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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

If an AI-generated image can't be mistaken for an already existing, copyrighted image then I really don't see how it can be copyright infringement.

As a human artist, I can study Picasso's paintings my whole life and paint in the style of Picasso, but as long as I don't copy an existing work of Picasso then how can what I do be copyright infringement?

Incidentally, human artists get copied all the time. Walk outside any major museum and you'll see endless Van Gogh imitators peddling their wares on the sidewalk. Somehow people don't get all hot and bothered about it. But when an AI does it suddenly everyone's up in arms over copyright violation.

How many human artists have copied Picasso's style? Probably thousands. How many have tried to paint like Da Vinci? Probably millions. Where is the outrage?

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The difference is that when a human creates Picasso inspired art they're creating it with the summation of all their life experiences. However, an AI trained only on Picasso, knows nothing of Picasso. It's a subset of his knowledge and can't add anything new. It doesn't know anything about art that Picasso didn't know. If you scale this up it's still true. An AI trained on many works of art doesn't know anything about art outside of the art that was put into it. It's the equivalent of a human living it's entire life in a pitch black room with only paintings of Picasso illuminated.

Stable diffusion was not trained on Picasso only but on a much larger dataset. It is capable of generating art, photo-realistic images and much more. Also the thing that is interesting is that it can combine different styles with just a text prompt. I think that is its killer feature, you can generate based art quickly based on your creative ideas without going through the laborious process of drawing and painting.

One can argue what is human experience if not looking all the images from your eyes and then mapping it to the wetware in the brain. By that argument, if we have a good enough AI system and we train it on all the human experience then it is similar to a person.

The ultimate question is do we have "soul" that differentiate us from the machine. Are we not just walking neural networks trained by millions of years of evolution.

Sometimes when using stable diffusion and character.ai's language model I feel like it's the other way around - like I, the ape sitting at the keyboard, am the mere machine.

This demonstrates a truly thorough misunderstanding of technology at hand

What it's your likeness in the photo?

My wife posed the question the other day: "how long before AI OnlyFans?" and it's a funny question, but also we might not be that far from it. What if it's clearly your photo that was used to...erm...train the AI?

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