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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 s

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.

caconym_ 3y ago
> most styles don't have names If you want to educate yourself on how to refer to different art styles you can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_art_movements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_art_movements > If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles It's almost as if artists develop their own styles that are just as uniquely theirs as any one work produced by them in that style, if not more so! When people put "by Greg Rutkowski" in their AI art prompts, they are not asking for results in a style that exists independently of Greg Rutkowski despite his name somehow being the only way to identify it. They are, in fact, asking for results in the style of Greg Rutkowski in the sense that works by Greg Rutkowski were labeled as such and fed into the training process, programmatically creating a digest of works by (at least) Greg Rutkowski that we call a "model", and that model is as a result capable of mimicking the style of Greg Rutkowski specifically. They are asking for results that look like they were painted by Greg Rutkowski, and they care enough to ask for Greg Rutkowski specifically because Greg Rutkowski is a highly skilled artist who developed his own distinctive style which is the central pillar of his intellectual property as an artist, and his competitive advantage. Intellectual property law as it stands today obviously couldn't have anticipated this technology, and didn't. However, if this kind of thing is still legal in ten years, that will represent a major systemic failure of copyright and trade secrets law to protect the core intellectual property of artists in the same spirit as it currently protects intellectual property in other domains.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > They are asking for results that look like they were painted by Greg Rutkowski, and they care enough to ask for Greg Rutkowski specifically because Greg Rutkowski is a highly skilled artist who developed his own distinctive style Sometimes, but not always. Lots of people prompt by cargo cult -- you find lots and lots of images generated by peppering the list with stuff like "masterpiece, best quality, 8k, award-winning". Are all of those found in the training set? Do they actually have the right result? It's statistics, not magic. The machine doesn't know what you mean, it only knows what's in the dataset. Some tags are not well represented enough to have the result you'd expect from the name. Googling around suggests "masterpiece" mostly translates to higher contrast and saturation. > they are not asking for results in a style that exists independently of Greg Rutkowski despite his name somehow being the only way to identify it. Some might be. There's not always a tag for every kind of aesthetic, so one possible solution is to find an artist that uses it. > which is the central pillar of his intellectual property as an artist, and his competitive advantage. And which copyright law says he doesn't have. Style isn't copyrightable.
  - caconym_ 3y ago
    > Sometimes, but not always. Sure—they often have such a poor understanding of art and the artist that they may not know that's what they're looking for, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, indeed, what they are looking for. > And which copyright law says he doesn't have. Style isn't copyrightable. The part of my comment you quoted says nothing about copyright law, so I'm not sure what you're trying to contradict here. An artist's personal style is a central pillar of their intellectual property in the sense that it takes massive personal investment to develop and everything they create flows from it, and it is a central pillar of their competitive advantage in the sense that it's aesthetically unique, positively stimulating to the viewer, and links their identity to their entire body of work in a way that can be exploited in the marketplace. The fact is that copyright law currently has no idea what to make of these AI tools. I think the only concrete opinion so far adopted by the US copyright office (which may in the future be superseded by legal precedent or law) is that products of AI alone are not products of human authorship and thus cannot themselves be copyrighted. It will take time for arguments to be made, for money to change hands, and finally for more broadly useful law to be settled, which is why I previously alluded to a period of ten years to let things shake out. If copyright law does step up to protect artists from this novel attack on their intellectual property, I doubt that protection will come in the form of allowing styles to be broadly copyrightable. From the contemporary commercial perspective, most of the value proposition of these tools is the ability to automatically and at scale launder the intellectual property of artists into derivative works that ostensibly do not infringe on the original works; given that, it is very much in the spirit of existing intellectual property law to write new law to protect artists. Only time will tell whether the inevitable evolution of intellectual property law to account for AI tools favors individual artists or large tech corporations.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles Do you? With base SD1.5, “by greg rutkowski” produces extremely similar results to “detailed realistic muted fantasy”. Except for the case where what you are actually trying to do is directly mimic the work of an artist with a strong unique style that is very heavily represented in the source data (Rutkowski, IIRC, has extremely little representation in the SD training data, leaving aside question of whether the other parts of that description apply), I don’t think you are losing the ability to refer to styles without artist names.

caconym_ 3y ago

> most styles don't have names If you want to educate yourself on how to refer to different art styles you can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_art_movements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_art_movements > If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles It's almost as if artists develop their own styles that are just as uniquely theirs as any one work produced by them in that style, if not more so! When people put "by Greg Rutkowski" in their AI art prompts, they are not asking for results in a style that exists independently of Greg Rutkowski despite his name somehow being the only way to identify it. They are, in fact, asking for results in the style of Greg Rutkowski in the sense that works by Greg Rutkowski were labeled as such and fed into the training process, programmatically creating a digest of works by (at least) Greg Rutkowski that we call a "model", and that model is as a result capable of mimicking the style of Greg Rutkowski specifically. They are asking for results that look like they were painted by Greg Rutkowski, and they care enough to ask for Greg Rutkowski specifically because Greg Rutkowski is a highly skilled artist who developed his own distinctive style which is the central pillar of his intellectual property as an artist, and his competitive advantage. Intellectual property law as it stands today obviously couldn't have anticipated this technology, and didn't. However, if this kind of thing is still legal in ten years, that will represent a major systemic failure of copyright and trade secrets law to protect the core intellectual property of artists in the same spirit as it currently protects intellectual property in other domains.

dale_glass 3y ago
> They are asking for results that look like they were painted by Greg Rutkowski, and they care enough to ask for Greg Rutkowski specifically because Greg Rutkowski is a highly skilled artist who developed his own distinctive style Sometimes, but not always. Lots of people prompt by cargo cult -- you find lots and lots of images generated by peppering the list with stuff like "masterpiece, best quality, 8k, award-winning". Are all of those found in the training set? Do they actually have the right result? It's statistics, not magic. The machine doesn't know what you mean, it only knows what's in the dataset. Some tags are not well represented enough to have the result you'd expect from the name. Googling around suggests "masterpiece" mostly translates to higher contrast and saturation. > they are not asking for results in a style that exists independently of Greg Rutkowski despite his name somehow being the only way to identify it. Some might be. There's not always a tag for every kind of aesthetic, so one possible solution is to find an artist that uses it. > which is the central pillar of his intellectual property as an artist, and his competitive advantage. And which copyright law says he doesn't have. Style isn't copyrightable.
- caconym_ 3y ago
  > Sometimes, but not always. Sure—they often have such a poor understanding of art and the artist that they may not know that's what they're looking for, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, indeed, what they are looking for. > And which copyright law says he doesn't have. Style isn't copyrightable. The part of my comment you quoted says nothing about copyright law, so I'm not sure what you're trying to contradict here. An artist's personal style is a central pillar of their intellectual property in the sense that it takes massive personal investment to develop and everything they create flows from it, and it is a central pillar of their competitive advantage in the sense that it's aesthetically unique, positively stimulating to the viewer, and links their identity to their entire body of work in a way that can be exploited in the marketplace. The fact is that copyright law currently has no idea what to make of these AI tools. I think the only concrete opinion so far adopted by the US copyright office (which may in the future be superseded by legal precedent or law) is that products of AI alone are not products of human authorship and thus cannot themselves be copyrighted. It will take time for arguments to be made, for money to change hands, and finally for more broadly useful law to be settled, which is why I previously alluded to a period of ten years to let things shake out. If copyright law does step up to protect artists from this novel attack on their intellectual property, I doubt that protection will come in the form of allowing styles to be broadly copyrightable. From the contemporary commercial perspective, most of the value proposition of these tools is the ability to automatically and at scale launder the intellectual property of artists into derivative works that ostensibly do not infringe on the original works; given that, it is very much in the spirit of existing intellectual property law to write new law to protect artists. Only time will tell whether the inevitable evolution of intellectual property law to account for AI tools favors individual artists or large tech corporations.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles Do you? With base SD1.5, “by greg rutkowski” produces extremely similar results to “detailed realistic muted fantasy”. Except for the case where what you are actually trying to do is directly mimic the work of an artist with a strong unique style that is very heavily represented in the source data (Rutkowski, IIRC, has extremely little representation in the SD training data, leaving aside question of whether the other parts of that description apply), I don’t think you are losing the ability to refer to styles without artist names.