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Comment by staindk | Hacker News Reader

I think this is true, but currently you can coax e.g. stable diffusion to generate art in the style of a specific person, and if you do things right, it will even have a smudge-y version of their monogram/signature in the bottom right.

Pretty clear indication that something is not yet 'transformative enough', IMO.

Same happens with Copilot and such - you can get it to spit out tens of lines of code verbatim pulled from someone else's project, with comments and all.

These kinds of things just don't sit right with me.

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Producing art in the style of someone else is perfectly fine. It's been done for centuries.

What is not fine is claiming that this is from the artist whose style is being copied. That makes your work a counterfeit.

To me, the legal protections for artists already exist: copyright offers protections against verbatim copying, laws against counterfeiting protect against original work made to be passed as if it were from the artist.

Whether these laws are still adequate in the face of AI-generated content is debatable and my guess is that we are in for interesting tests and debates around the subject.

Artists should have the means to protect their work. It's a condition to create a society where art can flourish in public. Everyone benefits.

However, artists should not be able to suppress the means of creation. Technology has always been a boon to Art. It can be the cause of huge shifts and some types of art may disappear in favour of new ones, but it's never hindered our innate need for creating art.

> I think this is true, but currently you can coax e.g. stable diffusion to generate art in the style of a specific person, and if you do things right, it will even have a smudge-y version of their monogram/signature in the bottom right.

You're conflating two things here:

1. SD can generate art in the style of a specific person

2. It also adds signatures to some pieces

These are independent things. Sometimes it does 1 without 2 and sometimes 2 without 1. And the signature can appear on the wrong artist - or the signature is a weird mix of different signatures.

It's just that it's been trained on "paintings with signatures" so it includes them. It's not the damning evidence some claim it to be.

It's worth noting that copyright doesn't protect code in the instance that the function cannot be divorced from the creative expression.

Comments and all would almost certainly be an infringement, as they are completely expressive and non-functional.

But you'll find that if you strip out those comments, it's possible that it would fail the test of the idea being separable from the expression [1].

[1] https://casetext.com/case/kern-river-gas-transmission-v-coas...

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