13 ms·

An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

91 points by spiffage 4y ago

scotty79 4y ago
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. This is incredibly disheartening. Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Rent seeking by owners of AI machines is OK, but not by copyright owners?
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Yes. Abolish all copyright. Are we hackers or not?
    - t433 4y ago
      Spoiler alert: They're not! This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.
      - kragen 4y ago
        pg did originally call it 'startup news' but i don't think you have standing to accuse him of 'appropriating' the term 'hacker' until you've hacked together something of comparable significance to on lisp or viaweb
    - manigandham 4y ago
      Who is “we”?
      - Kiro 4y ago
        Participants on a site called Hacker News.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      You understand that completely kills OSS as a concept, right?
      - krapp 4y ago
        Free and open source software licenses are redundant in a world where copyright and intellectual property laws don't exist, and no form of media (including software) can legally be owned by anyone.
        kmeisthax 4y ago
        Casual reminder that the endgame of the GPL was to make software copyright unenforceable.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - scotty79 4y ago
        Why would that be? Huge amount of OSS is released under fully permissive licenses.
        jeroenhd 4y ago
        Permissive licenses like "if you use this code you must also make your code available under the same license" form the basis of the world's most often used open source software. Open licenses are not the same as abolishing copyright.
        scotty79 4y ago
        Those are not permissive licenses. Those are copyleft licenses. As I said, a lot of software uses permissive ones. https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possible-distinctions/ https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...
        rpdillon 4y ago
        Those licenses only carry weight because of copyright.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      You have my respect.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    I think creating art in the style of an artist is well covered by Fair Use.
    - RandomLensman 4y ago
      Even if it were (which I am not competent to speak on), should that help to enrich some large corporation, for example?
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Make a mouse cartoon in the style of Disney and tell me how well that goes down.
      - yokem55 4y ago
        That's because you run into trademark laws, not copyright. Not to mention, if you can make the case that your art of the mouse is Parody, then it falls squarely under fair use.
        lxgr 4y ago
        Plagiarism is very much a matter of copyright, not trademark infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagiarism_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...
      - matheusmoreira 4y ago
        Here you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead > The game's creators, brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, took inspiration from the rubber hose style of the golden age of American animation and the surrealist qualities of works of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Fleischer Studios, Warner Bros. Cartoons, MGM Cartoon Studio and Walter Lantz Productions.
        marginalia_nu 4y ago
        There is a conspicuous lack of mice in that cartoon.
- healsdata 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the point you're making. Its disheartening that artists can opt-out of having a computer algorithm make derivative versions of their creations? I'm probably on the opposite side of the fence. I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. The training set should be limited to public domain and CC-0 until such a time it can comply with attribution; then other CC works could be incorporated.
  - t433 4y ago
    All art is derivative.
    - haswell 4y ago
      The definition of “derivative” and its historical context look nothing like the new reality created by generative AI. To continue blindly applying historical understanding to fundamentally new technologies creates huge blind spots, and I’d argue similar to pretending that the creation of ever more destructive weaponry requires no changes to the rules of engagement in warfare. The game has changed.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    It's disheartening because it's a great loss to everybody. Almost none of the people that were generating images in a style of some artist will contact this artist and pay to have an image created. So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work from the people who tried the AI commercially and got results that weren't completely satisfactory. Now barely anyone will ever have any contact with their art (relatively speaking vs scenario of virality). Basically the only people who win are the lawyers and handful of artists that were mislead by lawyers primitive argumentation. Everybody else looses. First and foremost artists and art lovers but also AI researchers and hardware manufacturers.
    - Avicebron 4y ago
      They could have gone viral because an AI recreated their art style to the degree that they could? And therefore people would abandon the AI to pay the artist individually? I'm not sure I follow, wouldn't those people just us the AI to continue creating what they want unless you think that driving the artist to compete monetarily with an AI will somehow work in the artist's favor?
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It would be a spectacularly shitty world where IP protection is only granted to entities with a legal budget that eclipses the GDP of Antigua, and not to smaller independent creators. The ends of having an useful model like stable diffusion doesn't really justify just ignoring the IP rights of tens of thousands of creators who were already having a pretty rough time making ends meet. That's just a shitty thing to do.
  - msla 4y ago
    It's already the case that independent creators get their works pulled on bogus copyright claims. Copyright law isn't friendly to small creators, and big creators use it as a cudgel with absolutely no consequences.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      And because things are bad we should go ahead and make them worse?
- aliqot 4y ago
  Where are all these self trained artists who learned their craft in a bubble, devoid of outside influence from other artists? Is it because there's a better paintbrush now, or is it because that paintbrush is not the 'real' way? This reminds me of the backlash against the wacom community on deviantart in the early days.
  - antiterra 4y ago
    A computer program is not a person, so the argument that stable diffusion does what a person does is of limited relevance.
    - usrbinbash 4y ago
      Is it? The model learns concepts from images, not the images itself. It has developed general solutions explaining light, colors, composition, objects and their relation to one another, facial features and too many more concepts to even begin enumerating them. How is this different from a human studying art, literature, music, etc. to learn concepts and then apply them in creating new pictures, novels or songs?
      - antiterra 4y ago
        It is different simply because it’s not a human. We can and often do assign laws that affect the automation of something a human can do. For example, installing a device on a firearm that repeatedly pulls the trigger creates a machine gun that is highly restricted legally, regardless of whether a human can easily pull the trigger at the same rate. Further, just because we can talk about how artists, at a high level do the same thing as AI image generators, the actual mechanism is not exactly the same and is therefore still subject to distinct regulation. Even if you were able to somehow establish that computer programs should have the same rights as people (since they are made and used by people,) you’re still not out of the woods. Much debate remains about what creativity and originality means when talking about human generated content in an IP sense, and adding the programmatic aspect doesn’t simplify things. (eg The Sina Qua Non of Copyright is Uniqueness, Not Originality https://tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v20/v20p327.pdf https://tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v20/v20p327.pdf)
- haswell 4y ago
  > Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense. These are orthogonal issues at this point. The one concern I do have is that the “lawyer nonsense” (read: AI companies playing fast and loose with current laws) will stack the regulatory deck against AI technology unnecessarily - essentially because of an unforced error that brings negative attention to the technology. Put another way, these companies are asking to have a spotlight put on them by being so flippant about copyright and ethics issues. This spotlight could have been avoided with better behavior, and the tech would still appear magical and remain one of the most impactful jumps in tech in decades.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    It's not 'playing fast and loose'. It's an area where there are no existing laws. We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.
    - haswell 4y ago
      Are the existing laws written in a way that is favorable to generative AI? No. But the laws do exist. Whether or not one believes those laws apply to generative AI seems to be based on one's belief in how similar that AI software is to humans. I'd argue that systematically ingesting 2.3 billion images is not remotely human (one of a myriad of reasons the comparisons break down), and that it is a long stretch to claim that this falls into the realm of fair use as originally envisioned. It is this insistence that the software is human enough to be granted human-like status that is playing fast and loose with the definitions of things, ranging from consciousness, to learning, to the interpretation of those concepts relative to current laws. I believe new laws will be written, and old laws will be updated. There's no question that the current legal system is not well equipped for various generative AI systems. But I don't think the current laws have nothing to say. And I'd still argue that this conversation can be separated from the one about indiscriminately slurping up artist's content. > We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online. Please don't argue against straw men. There are legitimate concerns from artists across disciplines and genres, and this isn't just isolated shrieking. Artist backlash is frankly one of the most natural outcomes I could imagine from a system that uses their work without permission. Many of the people who are complaining loudly are not against AI, just against the use of their work without consent or attribution. I'm both extremely excited about the possibilities the software unlocks and concerned about the implications. AI can exist without ignoring the rights of artists.
- mk_stjames 4y ago
  I think this is why it was very important that their first release of the model weights (the v1.4 model) was and will continue to be very important. While training an entire model from scratch requires an insane amount of data and compute right now (and will continue to be out of reach of individuals for some years I think), fine-tuning the model can be done on a consumer graphics card (they call it Dreambooth)... and I believe we will see further refinements that allow more and more useful tuning and features being built by individuals on top that original model, making it more and more powerful for specific uses. So even if future efforts change the functionality, or nerf the output in some way, there will always be people developing tools on the original weights. That cat is out of the bag.
- antiterra 4y ago
  ChatGPT has shown that attempting to train the model to decline certain types of requests is of limited effectiveness and readily circumvented. The ability to make custom checkpoints and tools like Dreambooth will further limit these restrictions.
- GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
  Strongly disagree, IP law (despite it's misuse by a certain mouse mascot'd company) is extremely important and protecting artists work and their livelihood. The price floor on art commissions is already very low and AI effectively makes that cost zero, while providing zero compensation to the thousands of artists. Without their work, there's no Stability AI. From an ethical standpoint Stability is in the wrong, and from a legal one I think the class has a very strong case to recover damages.
  - astrange 4y ago
    StableDiffusion is not based on art commissions. You can search https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ and see what kind of nonsense it usually has trained on.
    - GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
      It most definitely is, LAION-5B contains a large amount of copyrighted works from DeviantArt, ArtStation, etc.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Are those all commissions? The aesthetic subset is .05% Artstation: https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_sort=rowid&url__contains=artstation https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/im... Not sure if that's a large amount or not. They could've used robots.txt if they didn't want to be indexed.
        GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
        > Note that this is only a small subset of the total training data: about 2% of the 600 million images used to train the most recent three checkpoints, and only 0.5% of the 2.3 billion images that it was first trained on. [1] That dataset only covers "aesthetic" clip terms as well. Not to mention a lot of images come from Pinterest and other aggregators. [1] https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-train-stable-diffusions-image-generator/ https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-...
quitit 4y ago
Interestingly it shows the tenuous nature of the plaintiffs case, even before getting into the plaintiff's large errors. Since reasonably simplified information about SD is available and/or the plaintiff could have involved an expert to review his claims - it does raise a question if the function of the lawsuit is more about rattling chains rather than the merits of their argument. I.E. A deliberate ploy to extract a settlement.
- jerf 4y ago
  Ultimately, this is just something that has to be solved with legislation, not a court case. It's too novel a setup for a court case to deal with under existing frameworks. I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse. But proving that illegal under current law is certainly going to be a challenge. I have not read the original complaint but it surprises me that the lawsuit doesn't have a much stronger focus on this aspect. Copyright law is very concerned about not destroying the market for a given work through infringement, but this is a case about destroying the market for entire artists at a stroke. But that's a hard argument in court. There's no legal basis for claiming damages because the entire market itself is being destroyed. Though I'm not sure it's any weaker than the other claims trying to be made. The basic problem is, this isn't illegal in any sense. I don't just mean "illegal in that it must be banned" but any level of gradation in between, in the licenses, in requiring compensation, in any sort of regulation whatsoever. Technology has simply outrun law again.
  - simiones 4y ago
    I think it's not going to be that hard to argue that the company is infringing the copyright of those whose images they are using. Especially once the judge is show how similar the output of SD can be to a particular artist's images with the right prompts (proving that SD has memorized a significant amount of those images).
    - cwkoss 4y ago
acomjean 4y ago
>"The output represents the model’s understanding of what is useful, aesthetic, pleasing, etc. and that, together with data filtering and cleaning that general image generating AI companies do,2 is what the companies consider most valuable, not the training data.3" This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models? No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.
- cma 4y ago
  > No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people. What about a company where you submit images and it tells you which faces are in them?
- seydor 4y ago
  They are never going to compensate the artists. It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for
  - krisoft 4y ago
    uhm. What you are proposing is compensating the artists. Those 1000 designers are the artist in question then. > It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for I bet that you are massively underestimating the cost of that.
  - gugagore 4y ago
    I think you underestimate the scale of data these models are trained on by many orders of magnitude.
    - Ajedi32 4y ago
      I suspect you might be able to get pretty good results by training the system on video/CGI/other images that can be easily mass produced, then fine-tuning on a much smaller number of drawings and other stylized images.
tshadley 4y ago
"[The complaint] argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data." As noted in OP, this is an outstandingly bad definition of Deep-Neural-Networks, and the lawsuit should fail when the court hears an explanation from any competent practitioner. However, a correct definition would make the lawsuit far more interesting, imo. Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How does this entity affect social well-being, how should existing laws be modified--if at all-- with the welfare of humanity in mind, etc?
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > the lawsuit will fail when the court hears an explanation from an expert So how often does this happen? Somehow I'm too cynical to believe that a judge would rule against the intellectual property industry. The whole thing is based on absurd concepts to begin with, concepts that can be reduced to the ownership of unique numbers. Once a society accepts that, what difference do explanations make?
- simiones 4y ago
  > Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How can you claim with a straight face that this is a better explanation of what an NN is? An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. It is much much closer to "a giant archive of compressed images being used to interpolate between them" (though it's not that) than it is to a "superhumanly talented artist".
  - tshadley 4y ago
    > An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close. You'll need more than wikipedia to appreciate what deep-neural-networks are doing here, it's dimensional space that's key. What DNNs do that is similar to the human brain is that they order "concepts" in high-dimensional space. Colors, textures, shape and hierarchies of same are organized and cross-referenced with text in an incredibly complex connectome. It would be useless to memorize images with their textual descriptions as that would be horrendously inefficient/ineffective during inference. Rather, the model must do what we do and understand what makes an image a "landscape" or a "portrait" or a "cartoon". It needs to understand what is an artist's style and how to perform it on a work never before created. "Understanding" can only mean ordering meaningless letters and pixels in multidimensional space so that they line up with human understanding (and human 'understanding', in turn, can only mean ordering meaningless sensory perceptions in the brain's multidimensional connectome such that reality turns out to be approximately predicted and controlled). The only systems that work this way efficiently are neural networks, biological and artificial.
rafale 4y ago
I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  I hope the exact opposite. AI, including AGI if we ever get there, cannot be allowed to be strangled in its crib by artificially limiting the information it can learn from in the name of IP maximalism. IP law already goes way too far, the line should be drawn here.
  - troyvit 4y ago
    If you want new art you probably want some form of IP. What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      > What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines? Because when I have access to these tools I will make better art than the technocrat with access to these tools?
      - troyvit 4y ago
        But then are you still an artist or are you now a technocrat?
        williamcotton 4y ago
        An artist. You’ve got a lot of knots to untangle.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
sebstefan 4y ago
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  An artist's style is not copyrightable so I doubt it makes much of a difference. My guess is that showing good faith will make the lawsuit go over easier, because there's nothing illegal about paying someone to copy someone else's style (and not just a replica).
  - threeseed 4y ago
    But the artist's work itself is copyrightable. Any use of that work without permission (and thus attribution/compensation) is the problem.
    - tadfisher 4y ago
      Fair use is a thing.
      - ThrustVectoring 4y ago
        Fair use as a legal doctrine has significant practical problems - specifically, it's an open legal question with mind-bogglingly large sums of money at stake until and unless you get sued and spend six-figure sums in court to find out. Prudent risk management will forgo all sorts of activities that are clearly fair use under US law but happen to piss off large companies with expansive legal departments.
      - threeseed 4y ago
        But when companies are solely profiting from it then it ceases being fair.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I don't. Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons. Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this. [0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-copyright/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
shanebellone 4y ago
I've been saying this since it came out... Stable Diffusion is equivalent to hip-hop sampling in the 80s and 90s. The outcome is obvious.
- haswell 4y ago
  I’ve heard this argument on numerous occasions but I have never heard someone justify it or why they believe it. Are there specific similarities that make you believe these are equivalent scenarios? Not just “it feels thematically similar”.
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    It's the closest thing to a precedent. Hip-hop originally recorded and transformed vocals, instruments, and beats to create something new from pieces of something old. The practice occurred without permission and obviously ended up in court. Now sampling requires a licensing agreement. The additional cost has fundamentally changed the genre (over the last 40 years). Hip-hop and tech both ignored IP rights because neither started with a legal framework and both would have found the additional cost prohibitive.
    - haswell 4y ago
      That's helpful. I wasn't aware of the eventual licensing enforcement. If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules). I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefore is by definition not infringing. I suspect this might be where the flurry of downvotes came from.
      - shanebellone 4y ago
        "you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules" The systems are similar too despite having completely different internal processes. Both transformed existing IP without permission, to produce sufficiently remixed art as an output. A sufficiently generic abstraction would look very similar despite the disparity of domain. The primary difference between hip-hop and Stable Diffusion is that AI cannot rationalize, explain, or attribute inspiration to a final product. There was no aha moment and thus no creativity. It has no vested interest in its work.
dns_snek 4y ago
> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts for the jury to wade through. How can this possibly be a valid good faith argument? Either they're in breach of authors' copyright which extends to every piece of art that they included in the dataset without permission, or they're in the clear and aren't obligated to respond to removal requests. This reads like damage control to me in an effort to temporarily silence the loudest critics.
- hehdhdhkf 4y ago
  Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties. These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work. If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing. They either don’t understand how it works or they are just upset that a computer can make art as good as (or better than) they can in a fraction of the time. All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck, but it would be great if we all could try to understand reality first.
  - dns_snek 4y ago
    Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright? > All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck This is not a given. It's up to us and the copyright law. Real original work should be compensated appropriately unless you're proposing that we accelerate deployment of universal basic income and completely abolish copyright law. I have a feeling you might not like the violent outcome if you effectively strip original creators of their copyright, give corporations the right to effectively generate infinite profit off the backs of their work and tell the creators (and other people whose jobs will be automated away) to pound sand when they ask how they're supposed to pay rent from now on.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
It's interesting the IP attorney cites The Grey Album as being an example of something that is legal, when the reality is that the case was never brought because the original artists wishes meant it was unattractive for EMI to pursue the case.
kmeisthax 4y ago
>The complaint includes a section attempting to explain how Stable Diffusion works. It argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data. I've seen the collage tool argument several times, and I don't agree with it. But I can understand why people believe it. You see, there's a very large number of people who use AI art generators as a tracing tool. Like, to the point where someone who has never touched one might believe that it literally just photobashes existing images together. The reality is that there's three ways to use art generators: - You can tell it to generate an image with a non-copyright-infringing prompt. i.e. "a dog police officer holding a gun" - You can ask it to replicate an existing style, by adding keywords like "in the style of <existing artist>" - You can modify an existing image. This is in lieu of the random seed image that is normally provided to the AI. That last one is confusing, because it makes people think that the AI itself is infringing when it's only the person using it. But I could see the courts deciding that letting someone chuck an image into the model gives you liability, especially with all of the "you have full commercial rights to everything you generate" messaging people keep slapping onto these. Style prompting is one of those things that's also legally questionable, though for different reasons. As about 40,000 AI art generator users have shouted at me over the past year, you cannot copyright a style. But at the same time, producing "new" art that's substantially similar to copyrighted art is still illegal. So, say, "a man on a motorcycle in the style of Banksy" might be OK, but "girl holding a balloon in the style of Banksy" might not be. The latter is basically asking the AI to regurgitate an existing image, or trace over something it's already seen. I think a better argument would be that, by training the AI to understand style prompts, Stability AI is inducing users to infringe upon other people's copyright.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Great write-up. SD's removing the ability to imitate styles will probably go a long way to quell objections, though it will be interesting to see if there's a future legal split over the styles of living and dead artists. I don't imagine that anyone would object to 'autoseurat' for example. I can see see a future dispute arising over outpainting (beginning with an existing copyrighted work) but there infringement and identity of the infringer (the user, not the toolmaker) is more clear.
Animats 4y ago
That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement. Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA takedown request without a copyright registration, but you can't enforce it in court without one.[2] This raises the question of, if you as a service receive a DMCA takedown request, should you ask the requestor to send proof of copyright registration, and if they don't, ignore the request? [1] https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ [2] https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright-necessary-for-a-dmca-takedown/ https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright...
- rebuilder 4y ago
  Is this requirement to register specifically a feature of the DMCA? It seems quite surprising if, as the article claims, “people who don’t have registered copyrights cannot enforce their copyrights in court.” That would mean that the vast majority of artwork posted online is essentially free to exploit in the USA, since I’m sure most people do not routinely register their works with the copyright office before posting them.
- mcbits 4y ago
  Unless they're legally obligated to show proof of copyright registration for the takedown notice to be a valid, it would be risky to assume they didn't register it just because they didn't show proof.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Most of this revolves around the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. That is, doing a takedown without authenticating the ownership of the copyright provides immunity against being sued for contributory infringement. But to actually win such a lawsuit, the purported copyright owner would have to show proof of registration. This suggests an online process which looks like this: * US Service provider offers web page for DMCA notices. * Web page requests that the user enter copyright registration info. * If user fails to provide registration info, web page offers links to various national copyright registration sites to register a copyright. A payment receipt for copyright registration is acceptable as temporary proof of registration, but must be followed up within some period of time by actual proof of registration. * Temporary proof of registration is enough for a takedown, but the material will go back up if full proof is not submitted later. This would put a big dent in nuisance DMCA claims. The service provider might get sued occasionally, but for big providers, it's probably worth litigating this once or twice. The companies that have valuable IP file copyright registrations. Disney will be able to show a copyright registration on all their movies.
xeyownt 4y ago
I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.
- haswell 4y ago
  > If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that. This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and impact of AI software. In the case of "seeing" an image, the two processes could not be any more unlike each other, both in content and context.
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.
    - blackbear_ 4y ago
      Modern neural networks as used in language diffusion models have absolutely nothing to do with biological brains. That was just a vision of the early pioneers 70 years ago.
    - haswell 4y ago
      The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics. Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord. And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.
consumer451 4y ago
A lawyer who works on YouTube channel Corridor Crew posted a decent breakdown on this lawsuit recently as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857
mensetmanusman 4y ago
“LLMs are illegal because anything they see is owned by other people” The Disney protection act rears its head…
layer8 4y ago
> future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. How does this work? Do they retrain the model from scratch every week? Or is it somehow possible to retroactively remove specific training-set items from the already-trained model?
cycomanic 4y ago
I don't really understand the argument about danger mouses grey album being different from just a random "mash up" because the artistic merit behind the grey album. Sure the grey album is likely much more pleasant to listen to and would likely be considered worthy of copyright itself, where a random mash might not be. That doesn't change the fact that danger mouse had to ask permission to use Jay Zs and the Beatles work (and likely had to pay), or otherwise would have violated copyright. So how is that argument relevant. Nobody is arguing that composing images via stable diffusion prompts (like making some collage) is not a creative process. The argument is does one have to have permission/licence of the original creators.
gcoakes 4y ago
Am I the only one who thinks this just isn't defined well enough to be decided by the judiciary? It should be legislated. My opinion is that ML training should be distinctly different from human learning.
- jen20 4y ago
  I agree that it should both be legislated, and substantially different to human learning. In the US (or UK) however, most legislators are such intellectual lightweights that they have no hope of grasping even the basics of what they are legislating.

91 points by spiffage 4y ago

RandomLensman 4y ago
Rent seeking by owners of AI machines is OK, but not by copyright owners?
- Kiro 4y ago
  Yes. Abolish all copyright. Are we hackers or not?
  - t433 4y ago
    Spoiler alert: They're not! This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.
    - kragen 4y ago
      pg did originally call it 'startup news' but i don't think you have standing to accuse him of 'appropriating' the term 'hacker' until you've hacked together something of comparable significance to on lisp or viaweb
  - manigandham 4y ago
    Who is “we”?
    - Kiro 4y ago
      Participants on a site called Hacker News.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    You understand that completely kills OSS as a concept, right?
    - krapp 4y ago
      Free and open source software licenses are redundant in a world where copyright and intellectual property laws don't exist, and no form of media (including software) can legally be owned by anyone.
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        Casual reminder that the endgame of the GPL was to make software copyright unenforceable.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - scotty79 4y ago
      Why would that be? Huge amount of OSS is released under fully permissive licenses.
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        Permissive licenses like "if you use this code you must also make your code available under the same license" form the basis of the world's most often used open source software. Open licenses are not the same as abolishing copyright.
        scotty79 4y ago
        Those are not permissive licenses. Those are copyleft licenses. As I said, a lot of software uses permissive ones. https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possible-distinctions/ https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...
      - rpdillon 4y ago
        Those licenses only carry weight because of copyright.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    You have my respect.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  I think creating art in the style of an artist is well covered by Fair Use.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    Even if it were (which I am not competent to speak on), should that help to enrich some large corporation, for example?
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Make a mouse cartoon in the style of Disney and tell me how well that goes down.
    - yokem55 4y ago
      That's because you run into trademark laws, not copyright. Not to mention, if you can make the case that your art of the mouse is Parody, then it falls squarely under fair use.
      - lxgr 4y ago
        Plagiarism is very much a matter of copyright, not trademark infringement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagiarism_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_subject_to_plagi...
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      Here you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuphead > The game's creators, brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, took inspiration from the rubber hose style of the golden age of American animation and the surrealist qualities of works of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Fleischer Studios, Warner Bros. Cartoons, MGM Cartoon Studio and Walter Lantz Productions.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        There is a conspicuous lack of mice in that cartoon.
healsdata 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand the point you're making. Its disheartening that artists can opt-out of having a computer algorithm make derivative versions of their creations? I'm probably on the opposite side of the fence. I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. The training set should be limited to public domain and CC-0 until such a time it can comply with attribution; then other CC works could be incorporated.
- t433 4y ago
  All art is derivative.
  - haswell 4y ago
    The definition of “derivative” and its historical context look nothing like the new reality created by generative AI. To continue blindly applying historical understanding to fundamentally new technologies creates huge blind spots, and I’d argue similar to pretending that the creation of ever more destructive weaponry requires no changes to the rules of engagement in warfare. The game has changed.
- scotty79 4y ago
  It's disheartening because it's a great loss to everybody. Almost none of the people that were generating images in a style of some artist will contact this artist and pay to have an image created. So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work from the people who tried the AI commercially and got results that weren't completely satisfactory. Now barely anyone will ever have any contact with their art (relatively speaking vs scenario of virality). Basically the only people who win are the lawyers and handful of artists that were mislead by lawyers primitive argumentation. Everybody else looses. First and foremost artists and art lovers but also AI researchers and hardware manufacturers.
  - Avicebron 4y ago
    They could have gone viral because an AI recreated their art style to the degree that they could? And therefore people would abandon the AI to pay the artist individually? I'm not sure I follow, wouldn't those people just us the AI to continue creating what they want unless you think that driving the artist to compete monetarily with an AI will somehow work in the artist's favor?
marginalia_nu 4y ago
It would be a spectacularly shitty world where IP protection is only granted to entities with a legal budget that eclipses the GDP of Antigua, and not to smaller independent creators. The ends of having an useful model like stable diffusion doesn't really justify just ignoring the IP rights of tens of thousands of creators who were already having a pretty rough time making ends meet. That's just a shitty thing to do.
- msla 4y ago
  It's already the case that independent creators get their works pulled on bogus copyright claims. Copyright law isn't friendly to small creators, and big creators use it as a cudgel with absolutely no consequences.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    And because things are bad we should go ahead and make them worse?
aliqot 4y ago
Where are all these self trained artists who learned their craft in a bubble, devoid of outside influence from other artists? Is it because there's a better paintbrush now, or is it because that paintbrush is not the 'real' way? This reminds me of the backlash against the wacom community on deviantart in the early days.
- antiterra 4y ago
  A computer program is not a person, so the argument that stable diffusion does what a person does is of limited relevance.
  - usrbinbash 4y ago
    Is it? The model learns concepts from images, not the images itself. It has developed general solutions explaining light, colors, composition, objects and their relation to one another, facial features and too many more concepts to even begin enumerating them. How is this different from a human studying art, literature, music, etc. to learn concepts and then apply them in creating new pictures, novels or songs?
    - antiterra 4y ago
      It is different simply because it’s not a human. We can and often do assign laws that affect the automation of something a human can do. For example, installing a device on a firearm that repeatedly pulls the trigger creates a machine gun that is highly restricted legally, regardless of whether a human can easily pull the trigger at the same rate. Further, just because we can talk about how artists, at a high level do the same thing as AI image generators, the actual mechanism is not exactly the same and is therefore still subject to distinct regulation. Even if you were able to somehow establish that computer programs should have the same rights as people (since they are made and used by people,) you’re still not out of the woods. Much debate remains about what creativity and originality means when talking about human generated content in an IP sense, and adding the programmatic aspect doesn’t simplify things. (eg The Sina Qua Non of Copyright is Uniqueness, Not Originality https://tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v20/v20p327.pdf https://tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v20/v20p327.pdf)
haswell 4y ago
> Who knows how long will it take to progress the tech to the point where anyone will be able to train and run models unrestricted without dealing with lawyer nonsense. These are orthogonal issues at this point. The one concern I do have is that the “lawyer nonsense” (read: AI companies playing fast and loose with current laws) will stack the regulatory deck against AI technology unnecessarily - essentially because of an unforced error that brings negative attention to the technology. Put another way, these companies are asking to have a spotlight put on them by being so flippant about copyright and ethics issues. This spotlight could have been avoided with better behavior, and the tech would still appear magical and remain one of the most impactful jumps in tech in decades.
- ok123456 4y ago
  It's not 'playing fast and loose'. It's an area where there are no existing laws. We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.
  - haswell 4y ago
    Are the existing laws written in a way that is favorable to generative AI? No. But the laws do exist. Whether or not one believes those laws apply to generative AI seems to be based on one's belief in how similar that AI software is to humans. I'd argue that systematically ingesting 2.3 billion images is not remotely human (one of a myriad of reasons the comparisons break down), and that it is a long stretch to claim that this falls into the realm of fair use as originally envisioned. It is this insistence that the software is human enough to be granted human-like status that is playing fast and loose with the definitions of things, ranging from consciousness, to learning, to the interpretation of those concepts relative to current laws. I believe new laws will be written, and old laws will be updated. There's no question that the current legal system is not well equipped for various generative AI systems. But I don't think the current laws have nothing to say. And I'd still argue that this conversation can be separated from the one about indiscriminately slurping up artist's content. > We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online. Please don't argue against straw men. There are legitimate concerns from artists across disciplines and genres, and this isn't just isolated shrieking. Artist backlash is frankly one of the most natural outcomes I could imagine from a system that uses their work without permission. Many of the people who are complaining loudly are not against AI, just against the use of their work without consent or attribution. I'm both extremely excited about the possibilities the software unlocks and concerned about the implications. AI can exist without ignoring the rights of artists.
mk_stjames 4y ago
I think this is why it was very important that their first release of the model weights (the v1.4 model) was and will continue to be very important. While training an entire model from scratch requires an insane amount of data and compute right now (and will continue to be out of reach of individuals for some years I think), fine-tuning the model can be done on a consumer graphics card (they call it Dreambooth)... and I believe we will see further refinements that allow more and more useful tuning and features being built by individuals on top that original model, making it more and more powerful for specific uses. So even if future efforts change the functionality, or nerf the output in some way, there will always be people developing tools on the original weights. That cat is out of the bag.
antiterra 4y ago
ChatGPT has shown that attempting to train the model to decline certain types of requests is of limited effectiveness and readily circumvented. The ability to make custom checkpoints and tools like Dreambooth will further limit these restrictions.
GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
Strongly disagree, IP law (despite it's misuse by a certain mouse mascot'd company) is extremely important and protecting artists work and their livelihood. The price floor on art commissions is already very low and AI effectively makes that cost zero, while providing zero compensation to the thousands of artists. Without their work, there's no Stability AI. From an ethical standpoint Stability is in the wrong, and from a legal one I think the class has a very strong case to recover damages.
- astrange 4y ago
  StableDiffusion is not based on art commissions. You can search https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ and see what kind of nonsense it usually has trained on.
  - GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
    It most definitely is, LAION-5B contains a large amount of copyrighted works from DeviantArt, ArtStation, etc.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Are those all commissions? The aesthetic subset is .05% Artstation: https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_sort=rowid&url__contains=artstation https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/im... Not sure if that's a large amount or not. They could've used robots.txt if they didn't want to be indexed.
      - GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
        > Note that this is only a small subset of the total training data: about 2% of the 600 million images used to train the most recent three checkpoints, and only 0.5% of the 2.3 billion images that it was first trained on. [1] That dataset only covers "aesthetic" clip terms as well. Not to mention a lot of images come from Pinterest and other aggregators. [1] https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-train-stable-diffusions-image-generator/ https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-...

Interestingly it shows the tenuous nature of the plaintiffs case, even before getting into the plaintiff's large errors. Since reasonably simplified information about SD is available and/or the plaintiff could have involved an expert to review his claims - it does raise a question if the function of the lawsuit is more about rattling chains rather than the merits of their argument. I.E. A deliberate ploy to extract a settlement.

jerf 4y ago
Ultimately, this is just something that has to be solved with legislation, not a court case. It's too novel a setup for a court case to deal with under existing frameworks. I think one issue is just that of scale. I personally tend to agree that there's something icky with just slurping up literally everyone's content, then producing a tool that will then proceed to put them out of business en masse. But proving that illegal under current law is certainly going to be a challenge. I have not read the original complaint but it surprises me that the lawsuit doesn't have a much stronger focus on this aspect. Copyright law is very concerned about not destroying the market for a given work through infringement, but this is a case about destroying the market for entire artists at a stroke. But that's a hard argument in court. There's no legal basis for claiming damages because the entire market itself is being destroyed. Though I'm not sure it's any weaker than the other claims trying to be made. The basic problem is, this isn't illegal in any sense. I don't just mean "illegal in that it must be banned" but any level of gradation in between, in the licenses, in requiring compensation, in any sort of regulation whatsoever. Technology has simply outrun law again.
- simiones 4y ago
  I think it's not going to be that hard to argue that the company is infringing the copyright of those whose images they are using. Especially once the judge is show how similar the output of SD can be to a particular artist's images with the right prompts (proving that SD has memorized a significant amount of those images).
  - cwkoss 4y ago

acomjean 4y ago

>"The output represents the model’s understanding of what is useful, aesthetic, pleasing, etc. and that, together with data filtering and cleaning that general image generating AI companies do,2 is what the companies consider most valuable, not the training data.3" This didn't make any sense to me. Without the curated training data (images) how are they making the models? No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people.

cma 4y ago
> No matter what, putting images into your machine then selling the output generated with them and not compensating the original creators is going to be seen as problematic. Machines aren't people. What about a company where you submit images and it tells you which faces are in them?
seydor 4y ago
They are never going to compensate the artists. It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for
- krisoft 4y ago
  uhm. What you are proposing is compensating the artists. Those 1000 designers are the artist in question then. > It's cheaper to hire 1000 designers to make 100000 images of artistic styles they are going for I bet that you are massively underestimating the cost of that.
- gugagore 4y ago
  I think you underestimate the scale of data these models are trained on by many orders of magnitude.
  - Ajedi32 4y ago
    I suspect you might be able to get pretty good results by training the system on video/CGI/other images that can be easily mass produced, then fine-tuning on a much smaller number of drawings and other stylized images.

tshadley 4y ago

"[The complaint] argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data." As noted in OP, this is an outstandingly bad definition of Deep-Neural-Networks, and the lawsuit should fail when the court hears an explanation from any competent practitioner. However, a correct definition would make the lawsuit far more interesting, imo. Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How does this entity affect social well-being, how should existing laws be modified--if at all-- with the welfare of humanity in mind, etc?

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> the lawsuit will fail when the court hears an explanation from an expert So how often does this happen? Somehow I'm too cynical to believe that a judge would rule against the intellectual property industry. The whole thing is based on absurd concepts to begin with, concepts that can be reduced to the ownership of unique numbers. Once a society accepts that, what difference do explanations make?
simiones 4y ago
> Diffusion models can be compared to a superhumanly talented artist that can be cloned in unlimited fashion by anyone having the software and hardware means. How can you claim with a straight face that this is a better explanation of what an NN is? An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. It is much much closer to "a giant archive of compressed images being used to interpolate between them" (though it's not that) than it is to a "superhumanly talented artist".
- tshadley 4y ago
  > An NN is simply an approximation of a multi-valued function, whose parameters are adjusted by minimizing the difference between the output of the NN and the output of the real function for a certain input. Right, but that equally fits a biological NN if you zoom in that close. You'll need more than wikipedia to appreciate what deep-neural-networks are doing here, it's dimensional space that's key. What DNNs do that is similar to the human brain is that they order "concepts" in high-dimensional space. Colors, textures, shape and hierarchies of same are organized and cross-referenced with text in an incredibly complex connectome. It would be useless to memorize images with their textual descriptions as that would be horrendously inefficient/ineffective during inference. Rather, the model must do what we do and understand what makes an image a "landscape" or a "portrait" or a "cartoon". It needs to understand what is an artist's style and how to perform it on a work never before created. "Understanding" can only mean ordering meaningless letters and pixels in multidimensional space so that they line up with human understanding (and human 'understanding', in turn, can only mean ordering meaningless sensory perceptions in the brain's multidimensional connectome such that reality turns out to be approximately predicted and controlled). The only systems that work this way efficiently are neural networks, biological and artificial.

rafale 4y ago

I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.

Karunamon 4y ago
I hope the exact opposite. AI, including AGI if we ever get there, cannot be allowed to be strangled in its crib by artificially limiting the information it can learn from in the name of IP maximalism. IP law already goes way too far, the line should be drawn here.
- troyvit 4y ago
  If you want new art you probably want some form of IP. What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines?
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    > What's the incentive for an artist if at the first whiff of success their output is overtaken and resold by technocrats with machines? Because when I have access to these tools I will make better art than the technocrat with access to these tools?
    - troyvit 4y ago
      But then are you still an artist or are you now a technocrat?
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        An artist. You’ve got a lot of knots to untangle.
  - Karunamon 4y ago

sebstefan 4y ago

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.

jeroenhd 4y ago
An artist's style is not copyrightable so I doubt it makes much of a difference. My guess is that showing good faith will make the lawsuit go over easier, because there's nothing illegal about paying someone to copy someone else's style (and not just a replica).
- threeseed 4y ago
  But the artist's work itself is copyrightable. Any use of that work without permission (and thus attribution/compensation) is the problem.
  - tadfisher 4y ago
    Fair use is a thing.
    - ThrustVectoring 4y ago
      Fair use as a legal doctrine has significant practical problems - specifically, it's an open legal question with mind-bogglingly large sums of money at stake until and unless you get sued and spend six-figure sums in court to find out. Prudent risk management will forgo all sorts of activities that are clearly fair use under US law but happen to piss off large companies with expansive legal departments.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      But when companies are solely profiting from it then it ceases being fair.
ben_w 4y ago
I don't. Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons. Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this. [0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-copyright/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...

shanebellone 4y ago

I've been saying this since it came out... Stable Diffusion is equivalent to hip-hop sampling in the 80s and 90s. The outcome is obvious.

haswell 4y ago
I’ve heard this argument on numerous occasions but I have never heard someone justify it or why they believe it. Are there specific similarities that make you believe these are equivalent scenarios? Not just “it feels thematically similar”.
- shanebellone 4y ago
  It's the closest thing to a precedent. Hip-hop originally recorded and transformed vocals, instruments, and beats to create something new from pieces of something old. The practice occurred without permission and obviously ended up in court. Now sampling requires a licensing agreement. The additional cost has fundamentally changed the genre (over the last 40 years). Hip-hop and tech both ignored IP rights because neither started with a legal framework and both would have found the additional cost prohibitive.
  - haswell 4y ago
    That's helpful. I wasn't aware of the eventual licensing enforcement. If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules). I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefore is by definition not infringing. I suspect this might be where the flurry of downvotes came from.
    - shanebellone 4y ago
      "you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules" The systems are similar too despite having completely different internal processes. Both transformed existing IP without permission, to produce sufficiently remixed art as an output. A sufficiently generic abstraction would look very similar despite the disparity of domain. The primary difference between hip-hop and Stable Diffusion is that AI cannot rationalize, explain, or attribute inspiration to a final product. There was no aha moment and thus no creativity. It has no vested interest in its work.

dns_snek 4y ago

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style and further, that future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. With that removal, the most outrage-inducing and troublesome output examples disappear from this case, leaving a much more complex and muddled set of facts for the jury to wade through. How can this possibly be a valid good faith argument? Either they're in breach of authors' copyright which extends to every piece of art that they included in the dataset without permission, or they're in the clear and aren't obligated to respond to removal requests. This reads like damage control to me in an effort to temporarily silence the loudest critics.

hehdhdhkf 4y ago
Where is the form to remove my reddit comments from chat gpt training data? Or my blog posts from gpt training data? I have a paragraph on the Internet that someone read and got an idea - I want my royalties. These artists complaints are ridiculous, and are being made by people who don’t understand how things work. If some other person draws a picture in their “style”, no one has to ask permission. That’s not a thing. They either don’t understand how it works or they are just upset that a computer can make art as good as (or better than) they can in a fraction of the time. All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck, but it would be great if we all could try to understand reality first.
- dns_snek 4y ago
  Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright? > All knowledge workers and creatives are going to face this in the future. It’s going to suck This is not a given. It's up to us and the copyright law. Real original work should be compensated appropriately unless you're proposing that we accelerate deployment of universal basic income and completely abolish copyright law. I have a feeling you might not like the violent outcome if you effectively strip original creators of their copyright, give corporations the right to effectively generate infinite profit off the backs of their work and tell the creators (and other people whose jobs will be automated away) to pound sand when they ask how they're supposed to pay rent from now on.

philipwhiuk 4y ago

It's interesting the IP attorney cites The Grey Album as being an example of something that is legal, when the reality is that the case was never brought because the original artists wishes meant it was unattractive for EMI to pursue the case.

kmeisthax 4y ago

>The complaint includes a section attempting to explain how Stable Diffusion works. It argues that the Stable Diffusion model is basically just a giant archive of compressed images (similar to MP3 compression, for example) and that when Stable Diffusion is given a text prompt, it “interpolates” or combines the images in its archives to provide its output. The complaint literally calls Stable Diffusion nothing more than a “collage tool” throughout the document. It suggests that the output is just a mash-up of the training data. I've seen the collage tool argument several times, and I don't agree with it. But I can understand why people believe it. You see, there's a very large number of people who use AI art generators as a tracing tool. Like, to the point where someone who has never touched one might believe that it literally just photobashes existing images together. The reality is that there's three ways to use art generators: - You can tell it to generate an image with a non-copyright-infringing prompt. i.e. "a dog police officer holding a gun" - You can ask it to replicate an existing style, by adding keywords like "in the style of <existing artist>" - You can modify an existing image. This is in lieu of the random seed image that is normally provided to the AI. That last one is confusing, because it makes people think that the AI itself is infringing when it's only the person using it. But I could see the courts deciding that letting someone chuck an image into the model gives you liability, especially with all of the "you have full commercial rights to everything you generate" messaging people keep slapping onto these. Style prompting is one of those things that's also legally questionable, though for different reasons. As about 40,000 AI art generator users have shouted at me over the past year, you cannot copyright a style. But at the same time, producing "new" art that's substantially similar to copyrighted art is still illegal. So, say, "a man on a motorcycle in the style of Banksy" might be OK, but "girl holding a balloon in the style of Banksy" might not be. The latter is basically asking the AI to regurgitate an existing image, or trace over something it's already seen. I think a better argument would be that, by training the AI to understand style prompts, Stability AI is inducing users to infringe upon other people's copyright.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Great write-up. SD's removing the ability to imitate styles will probably go a long way to quell objections, though it will be interesting to see if there's a future legal split over the styles of living and dead artists. I don't imagine that anyone would object to 'autoseurat' for example. I can see see a future dispute arising over outpainting (beginning with an existing copyrighted work) but there infringement and identity of the infringer (the user, not the toolmaker) is more clear.

Animats 4y ago

That author makes the point that copyright registration (which you do online with the Library of Congress in the US)[1] is required for copyright enforcement litigation. And, quite possibly, it may be required for DMCA enforcement. Now, that could work out. Major movie studios and recording companies do file copyright registrations and submit a deposit copy. But few others bother. It seems that you can send a DMCA takedown request without a copyright registration, but you can't enforce it in court without one.[2] This raises the question of, if you as a service receive a DMCA takedown request, should you ask the requestor to send proof of copyright registration, and if they don't, ignore the request? [1] https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ [2] https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright-necessary-for-a-dmca-takedown/ https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/is-a-registered-copyright...

rebuilder 4y ago
Is this requirement to register specifically a feature of the DMCA? It seems quite surprising if, as the article claims, “people who don’t have registered copyrights cannot enforce their copyrights in court.” That would mean that the vast majority of artwork posted online is essentially free to exploit in the USA, since I’m sure most people do not routinely register their works with the copyright office before posting them.
mcbits 4y ago
Unless they're legally obligated to show proof of copyright registration for the takedown notice to be a valid, it would be risky to assume they didn't register it just because they didn't show proof.
- Animats 4y ago
  Most of this revolves around the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. That is, doing a takedown without authenticating the ownership of the copyright provides immunity against being sued for contributory infringement. But to actually win such a lawsuit, the purported copyright owner would have to show proof of registration. This suggests an online process which looks like this: * US Service provider offers web page for DMCA notices. * Web page requests that the user enter copyright registration info. * If user fails to provide registration info, web page offers links to various national copyright registration sites to register a copyright. A payment receipt for copyright registration is acceptable as temporary proof of registration, but must be followed up within some period of time by actual proof of registration. * Temporary proof of registration is enough for a takedown, but the material will go back up if full proof is not submitted later. This would put a big dent in nuisance DMCA claims. The service provider might get sued occasionally, but for big providers, it's probably worth litigating this once or twice. The companies that have valuable IP file copyright registrations. Disney will be able to show a copyright registration on all their movies.

xeyownt 4y ago

I don't understand how using an image as input to a model is a copyright infringement. If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? It seems that violation would only come if you would use the model to produce images that are derivative of that original image, the same way a counterfeiter would make a copy of it. Have the skill to copy is not the same as actually copying.

haswell 4y ago
> If the image is freely viewable (say you can browse to it), and you just look at it, are you violating any rights? The fundamental issue with this line of argument is that it equates the process of human vision and the consequences of that with that of a computer program ingesting that image and the consequences of that. This anthropomorphization seems like a form of deep fallacy when considering the nature and impact of AI software. In the case of "seeing" an image, the two processes could not be any more unlike each other, both in content and context.
- stickfigure 4y ago
  Computational neural networks are modeled after biological brains. Anthropomorphizing them is not a fallacy; it's kind of the whole goal.
  - blackbear_ 4y ago
    Modern neural networks as used in language diffusion models have absolutely nothing to do with biological brains. That was just a vision of the early pioneers 70 years ago.
  - haswell 4y ago
    The fallacy lies in assuming that because of this similarity/modeling, the software resembles anything remotely close to a human brain, or should afford the software the status of an entity with human-like characteristics. Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord. And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.

consumer451 4y ago

A lawyer who works on YouTube channel Corridor Crew posted a decent breakdown on this lawsuit recently as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34479857

mensetmanusman 4y ago

“LLMs are illegal because anything they see is owned by other people” The Disney protection act rears its head…

layer8 4y ago

> future releases of Stable Diffusion will comply with any artist’s requests to remove their images from the training dataset. How does this work? Do they retrain the model from scratch every week? Or is it somehow possible to retroactively remove specific training-set items from the already-trained model?

cycomanic 4y ago

I don't really understand the argument about danger mouses grey album being different from just a random "mash up" because the artistic merit behind the grey album. Sure the grey album is likely much more pleasant to listen to and would likely be considered worthy of copyright itself, where a random mash might not be. That doesn't change the fact that danger mouse had to ask permission to use Jay Zs and the Beatles work (and likely had to pay), or otherwise would have violated copyright. So how is that argument relevant. Nobody is arguing that composing images via stable diffusion prompts (like making some collage) is not a creative process. The argument is does one have to have permission/licence of the original creators.

gcoakes 4y ago

Am I the only one who thinks this just isn't defined well enough to be decided by the judiciary? It should be legislated. My opinion is that ML training should be distinctly different from human learning.

jen20 4y ago
I agree that it should both be legislated, and substantially different to human learning. In the US (or UK) however, most legislators are such intellectual lightweights that they have no hope of grasping even the basics of what they are legislating.