Stable Diffusion Frivolous Litigation

http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/

by ronsor • 4 years ago

32 100 4 years ago

These tired arguments for AI art are irrelevant and all over the place. Nobody cares about the model output or an academic explanation of how diffusion works. It is all about the training data.

The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission and violating the copyright.

I've just searched the dataset to find mickey mouse, marvel and some disney characters images in the training dataset.

So then it is trained on copyrighted material, and Midjourney and especially SD are building and profit SaaS on the backs of the work without permission or compensation.

Even that alone is a valid reason litigation, and I wouldn't be surprised if Disney joins in against this or asks SD to remove them from the next model release.

Just do the following:

1. Just ask for permission to use the artists work?

2. Train on public domain images, there are plenty out there.

It's that simple.

Ajedi32• 4 years ago

artists had their art trained on without their permission and violating the copyright

Okay, I'll bite. Since when does copyright require permission to learn from the copyrighted material? I don't need your permission for that, and neither should an AI.

Or alternately, assuming you reject the "human-AI analogy": since when do I need permission to collect statistical information about copyrighted material? Should Disney be able to sue me for telling you how much screen time Jafar had in Disney's Aladdin, or what percentage of pixels in the first 5 minutes were a shade of blue?

johnnymorgan• 4 years ago

This, training is passive knowledge.

Basically this is saying if you look at it, and then learn to draw you owe Disney money.

Disney would love that but it's ludicrous

Snild• 4 years ago

Machines are not people, and don't enjoy the same rights as us.

(And I would not call it "learning", at least not in the same meaning of the word as for humans, but that's a more philosophical discussion.)

visarga2• 4 years ago

Nobody's arguing that near-duplications or trademark violations are not bad. But I think they want a broader power grab - to extend copyright to art styles. In other words to protect not just the expression but also the ideas themselves. They want something like patent + trademark + copyright all in one.

karpierz15• 4 years ago

If I take a picture of Mickey Mouse, add 1 to each RGB value, it would still be covered under copyright.

I think the term 'learn' is doing the heavy lifting in your argument here. Specifically, your argument seems to be:

1. We use the term 'learn' as shorthand for 'fitting a machine learning algorithm to data'.

2. We also use the term 'learn' for a human looking at copyrighted material to practice their craft.

3. Humans using copyrighted material to learn doesn't make their works derivative.

4. Therefore, machine learning algorithms that are trained on copyrighted material aren't producing derivative works.

This argument holds an implicit assumption: if we use the same term for a process, it should covered by the same rules/laws. Which I think isn't very sound.

fxtentacle4• 4 years ago

The illegal part is actually SD selling the images which contain copyrighted material.

If you were to paint Mickey and sell those paintings, Disney might sue you. Why should SD (the company) be allowed to do that?

notahacker5• 4 years ago

You definitely need permission to make copies of people's art on your computers to use whilst learning though (copyright holders tend to be OK with or completely unaware of that, but it's a right they reserve)

More to the point, this feels like the "have your cake and eat it" of legal arguments. If we're going to anthropomorphise AI to the extent we argue storing data in its data corpus without authorisation is just like allowing a human to look at your legally owned stuff, and reinterpreting that data in a [sometimes not particularly] lossy fashion as a set of weights and biases is just like a human learning, we should probably follow the "AI is just like a person" argument through to its logical conclusion and hold it legally responsible for not respecting copyright law if it ever produces outputs with trademarked images or uncanny resemblance to copyrighted material that aren't deemed "fair use", just like a person would be.

(tbf, it's not too hard to imagine a world in which ChatGPT says "I'm sorry, but I am not able to write stories involving Mickey Mouse, because Mickey Mouse is the intellectual property of the Disney Corporation. Respecting intellectual property rights is very important", and I'm not sure that's an improvement...)

amelius• 4 years ago

Since when does copyright require permission to learn from the copyrighted material?

Ah, but you are anthropomorphizing an algorithm. What is happening inside the computer you call learning, but it is just some mathematical function. Other people might not agree that this is learning, and might call it "mixing" or "copying".

srackey3• 4 years ago

Copyrighted training data is used in the training of a model, but doesn’t exist within the model weights in any real sense. Doesn’t seem different to if I hired an artist to make me a painting of a Disney character (I’m sure there exists copyrighted material in their training dataset).

jounker• 4 years ago

If it generates an artists signature when producing something in that artists style, then I’d argue against that idea. And frequently enough, they will generate a recognizable signature.

pdntspa2• 4 years ago

A machine is copying the image when learning from it no more than a brain is copying an image by trying to memorize it. In either case you are never going to get the same image out. I am not aware of copyright asserting itself over the perception of anything.

Plus, regardless of poorly-enforced legal 'realities', you cannot control something once it is out in the public space. It may as well be public domain. Artists are learning first-hand that they have no control, as it should be.

I say this as an artist myself, either I release my work publicly and it will do with it what it wishes (paying me would be nice, but really difficult to reasonably expect), or I hoard my art privately and it dies when I die, unseen and unperceived.

The problem is the computer people have been dealing with bots for a while, we have tools and years of best practice to deal with it. Artists don't, this is new to them, and frankly a lot of them like to get wrapped up in emotions and do not give a damn about technical nuances -- as you correctly assert. So they will generally repeat whatever trite line sounds best. (You can see this firsthand on with the copypasted memes on facebook/reddit)

How many of these guys truly understand the issue? Or are they just the next generation of luddites trying to fight off the next printing press or camera?

Vespasian• 4 years ago

You can certainly require fees to be paid.

That wouldn't be unusal. Collection agencies are a thing and laws can be adopted to account for AI.

Then it's pay x amount of money to use generative art.

And SAAS services can be required to collect those. Self hosted Setups can come later.

andybak8• 4 years ago

The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission

Yes.

and violating the copyright.

No.

c7b2• 4 years ago

violating the copyright

that's a personal opinion, not a legal fact. until we don't have court rulings on this matter, all legal statements are opinions. in order to have a civilized debate, we should be careful about separating opinions and facts, and clearly marking the former as such.

visarga2• 4 years ago

Nobody cares about the model output
The issue at hand is that artists had their art trained on without their permission

Interesting that you care about the training data but not the generated images. The only explanation I found is that you want to stop the "evil" from the root and have the models unaware of your style.

Do you believe that the style of an artist who is not included in the diffusion training set can't be replicated? No style is actually outside the scope of the model after it has learned the first few thousand styles. They become a map that will reveal every other style.

niemandhier• 4 years ago

That just Google books, Google image search and Google news all over again…

jrochkind13• 4 years ago

Your argument would make Google illegal -- they are copying and indexing other people's content (including images, as it happens), to make a profit, on the backs of other people's work, without a license or permission.

But the courts have already ruled that this is not the case. Your argument is based on what makes sense to you, but not seemingly informed by actual copyright law.

It is harder and harder to get "what makes sense to me" to be consistent as digital technology changes the landscape, that is true. Not as a matter of law, but just your own moral sense, I'm curious if you think web-crawling for indexes for web searches (including image searches) ought to be legal. And if so, what's the difference?

williamcotton19• 4 years ago

As my wife keeps pointing out to me when I incessantly point out that “people on the internet are wrong about copyright”… who cares? The courts certainly don’t.

notahacker5• 4 years ago

Courts have ruled against Google caching and displaying content in search timelines before. Google vs NewsCorp ultimately ended with Google paying NewsCorp license fees to index its content! But most people haven't sued because they actually want to be indexed by Google (and Googlebot respects robots.txt if they don't)

But Google search does not use images for the same purpose, and does not sell access to the images, and at present most AI models don't offer an opt-out, so the copyright implications are different (most logically, indexing and displaying an image with tacit permission and a backlink on an ad-supported web page is not the same as selling derivative works based on an image). By extension, they are not necessarily the same for StableDiffusion as they are for DALL-E, or for LLM models as they are for generative image models or licensed codebases, and copyright law has never been and probably never will be applied evenly across different jurisdictions, mediums and even individual cases.

hanoz• 4 years ago

Has a child violated copyright when they've watched so much Disney that they can now draw a pretty good likeness of one of their characters in an original pose?

adgjlsfhk12• 4 years ago

probably (but I doubt there is case law here because suing a child for copyright infringement would be a really bad look)

jMyles• 4 years ago

There seems to be a sockpuppet constituency desperately trying to sell "yes" as an answer to this question.

It's hard to see how the endgame of this nonsense is anything but total thought control (couched with semantic distinctions between "thought" as it occurs in your biomass and "thought" as simulated in an electronic device).

notahacker5• 4 years ago

If their parents are selling credits so that people can buy novel pictures with pretty good likenesses of Disney characters drawn by their kid.

They'd certainly be relying on "fair use" defences, not "but it's not copyright violation if my kid learned how to do it" defences.

CppViking• 4 years ago

If the goal of this website was to convey information, it failed for me because I have no idea in which order to read the columns of text. Why couldn't they just make a simple page or article?

c7b2• 4 years ago

The website seems to strongly assume that you are already familiar with this site: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/

I stumbled a bit initially too, but it is in fact a reasonably readable [0] point-by-point response to the statements on the first site. They should maybe just add a landing page or a top section to explain what they're doing here.

[0] edit: on desktop, on mobile it looks pretty bad for me. shouldn't have been too hard to make this responsive I guess, just put the sections and reply below one another

andybak8• 4 years ago

They should also run a spellchecker over it.

srackey3• 4 years ago

It is too late. Sorry artists but it’s over. These models can be trained cheaply(compared to a model like GPT-3), run on consumer GPUs, and are open source. Even if somehow Stable Diffusion got forced to take it down, it’s already out! Will be available with BitTorrent forever. Stable Diffusion could be stopped by US copyright law, but there will be 100 Chinese and Russian startups, who will develop even better models and not give a fuck.

This is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. Adapt or die!

andybak8• 4 years ago

This is not mentioned enough and it's hard to think of an outcome to any legal action that would fix the things that traditional artists are asking to be fixed.

And even if there was an effective legal block on allegedly infringing models - an "IP clean" AI model would on the whole be equally disruptive. There's enough material out there in the public domain to create effective image generation models. It might not match the style of living artists very well, but that's not really the thing that's going to be the real problem.

fxtentacle4• 4 years ago

You could say the same about any JPEG on the internet. Yet artists successfully recover licensing fees for those. It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too.

andybak8• 4 years ago

Which would be fine and not an issue. Plagarism is already handled by copyright law.

What won't happen is "x in the style of y" suddenly becoming an enforceable infringement (whether AI produced or not)

marcinzm• 4 years ago

It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too.

Then companies will just clean-room the thing by getting tens of thousands of developing world artists to draw things and generate training data. Combined with all the works out of copyright and those bought from existing licensors will get you probably the same quality models. That costs money but so does GPT-3 and look where we are. There is no getting the cat back in the bag, it's five blocks away with a rocket strapped to it's back.

skerit• 4 years ago

Not only that, but all these naïve restrictions artists want to impose on machine learning would end up being awful for everyone except huge corporations.

fdslakfdsjk• 4 years ago

Context: The page is a response to Matthew Butterick’s arguably frivolous lawsuits against co-pilot and now stable diffusion.

(Both websites prominently feature Butterick’s self-portrait and biography, I’m not trying to ad hominem this or anything but it appears to be his personal branding)

siliconc0w• 4 years ago

INAL but I think the test is does it, "harm the market for or value of X's images" so the information theory of bits and bytes doesn't really matter. I think stable diffusion, chatGPT, or CoPilot may actually fail this test - it depends on much leeway they get for the perceived public benefit and the 'transformative-ness' of this technology. What would be pretty cool would be that if the courts decided open-source = public benefit = acceptable, proprietary for profit platform = no public benefit = unacceptable without consent.

jasonmarks_2• 4 years ago

Once again: what works? Copyright law is built around works,[18] and you have yet to show that even your clients, let alone anyone else, has works violated by infringing works that were not sufficiently transformatively different.

I messed around with Stable Diffusion and asked it to generate a lacrosse player. In the output image the crosse had a partial unmistakable unique design, too exact to be considered noise. The piece of equipment is the STX Arrow (a one-off design from a few years back). I certainly think you could argue it was not "transformatively different". Again the STX Arrow is literally the only crosse with that particular design AFAIK

stable diffusion img: https://twitter.com/jasonmarks__/status/1570893504339116032

STX arrow: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/43/9d/e8/439de85ff04ec0f19f8f...

williamcotton19• 4 years ago

Cool, so now if you put that image on a t-shirt and sell it online you, and only you, are liable.

Are you trying to put the blame on Stable Diffusion for making you choose to publish an image with a trademark?

jasonmarks_2• 4 years ago

Hi there, just pointing out that I noticed not everything is getting lost in noise.

DannyBee2• 4 years ago

contributory copyright infringement exists

janef0421• 4 years ago

This seems poorly argued. There's a lot of emphasis on technical minutiae, but the question is whether the way the model embeds and reproduces the features of the input images infringes on copyright. I would think that is more dependent on the capabilities and functions of the models, not the specific mechanism of implementation.

Also, the Jevon's paradox bit is a tangent. AI image tools may become widespread, and their use may expand the art market, benefitting artists who make use of them. That is not a relevant point, because the lawsuit is not about the legality of image-generating neural networks; It is about whether using an unlicensed image to train such a model infringes on its copyright. If it was found that it does, then AI art could still transform the art market; All that would change would be that images would need to licensed for training.

DannyBee2• 4 years ago

IP lawyer here:

This reads like a bunch of technical arguments that have no interesting legal meaning.

You already can't avoid copyright infringement by using statistical distributions whose output is substantially similar to the original. IE Lossy compression does not avoid infringement

This is already law.

The only question is how far does that reach and where fair use provides a defense to something that would otherwise be infringement. How transformative must something be, etc.

The basic test for infringement is access to the work and substantially similar result.

Intermediate means do not matter. You could have monkeys whose kids have genes that got passed along that enable them to redraw your work, so that they have no literal knowledge and have never seen it. If the output is the original work, its still infringement.

The article also gets wrong that court cases also have been a (reasonable) continuation of plenty of conversations, from civil rights to you name it.

I personally am not a fan of this litigation, but this author doesn't make good arguments about it

Stable Diffusion Frivolous Litigation

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