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I would venture to guess that the author doesn't have a full understanding of what the AI is doing or how it works.

There are a gazillion artist who take clear inspiration from other artists, and there is no copywrite violation in doing so. The AI viewing his work isn't any different.

> I would venture to guess that the author doesn't have a full understanding of what the AI is doing or how it works.

Actually he does.

> There are a gazillion artist who take clear inspiration from other artists

Inspiration is not the same thing Stable Diffusion does.

We can't even define inspiration in a proper manner, but for sure we can say that if someone wants to draw comics in the way Tezuka made them, they have to study, exercise, rinse and repeat for at least a few years.

No human can scrape billions of images and take inspiration from all of them, not even in 10 life times.

Also, no human will make something similar to something else seen for the first time in 10 seconds.

Not even if it's "La Linea" from Cavandoli.

We can go back and forth all day. But legally your friend has no legs to stand on. People do "like copies" of works all the time, and it's been ok'ed by the courts just as much.

Unless your friend thinks the AI is copying snippets of his work into generated images, I'm not sure where they are getting these ideas from.

> But legally your friend has no legs to stand on.

My friend is just upset.

Legally he has every right in the World, he's the author for Christ Sake!

Will he try anything?

Of course not.

Are you okay with this?

Well, then you should reconsider your values.

> People do "like copies" of works all the time,

If those copies are authorized, I don't see the problem.

Try to recreate a Star Wars image and sell it on the Internet.

See what happens.

> Unless your friend thinks the AI is copying snippets of his work into generated images

Would you bet your life on the fact that it doesn't?

You know why we Europeans came up with the GDPR?

Yes, exactly, because processing of the data, automatic or not, must be authorized by the holder of the rights on that data.

We are not talking about artistic expression here, I'm not sure where you are getting this idea from, this is not inspiration or art or human expression, this is simply data processing leading to algorithmic replica of other people's works.

Without people's work, no model could replicate it.

Impressive, still completely dependent on some kind of source material, that they scraped, they haven't produced it by themselves.

There will be a day when people like you will realize that appropriation is not right.

Books are different, most of the works models are trained on are in the public domain, Shakespeare is public Domain, nobody will ever contest that, but if you think a living author has no right to have a say before someone process their work, you're the one with crazy ideas.

>Would you bet your life on the fact that it doesn't?

Yes, because that's not how it works.

If your friend is still upset, maybe they should consider the artists they "stole" their learning material from.

> Yes, because that's not how it works.

I think you don't know how laws and Author rights work

The simple fact his work became part of something else he did not authorize is the problem here.

And yes, it could spit out something that is very close to the original, so close that fair use could not stand.

Fair use is not a right!

> If your friend is still upset, maybe they should consider the artists they "stole" their learning material from.

He does, don't imply differently, ad hominem are a stupid argument for very stupid people.

That's why he spent 30 years of his life learning and in the end he became good enough to meet the artists he "stole" from to thank them of what they did.

You seem to lack the ability to understand the difference between being a good person and being a senseless automata...

If the model physically does not have enough information to create a work that would be found to be infringing on your friend's rights, then why is your friend upset? The model viewed his work and learned from it in the same way that humans do.

If your friend published images on the internet, he clearly intended them to be viewed by (meat) neural networks. Why are silicon ones operated by humans any different?

Edit: To elaborate, if (10 years ago) someone saw your friends works and started producing derivatives and publishing them to DeviantArt, would your friend have any good reason to be upset?

I think that your and your friend's argument reduces to "the AI is not a human, but a machine-like, and thus can not be `inspired' but only `reproduce'". I don't know if it is a novel argument to be tried in a court of (copyright) law, but it is certainly a good one.

> I think that your and your friend's argument reduces to "the AI is not a human, but a machine-like, and thus can not be `inspired' but only `reproduce'".

That's the one argument, but it's not the most important important.

The most compelling issue here is that SD used copyrighted data scraped from the Internet without even informing the authors, who were not unknown to SD authors, because they tagged them in the model.

using work without permission is a violation copyright. imo the fact that the original has to be scrapped to create the dataset completely negates any argument about whether the final product is transformative b/c it cannot exist without the original data

It seems like you didn't understand my point

> took that image from the online shop

They didn't take the image. They looked at it and learned a few datapoints from it. It's not like they compressed the image and added it into the model, able to be reversed by anyone who downloads it. In fact it's likely there's other completely distinct images that could have contributed the exact same tweaks to the model, like a hash.

>I can enter a bookshop and look around, open a book, read some pages and maybe learn something.

>It doesn't give me the right to republish a similar book putting together what I saw, unless the license specifically grants me that right or I obtained a license that does.

No, but the analogy would be if you learned something from the blurb you read - like a word, or a factoid, or an expression - and it influenced some writing you did later. You didn't steal from that book's author.

> They didn't take the image. They looked at it and learned a few datapoints from it

Nobody authorized them to do what they did.

> No, but the analogy would be if you learned something from the blurb you read - like a word, or a factoid, or an expression - and it influenced some writing you did later. You didn't steal from that book's author

that's what clean room implementation is for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Wine contributors were not allowed to see Windows leaked source code to avoid copyright infringement claims.

both WINE and ReactOS have refused to use the leaks; ReactOS doesn't even allow people who have worked legitimately at MS in the past to be developers, simply because even the smell of contamination would expose the projects to enormous legal risks

So, to be fair, Stable Diffusion authors should take inspiration from all the source material, replicate it the best way they can using their own abilities and then train the model on what they produced.

They didn't do it for two reasons:

- it would have required centuries

- the result would have been much less compelling

stable diffusion is so interesting due to the fact that the source material was of high quality.

So, we can conclude that it's the merit of the authors of the source material, not simply the model itself.

Shouldn't they be rewarded or at least consulted before using their works?

What if some of them is training their own model on works they have the right to use and now Stable Diffusion took all their hard work away?

If stable diffusion was trained on my drawings, it would produce a steaming pile of shit.

And nobody would be talking about it right now...

This why we have the fair use defense for ignoring copyright [0]. It’s more efficient for society to limit the control copyright allows authors of works so they can be leveraged to enable something even greater. While many in the media community ask permission for almost any use, to maintain good relationship, and limit liability you don’t have to for many uses.

“Copyright” and fair use are human defined not absolutes, so the real debate is whether AI models should be allowed to learn from copyright works like a human does. This use case is also close to people who use clips or samples snippets of works in other bits of art which they then profit off of. It is way more efficient at this process than previous methods (having an artist study and practice a style then reproduce it), so that is where the debate is.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

> It doesn't give me the right to republish a similar book putting together what I saw

And how useful has this policy been for the public?