You mean the portfolio which, by definition to be in that dataset, was marked for indexing by robots.txt, and made available publicly to unauthenticated GET requests on the internet?
All rights reserved. I didn't agree for them to use my IP commercially.
It's the law that matters here.
So - keeping this argument purely in terms of IP law - can you explain what the case is for these images to have been illegally used?
https://people.com/music/pharell-williams-robin-thicke-blurr...
More bullshit equating the human mind to an AI. Newsflash, boyo - humans are not NNs, there is no reason legal precedent should treat humans the same as NNs (and it won't).
I capture what I see, more as a frame of reference for myself with location scouting and game dev. I take quite literally hundreds of thousands of photographs. It's 1 in every thousand that's worth sharing.
I have zero interest in other photographers, I can't even name one. Whatever other people do, neat. I don't even consider myself to be a "photographer", but I guess with hotels and airports buying prints, that somehow makes me a professional.
I capture what I like. There's literally zero other motivation behind it. Most of my income comes from elsewhere. I use a print-on-demand service.
If I take a photograph of a sculpture I've made and that is then incorporated into another work without permission, that's intellectual property theft. A lot of the images are of things I've made, not just street photography or landscapes that anybody could go and take.
If I write a riff in a microtonal scale and it turns up as a sample in a record, or is covered and released without permission, that's intellectual property theft too.
If someone is worried about an original image, why not watermark all uploaded versions?
If I walk about my neighborhood scattering paper copies of an image, and someone else picks one up to hang on their wall, did anyone break any laws (besides me littering)?
EDIT: Let's consider a simpler scenario - I take an MD5 sum of one of your photos, and then hash collide a an image from my phone camera till I find a match. Which part of this process is "stealing"?
That's not the standard for copyright infringement. The standard is (1) access to the original work and (2) producing a work that is "substantial similar" to the original. If the user of an AI produces an output that is substantially similar to one of the AI's training images, then it could potentially infringe.
That's the law. In an actual case, a judge or jury would look at the original and decide if the alleged infringer is "substantially similar" enough. That's a crap shoot, so cases usually settle before that.
So the question “where in the model is your original?” is a reasonable and relevant question to ask.
If this person can induce the model to produce a work that is reasonably considered a copy of their original, then fair enough. All they have to do is give a prompt and a seed and they can prove copyright infringement very easily because anybody else with similar hardware and software can demonstrate the infringement on demand. If I understand correctly, this has happened with GitHub Copilot, with Copilot reproducing copyrighted works verbatim.
But if they can’t do that… why should anybody take their claims of copyright infringement seriously? If nobody can point to copyright infringement having taken place, what basis is there for believing it has? As you say, the standard is access to the work and producing a work that is substantially similar to the other. The former has been demonstrated. People are asking about the latter.
So “where can we find the original in the model?” is possibly the single most relevant question there is. It’s a clear line that divides infringement from inspiration, and it can be proved definitively if copyright infringement has been observed to occur.
A copy must be made for there to be copyright infringement. Who has shown a copy has been made? If a copy has been observed to occur, it’s trivial to demonstrate copyright infringement. Who has done this?
The part they’re concerned about is where somebody uses their work as a reference for derivative works.
We can acknowledge that this is an unsettled legal question without pretending like there’s no such question for a creator to raise. This community works better when we give each other fair understanding.
---
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
----
This is far from an unlimited grant of power. Of this list, the only plausible grounds is (2) - derivative works.
Which means we're well into then arguing about "Fair Use"[1], which I would encourage people to read the full description of carefully - because the answer isn't whether you can come up with a snippy "gotcha!" it's whether under careful consideration in the court of law anyone would be likely to agree with you.
I really don't know why people bother bringing it up other than to create an uninformed distraction.
Seeing as you like analogies: if you play music in a public building, you need a license even if you are selling coffee and not the music.
It's the same as if I were to look at your photos and then take my own similar photos for the background of a web store. I would have "used" your photos in some sense. But I would not have used them commercially in any way whatsoever.
You have just as much grounds for complaint in Stability's case as you would in the case of me looking at your photos as reference for my own.
Likewise there is no copyright infringement occurring when an ML model is trained on copyrighted works.
Stable Diffusion is a 5GB matrix of floating-point numbers trained on 240TB of data. It does not, and cannot, contain infringing data from the training set. It is physically impossible for it to contain such data. There is not, and cannot be, any infringement occurring.
That's called "non-literal" copyright infringement. Plaintiffs win on the claims and appeals courts uphold the judgments. (See, e.g., the "Blurred Lines" case. https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/music/robin-thicke-pharr...).
A person could infringe the copyright in an original image if they painted their own version by hand. The AI is basically irrelevant.
So there's almost a kilobyte of missing data, without which nothing is produced.
Would a JPEG file with random noise in it be potentially any given original image? Of course not - even though the decompressor is perfectly capable of recreating one given suitable input data.
The "Grokking Stable Diffusion" colab posted here a week or two back makes this particularly explicit - any given 512x512 image can be reversed into a latent-space encoding of that image, and reconstructed from it. The NN weights are necessary but not sufficient to do so - ultimately you end up with a 512 byte number mapping to the expression which reconstructs an image. But that includes images which aren't part of the original training set.
[1] https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1dlgggNa5Mz8sEAGU0wF...
Slam dunk case right? What's stopping you?
Sort of falls flat.