Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

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SD is better than the other two, but it will still centralize control.

I imagine that Disney would take issue with SD if material that Disney owned the copyright to was used in SD. They would sue. SD would have to be taken off the market.

Thus, Disney has the power to ensure that their copyrighted material remains protected from outside interests, and they can still create unique things that bring in audiences.

Any small-time artist that produces something unique will find their material eaten up by SD in time, and then, because of the sheer number of people using SD, that original material will soon have companions that are like it because they are based on it in some form. Then, the original won't be as unique.

Anyone using SD will not, by definition, be creating anything unique.

And when it comes to art, music, photography, and movies, uniqueness is the best selling point; once something is not unique, it becomes worth less because something like it could be gotten somewhere else.

SD still has the power to devalue original work; it just gives normal people that power on top of giving it to the big companies, while the original works of big companies remain safe because of their armies of lawyers.

> I imagine that Disney would take issue with SD if material that Disney owned the copyright to was used in SD. They would sue. SD would have to be taken off the market.

Are you sure?

I'm not familiar with the exact data set they used for SD and whether or not Disney art was included, but my understanding is that their claim to legality comes from arguing that the use of images as training data is 'fair use'.

Anyone can use Disney art for their projects as long as it's fair use, so even if they happened to not include Disney art in SD, it doesn't fully validate your point, because they could have done so if they wanted. As long as training constitutes fair use, which I think it should - it's pretty much the AI equivalent of 'looking at others' works', which is part of a human artist's training as well.

> Are you sure?

Yes, I'm sure.

> I'm not familiar with the exact data set they used for SD and whether or not Disney art was included, but my understanding is that their claim to legality comes from arguing that the use of images as training data is 'fair use'.

They could argue that. But since the American court system is currently (almost) de facto "richest wins," their argument will probably not mean much.

The way to tell if something was in the dataset would be to use the name of a famous Disney character and see what it pulls up. If it's there, then once the Disney beast finds out, I'm sure they'll take issue with it.

And by the way, I don't buy all of the arguments for machine learning as fair use. Sure, for the training itself, yes, but once the model is used by others, you now have a distribution problem.

More in my whitepaper against Copilot at [1].

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/uploads/copilot.pdf

>The way to tell if something was in the dataset would be to use the name of a famous Disney character and see what it pulls up.

I tried out of curiosity. Here[1] are the first 8 images that came up with the prompt "Disney mickey mouse" using the stable diffusion V1.4 model. Personally I don't really see why Disney or any other company would take issue with the image generation models, it just seems more or less like regular fan art.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/cIHBCRe.png

How is this situation made any worse by these AI systems?

If a small time artist has their work stolen, they probably won't be able to fight it very well. They might be able to get a few taken down, but the sheer number will make it impossible to keep up.

Disney, on the other hand, will have armies of lawyers going after any copyright violation.

It seems the same whether AI is involved or not.

The sheer scale is what makes it worse.

Because you are right: a few, and a small time artist can fight. Hundreds and thousands of copies, or millions, and even Disney struggles. That's why Disney would go after the model itself; it scales better.

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