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

All rights reserved means "all rights"

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...