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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.

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If anything the legal position is probably the opposite: The law is leaning towards AI training being transformative/fair use and AI generated content not getting any copyright protection at all. So something paying artists for style-rips probably was a net positive for artists, because it's very possible it will end up outright legal to have gen AI rip off artists' styles wholesale.

In which case they would have zero business model.

They took a base model, trained on but not reproducing work, so entirely fair with no theft, and then tried to tweak it so it could make money for an artist.

Except that as soon as it is used to create work, it’s reproducing work that is derived from what it was trained on. Not just the stuff it was TUNED on or asked to derive style from.

Its derivative but not to any infringing extent.

Are you a lawyer? If not, you can't make that assertion with that level of confidence.

As somebody who occasionally votes for laws I’ll make whatever assertions I want with whatever confidence I want. Lawyers are for legal advice, which isn’t what’s being discussed AFAICT.

Are you running around holding the people claiming that its definitely theft to that standard or just me?

I believe a service like this could succeed if the initial base model wasn't Stable Diffusion and wasn't trained internet scrapes without the copyright permissions.

Their solution basically just amounts of "Ethically sourced Styles" which still has all the red tape that a normal text2image model has because majority of the data is still unapproved for use in an AI model.

Businesses didn't want to get wrapped up in a pesudolegal model that really has no better legality than base SD.

Cite one legal case where an AI company trained on a particular work, and the judge ruled that they quote-stole it-unquote.

Courts pretty much always rule in favor of rich corps that steal from individuals, and increasingly so. AI companies have money. Artists don't. That makes AI thievery fine, doubly so since AI corps have financially contributed to the government.

You should realize that this is happening not only in the space of images(where conglomerates aren't a thing), but also in music.

Music conglomerates have money and their lawsuits will probably settle the issue.(unless they settle) That will be applied for all copyrighted works, regardless of the medium.

I believe going against the big guys is the reason why the big ones don't yet have music generation LLMs.

https://gemini.google/overview/music-generation/

Look, you've made a closed argument. Now if I mention small labs or floss projects that got litigated against, first I'd need to 'stop beating my wife'.

No one is stealing anything. It's not theft. There has been no crime. None of this is anywhere near criminal law.

I could make a more nuanced argument on copyright infringement. But to make that steelman, I'd need to accept a too large overton window shift, so I'll decline to do so here.

It can output books verbatim. It often "mistakenly" embeds watermarks from famous artists into generated pictures. Arguing that it's not stealing because a bought and owned legal system, which worked at a glacial pace even before it was completely bought off, isn't theft just because a law doesn't exist yet is silly. It's analogous to saying that dumping uranium and blowing up nukes everywhere in the 1940s and 1950s was great and non-polluting because there wasn't a law against it and nobody is being hurt (and cancer takes a while to develop, so nobody can prove their cancer was from nukes nearby). People argued back and forth back in the day about it. Now we realize that waiting for laws was dumb because it was pretty obviously bad not just in retrospect, but at the time. AI makes shoddy copies of good stuff. It pollutes the internet in ways that'll outlive us, just like a nuke does to the world. And it's pure cancer.

Nope. Besides not stealing, it's also not nuclear proliferation, cancer, or pollution either. Nor are courts ever likely to call it that. Not even if the defendant is a poor European student. Especially not if the court is actually clean.

The problem is that you're putting it in the wrong legal framing, and it just won't fly. Willing to engage, but not on these terms.

You missed Kim’s point entirely. The point was that the term “stealing” is simply the wrong term. I agree with the rest of your argument, but we really really need to stop calling it “stealing”. That really doesn't help anyone.

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