The paper shows that Stable Diffusion and Google's Imagen regenerate individual images from their training sets. They show it is very rare, but can be found reliably.
Likewise, in this work they prime the pump by using exact training prompts of highly duplicated training images. And then you have to generate 500 images from that prompt to find 10 duplications. You've really gotta want to find the duplicates, which indicates that these are going to be extremely rare in practice, and even more rare once the training data is hardened against the attack by deduplication.
Good analogy! An MP3 decoder takes an input and produces an output. If the output is copyrighted material, it's well understood that the inputs is simply a transformed version of that same copyrighted material and is similarly copyrighted.
The SD model is very much analogous. The prompt causes the algorithm to extract some output from the input model. If the output is copyrighted material then similarly the input model must carry a transformed version of that same copyrighted material and is therefore also subject to copyright.
Right?
By the way, I pose this, but I highly doubt this is actually how the courts will rule. I think they'll find the model itself is fine, that the training is subject to a fair use defense, but that the outputs may be subject to copyright if there's substantial similarly to an existing work in the training set.
Anthropomorphizing this software seems problematic.
Memorising a picture using a fleshy model is fine, so the raw fact that art has been found in a black box model here isn't necessarily relevant. Might be. Might not be.
The biological/evolutionary limits of humans are core assumptions of current laws, and I’d argue that the operating environment has changed enough to make those assumptions outdated.
> Memorising a picture using a fleshy model is fine
I imagine the fleshy model is fine not because it’s fleshy, but because it’s the model that people were targeting when writing current laws.
Even if no memorization occurred, there are still big questions about why such a model should be treated like anything other than just another computer program from a legal perspective.