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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think about all the controversy surrounding machine-generated images in contrast with a scenario where the same images were generated/drawn/created directly by a human.

In this specific scenario, what would the artist think if 1000 people started drawing in her style and released those images?

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It's ok to have different standards for humans and computers. Even if you think that a machine learning model is conceptually doing the same thing as a human artist, just a trillion times faster and infinitely replicable, there's no reason we can't say that it's ok for humans to do this, but not for computers. Computers are not people. It's not unfair or unethical to put an artificial limitation on an artificial object.

Seems like putting a limitation on what someone can do with their own computer on their own time with their own money.

Yes, sort of like disallowing someone to DDoS a server using their own computer on their own time with their own money.

This is not about one person playing around in private, it's about thousands of people (potentially millions) instantaneously generating art expressly intended to copy someone's specific style and publicly releasing the results.

If you're ddosing someone's server you necessarily aren't playing around in private.

If people were only playing around with Stable Diffusion in private then this article wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Saying "here's an image I generated" is exactly the use case of reddit. DDoSing reddit is not the use case of reddit.

And "private" has more meanings than "secret/only personally known". Posting something you generated on Reddit for fun is private use.

Tough to argue with that, all I can say is that your usage of the word "private" does not agree with either the dictionary definition or common usage.

Look up the term with relation to copyright law. See also: personal use, fair use.

e.g. (pdf) https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?r...

That link does not define the term, and I haven't been able to find a legal definition of "private use". The paper seems to be using the normal definition, though.

> It sounds controversial that a defense of private use exists at all; after all, one usually buys a book for her private use. This use may mean that one can make photocopies of a legally possessed book, in order to read it, for example, not only in the office, but also at home. One may also loan the book to a friend.

I would be pretty surprised to find a legal definition that says if you put something online just for fun it doesn't count as copyright infringement.

I don't know why we're talking about this though, I'm not a big fan of copyright but that's not what this is about. It's not "you put my drawing on Reddit without my permission", it's "you publicly released a tool on Reddit that allows anyone to effortlessly create infinite variations of my work in my name, please don't do that". I don't care whether or not it's legal, I think it's immoral to create a tool that could not exist without ingesting someone's life's work and then ignore them when they ask you not to do that.

if you release the artwork you generate, you aren't playing around in private either.

There are plenty of those limitations already, some even having to do with things like IP and copyright.

I don't see any evidence that things being generated with SD or similar somehow remove those same limitations around IP and copyright. I am just as much hoping Disney looks the other way when I make fanart of their IP regardless of how it is made.

>It's ok to have different standards for humans and computers.

Is it? The computer is a tool doing it on behalf of a human, so different rules for computers ends up being different rules for using different tools. Should the efficiency of a tool be a factor in the limits we put on a human? Given that humans can use the same tool with different levels of efficiency, this also seems to open up to the question if different levels of skill using a tool have different rules.

> Should the efficiency of a tool be a factor in the limits we put on a human?

Yes, for example hitting someone with a real sword is punished more harshly than hitting them with a plastic one. Tweeting out blatant lies to your 100 million followers is worse than tweeting out blatant lies to 2 followers. Shining a laser pointer at a plane is only illegal if it's strong enough to blind the pilot.

The question is should we have different standards for computers and human doing the exact same thing - not different things. Your examples all have different outcomes based on the tool.

Do you think training a human artist on a body of work has the same outcome as training Stable Diffusion on that same body of work?

Not substantially different enough to criminalize the latter.

I don't think it's criminal, I just think it's wrong.

>Yes, for example hitting someone with a real sword is punished more harshly than hitting them with a plastic one.

Intent will be a factor. If you thought you had a real sword and intended to kill someone, your penalty will be the same even if the sword was plastic. Look at federal stings where people attempt to commit a horrible act but are given inert tools to do it with and fail. There are some edge cases, like the difference between attempted murder and murder, and there are laws specifically around guns that make using them to murder a worse crime, but in general the tool used doesn't matter and in the few cases it does, I question if those laws should exist and think they were put in place for reasons other than just stopping murder.

>Shining a laser pointer at a plane is only illegal if it's strong enough to blind the pilot.

Is it? Less resources will be spent to capture someone using a laser too weak to be noticed, but if caught would it really be legal?

I can move on the street om my feet, or I can move on the street with 240km/h with the use of a tool called a sports car. I think limits on the capacity of our tools are often the whole difference between what is legal and what is illegal.

There are a number of differences. First is that road rules apply to public roads. Private roads have far fewer rules. You might not be able to endanger a child or have duels to the death, but there generally aren't speed limits at all regardless if tools are involved.

Then there is the matter of why the laws exist. Generally they prevent harms, and if the limit is on a tool it is only because humans can't do the harm without a tool. A limit on noise generally only limits the use of tools, but if a human was able to break the limit without a tool then the limit would be applied to them. A law might not have been created yet just because it isn't a threat.

In this case, humans can already copy artwork, so there are already limits in place. In this case the tool doesn't really allow for anything new that couldn't already be done with money. If I could afford it, I could hire thousands of artists to create work in a similar art style up to the limits of the existing law. Such expenditures are rare, but are they something that needs to be limited which hasn't due to being too rare? If not, then why does a tool lowering the cost change the limit?

Computers do it more efficiently, yes, but you're not giving an argument as to why being more efficient means there should be different rules.

Sometimes society established norms when doing a thing was very rare and expensive, and honestly barely needed any control because it was so unusual.

If that thing becomes a lot cheaper and easier, and it starts being done a lot more - perhaps we realise we actually need different rules even though the difference is purely quantitative.

One guy juggling chainsaws on main street - how entertaining! No need to ban that. Dozens of chainsaw jugglers on every street, 24/7, the issues are easy to imagine.

To say that "Oh, you were OK with one chainsaw-juggler therefore you would be OK with 100,000" is IMHO a line of argument that obscures more than it clarifies.

>It's interesting to think about all the controversy surrounding machine-generated images in contrast with a scenario where the same images were generated/drawn/created directly by a human.

It actually isn't interesting. Or, I should rather say, it's only interesting for singularitarians who anthropomorphize algorithms as part of their idiotic (pseudo)religion.

You’re missing the big qualifier: what if those other artists started drawing in her style AND marketed it as her style?

There's nothing atypical about that in the graphic design world.

An artist does not own "their" style, and can even be one of thousands of people drawing in that same style.

Art styles are not something people can own.

Imagine trying to own a genre of music...

You’re ignoring what I said. It’s one thing to draw in a similar style, it’s another to market it as a style using someone else’s name and portfolio to get clout.

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