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> it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighte

> it’s extremely easy to coerce direct copies out of models that artists could be pursued for infringement if they drew, but companies reselling said copyrighted artwork face no penalty The purpose of the model isn't to make exact reproductions. It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement. You can, but it's the user who chooses the use, so is that on AT&T and Microsoft or is it on the users doing the infringement? > They sell these images and give no credit or cash to the images being “interpolated” between. A big part of the problem is that machines aren't qualified to be judges. Suppose the image you request is Gollum but instead of the One Ring he wants PewDiePie. Obviously this is using a character from the LOTR films by Warner Bros. If you're PewDiePie and you want this image to use in an ad for your channel, you might be in trouble. But Warner Bros. got into a scandal for paying YouTubers to promote Promote Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor without disclosing the payments. If you're creating the image to criticize the company's behavior, it's likely fair use. The service has no way to tell why you want the image, so what is it supposed to do? A law that requires them to deny you in the second case is restricting a right of the public. But it's the same image. Meanwhile in the first case you don't really need the company generating the image to do anything because Warner Bros. could then go after PewDiePie for using the character in commercial advertising without permission. > Notice this doesn’t extend to open source, it’s the commercial aspect that represents theft. It's also not really clear how this works. For example, Stable Diffusion is published. You can run it locally. If you buy a GPU from Nvidia or AMD in order to do that, is that now commercial use? Is the GPU manufacturer in trouble? What if you pay a cloud provider like AWS to use one of their GPUs to do it? You can also pay for the cloud service from Stability AI, the makers of Stable Diffusion. Is it different in that case than the others? How?

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
>It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement. I think that a comparison that could help to elucidate the problem here is to a search engine. Like with imagegen, an image search is using infrastructure+algorithm to return the closest match(es) to a textual input over some particular space (whether the space of indexed images or the latent space of the model). Immediately, however, there are qualitative differences. A search company, as an entity, doesn’t in any way take credit for the work; it bills itself as, and operates as, a mechanism to connect the user to others’ work, and in the service of this goal it provides the most attribution it’s reasonably able to provide given technical limitations (a url). For me this is the difference. Image gen companies, at least all that I’m aware of, position themselves more as a kind of pseudo-artist that you can commission. They provide no means of attribution, rather, they deliberately obfuscate the source material being searched over. Whether you are willing to equate the generation process to a kind of search for legal purposes is really the core disagreement here, and beyond an intuition for it not something I feel I can prove. So what’s the solution, what’s a business model I’d find less contentious? If an AI company developed a means to, for example, associate activation patterns to an index of source material, (or hell, just provided an effective similarity search between output and training data) as a sort of good-faith attribution scheme, made visible the training set used, and was upfront in marketing about its dependence on the source material, I’d struggle to have the same issues with it. It would be leagues ahead of current companies in the ethical department. To be clear though, I’m not a lawyer. I can’t say how image gen fits into the current legal scheme, or whether it does or doesn’t. My argument is an ethical one; I think that the unethical behavior of the for-profit imagegen companies should be hampered by legality, through new laws if necessary. I feel like this should answer your other questions as well but let me know if I missed something.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago

>It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement. I think that a comparison that could help to elucidate the problem here is to a search engine. Like with imagegen, an image search is using infrastructure+algorithm to return the closest match(es) to a textual input over some particular space (whether the space of indexed images or the latent space of the model). Immediately, however, there are qualitative differences. A search company, as an entity, doesn’t in any way take credit for the work; it bills itself as, and operates as, a mechanism to connect the user to others’ work, and in the service of this goal it provides the most attribution it’s reasonably able to provide given technical limitations (a url). For me this is the difference. Image gen companies, at least all that I’m aware of, position themselves more as a kind of pseudo-artist that you can commission. They provide no means of attribution, rather, they deliberately obfuscate the source material being searched over. Whether you are willing to equate the generation process to a kind of search for legal purposes is really the core disagreement here, and beyond an intuition for it not something I feel I can prove. So what’s the solution, what’s a business model I’d find less contentious? If an AI company developed a means to, for example, associate activation patterns to an index of source material, (or hell, just provided an effective similarity search between output and training data) as a sort of good-faith attribution scheme, made visible the training set used, and was upfront in marketing about its dependence on the source material, I’d struggle to have the same issues with it. It would be leagues ahead of current companies in the ethical department. To be clear though, I’m not a lawyer. I can’t say how image gen fits into the current legal scheme, or whether it does or doesn’t. My argument is an ethical one; I think that the unethical behavior of the for-profit imagegen companies should be hampered by legality, through new laws if necessary. I feel like this should answer your other questions as well but let me know if I missed something.