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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Oh, it generates from a text prompt, not a sample texture. I thought this was just a tool to generate wrapped textures from non-wrapped ones.

The licensing is a mess. The Blender plug-in is GPL 3, the stable diffusion code is MIT, and the weights for the model have a very restrictive custom license.[1] Whether the weights, which are program-generated, are copyrightable is a serious legal question.

[1] https://github.com/lstein/stable-diffusion/blob/61f46cac31b5...

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Shouldn't the arguments for applying copyright to photographs apply nicely to applying copyright to ML weights too? Sure, the output is generated by a machine, but the output is also created by the creative choices of the machine's user.

If anything, it would seem to me that photographs had a much better case to being uncopyrightable, with them being mechanistic reproductions of existing reality.

The weights are not particularly restrictive. You're totally allowed to use them to generate things you sell for instance.

The license isn't particularly restrictive to users, but it does put restrictions on developers.

For example, the way I interpret it, if you write software that incorporates Stable Diffusion then it's not legal to use any GPL-licensed code, or vice versa (thanks to the "use-based restrictions").

(Of course, you could argue that this isn't much more "restrictive" than the GPL itself is.)

>very restrictive custom license

restrictive in what sense? Doesn't seem restrictive to me

You can assert any license you want, but good luck enforcing it in court.

Pretty ironic to assert copyright on the weights while ignoring it on the training data the produces the weights. Are AI practitioners foolish enough to tempt that fate?

It does seem to allow for providing a sample texture

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