI if the design only existed in their head. Conventional artists have to do it first so that AI artists can follow.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
Artists using AI maybe could have. “AI artists” are largely a bunch of obnoxious trolls with a shallow understanding of art history, technique, etc, such that this seems unlikely. Almost all AI art I see is within a narrow range of stylized realism or anime/manga-derived work.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
There are novel artists using Stable Diffusion or Firefly as a photoshop-like-tool. Not txt2img, but stuff like inpainting, controlnet, contextual modification, LORAs trained on their own portfolio and such. They are obscure for the same reason most artists are obscure. But most "AI artists" you are talking about are would-be consumers looking for something specific, not creators looking to pull something novel out of their head.
dale_glass 3y ago
Probably something similar? I don't see why not. I don't look at that kind of artwork all that much, but Rutkowski's pictures seem to have a very D&D/Tolkien-ish quality to me, to put it in some words. I'm pretty sure other artists made works in similar styles. I do recall purchasing a poster with a similar look around 20 years ago, when he'd have been 14-ish. He might be a prominent artist in the genre now, but he's far from the first or that unique.

neilv 3y ago

> “If he contacts me asking for removal, I'll remove this.” Lykon said. My interpretation of the article is that the entire reason this person created this was because the artist had objected to being in a generative model. When the artist was removed from the popular generative model, this person created a model/tuning specifically to put the artist back into one, and distributed it. They seemed to do this well aware that the artist didn't want to be in a generative model. That sounds aggressively adversarial and abusive, and so the quote above sounds disingenuous. Consider the analogy of a bully who is hitting a victim, and the bully demands that the victim ask the bully nicely to please stop. Humiliating the victim, and making the victim acknowledge the bully's power over them. Also, this is only after much damage is already done to the victim. And, in this case, after the bully has called over a mob to also beat the victim, and knowing that, even if the bully stops, the mob will continue. The person in this case might not have the self-image of a bully, but is instead thinking of it as the usual Internet get-out-of-jail-free card: such as when you post someone else's content, when you're pretty sure they don't want you to, and without even trying to get permission, but you think it's all OK if you say "I'll take this down if they ask me to". (Related: The YouTube copyright violation disclaimer "I don't own this! All rights to the owner!", maybe even referencing the "All rights reserved" of a traditional copyright notice.) Wherever you stand philosophically on copyright and related matters, and whatever jurisdiction and economic conditions you're under, it's maybe also helpful to consider the bullying question. One can stray into that accidentally, and that's harder to justify.

arjun_krishna1 3y ago
based
wccrawford 3y ago
If this person was genuine, they would have asked permission first. It wasn't like they had to ask a lot of people who are hard to contact. Just 1 person. I'd have had more respect for this person if they'd just said "Sorry not sorry." instead.
olaulaja 3y ago
The thing is, most styles don't have names, only artists using them. If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles, including as combinations (so you can't even do "influenced by rutkowski" styles). This obviously sucks for the user, and I don't think artists should be able to deny control over style just because it makes imitation easy. In this context, putting an artist back in the model is a pretty sensible form of disagreement/protest. I admit the "I'll take this down if they ask me to" is strange, but mostly because its too weak; the LoRA should just stay up, not demand another no from someone who already made their opinion clear.

cateye 3y ago

Greg Rutkowski's art style is similar to Gustave Moreau's, Rutkowski shouldn't be permitted to create his artwork.

throwaway69123 3y ago
There are too many artists applying human stylegan to their artwork! Something must be done to stop this unethical practice.

causality0 3y ago

A digital quagmire where Rutkowski himself struggled to differentiate between AI-generated pieces and his genuine works. Is this hyperbole or did he actually say this? How could someone spend tens of hours meticulously painting something and then not be able to tell if he did it?

drdaeman 3y ago
And if they're somehow (just theoretically) genuinely indistinguishable even to the author - this prompts to question the value of originality.
- cheald 3y ago
  Nonsense. A neural net of sufficiently high parameter count can learn a function to reproduce any digital representation of information. This argument would suggest that anything which can be represented digitally is therefore of minimal value.
  - drdaeman 3y ago
    > This argument would suggest that anything which can be represented digitally is therefore of minimal value. Uh, not really like that. The original was about value in comparison, not an absolute value. I don't really see what's immediately wrong with an idea that anything digital has questionable value compared to its clones generated by a trained neural network (but absolute value of those could be still very high). It could be wrong - but it's not immediately obvious to me.
dale_glass 3y ago
I suppose that means that he's having a hard time explaining to how to distinguish the AI version from his works. Like there's nothing along the lines of "This is clearly not my work because I don't draw dragon wings this way" he can say. Not that he forgot what he drew and what he didn't.
Modified3019 3y ago
That reads to me as "he looked at the details of the AI art, and had a hard time finding obvious issue in the 'technique'", not that he forgot about art he made.

Loveaway 3y ago

Man I feel for the artists. Seen a lot of outcry among people I've worked with too. It just seems so unfair. Like what are we doing? We automated away one of the most pleasing, satisfing and skill intensive endeavours humans can undertake. A dreadful reality we'll probably have coming to our jobs soon enough too. Bitter truth is though, it's not going away. The genie is out of the bottle, and if you are a talented artist, you absolutly need to embrace AI. If you take a look at DeviantArt AI section for example you'll see: The bar has been raised. It's masterpiece next to masterpiece now. Talented artists + AI = Simply stunning work. It feels heartless, but what can we do, will you be able to stay competive without AI? It feels you'll be just hampering yourself for idealistics reasons.

CuriouslyC 3y ago
We didn't automate away art. We automated away the technical skill of digital illustration, which a totally different thing. Now, instead of artists also having to be illustrators, we've opened up being an artist to a wider audience.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  People know this but it doesn’t make things better. If you dedicated thousands of hours to mastering technical skill of illustration, it isn’t nice to see the value in that work obliterated overnight. What makes this so much worse than things like chess AI is that chess is done for fun and the final output is useless. While art is mostly for the output. While the process is fun, it’s fun because of the value of the output.
- caconym_ 3y ago
  > we've opened up being an artist to a wider audience. No, we've opened up the ability for someone who writes a short textual description of an illustration to obtain an illustration ostensibly matching that description for a much lower cost than they might have paid for it before these technologies were available, e.g. by commissioning an artist. You're right that technique can be abstractly separated from other aspects of the artistic process, but you miss how the inability to guide the application of technique will cut your capacity for expression off at the knees. The prompt is the art, such as it is, and the ability to iterate on versions of the prompt and parameters of the model to random-walk your way to a result that approximates what you were imagining is a very poor substitute for the ability to lay down the brush strokes yourself.

vasco 3y ago

Interestingly enough, Rutkowski might have been the biggest artist beneficiary of this AI hype cycle.

Aerroon 3y ago
The only reason I know he exists is because of SD. The same goes for a few other artists. Now I even know roughly what his art like like.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

> "Legal doesn't always mean ethical." Right now it's not given that it's legal. Most people are assuming that it's ok under fair use, but until the SCOTUS rules on it it's an unknown. Given the potential economic impact on the original artist, the mechanical nature of the transformation and the fact that extracting the style of an artist's work could be deemed substantive, fair use is not in the least bit a slam dunk. One could argue that use of this sort of AI robs the original artist of the fruits of their labour, neutering copyright protections, and produces works that substitute for the originals, without adding any creative input other than commanding the output from a machine. Given the intent of copyright law, judges would likely be receptive to this argument.