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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

What will happen if SD looses the court case? The cat is out of the bag and the data set can be downloaded by anyone today.

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It will prevent VCs from investing in a similar company, and without VCs we won't have enough money to do massive training like SD. The community will keep fine-tuning the original SD, sure, but there won't be SD 3.0.

Of course then a company in China (or other countries that are rich enough but don't care the U.S. lawsuits enough) will make a better SD 3.0.

AI companies will have to soft through their data sets to find copyright free or CC0 or public domain images to train their algorithms on, or buy the necessary rights for commercially produced works.

If the neural network tech itself is good enough, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. Finding these images and verifying their copyright status is going to take more work.

Most likely, AI giants will buy digital art websites like DeviantArt or Flickr and use the images already collected after changing around the terms a bunch of times.

A lot of new paid software uses SD under the hood. Such a ruling would likely make such apps exist in a very nebulous space.

To be honest, I already feel quite strange about folks profiting off of SD results.

Nothing, no one can stop this now. It's like horses being angry at cars.

Cars don't have tiny horses inside them making them work, so the analogy doesn't apply. These AI models can't do anything without first gorging on existing content.

A lot of that existing content is copyrighted, and demonstrably present in the resulting product; so these companies have an uphill battle _not_ to be stopped by the courts.

> A lot of that existing content is copyrighted, and demonstrably present in the resulting product; so these companies have an uphill battle _not_ to be stopped by the courts.

These lawsuits will go exactly like in the war against piracy, impossible to win. Cut one head off, ten more appear.

Piracy lawsuits won constantly, enough to push all piracy to the dark web. They even sued little old grandmas and won. No legitimate business today is built on top of piracy.

I'm not arguing that generative art will cease to exist, I'm just arguing that the path to legal revenue will involve paying copyright holders; and the real gold in this industry is in licensing training datasets to businesses that just want 'AI Magic' in their product marketing.

But they did win the war on piracy. They're still making tons of money, the piracy community is the same size or smaller than it was 10 years ago, and most of the people inside it are either committed cheapskates who would never have been customers, or committed collectors who while pirating are also buying twice as much as their neighbors.

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