huggingrear

that seems to work almost entirely from imagination

I very much doubt that.

Secondly, putting strangely much effort into a comment on Hacker News

Note sure what you are implying here, could you elaborate ? The reason I know about these images is because they've been posted, alongside many other similar examples, in discussions regarding AI art.

I know this because there are too many mistakes with regards to proportion:

Have you ever used programs like Photoshop, Krita et al ? You can start painting directly over a photo, and then easily transform the proportions of all components in the image, and since you draw them in layers, they can be done without affecting eachother.

Here they are, side by side:

https://imgur.com/a/tIbBkk2 https://imgur.com/a/K1fEPtu

I have no doubt that he started painting these over the reference photos, and then used the 'warp tool' in his painting program of choice to alter the proportions, a very common technique.

And this is PERFECTLY FINE, the resulting artwork is transformative enough to be considered a new work of art, which is true for practically every piece of art I've seen generated by Stable Diffusion, the only one I've seen that I'm doubtful about is the 'bloodborne box art' one, which is THE example that is always brought up as it such an outlier.

and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common"

Paintover does not have to mean actual 'tracing', a LOT of artists use photos as direct references and paint over them in a separate layer, keeping the composition, poses, colors very close to the original while still changing details and style enought to make it transformative enough to be considered a 'new work'.

Here are two examples of artist Sam Yang using two still frames from the tv show Squid Game and painting over those, the results which he then sells as prints:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/samdoesarts/the-alleyway/ https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/samdoesarts/067/

That said, you could even get away with less transformation and still have it be considered original work, take Andy Warhol's 'Orange Marilyn' and 'Portrait of Mao', those are inked and flat color changes over photographs.

My assumption would be 'fair use'. Artists themselves make use of this extremely often, like when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common), fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common). The are often done for commission as well.

AFAIK, downloading and learning from images, even copyrighted images, fall under fair use, this is how practically every artist today learns how to draw.

Stable Diffusion does not create 1:1 copies of artwork it has been trained on, and its purpose is quite the opposite, there may be cases where the transformative aspect of a generated image may be argued as not being transformative enough, but so far I've only seen one such reproducable image, which would be the 'bloodborne box art' prompt, which was also mentioned in this discussion.

It's pretty trivial to recreate famous works like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night or Monet's Water Lily Pond.

A recreation of a piece of art does not mean a copy, I've personally seen hundreds of recreations of Edvard Munch's 'The Scream', all of them perfectly legal.

Even in a massively overtrained model, it is practically impossible to create a 1:1 copy of a piece of art the model was trained upon.

And of course that would be a pointless exercise to begin with, why would anyone want to generate 1:1 copies (or anything near that) of existing images ?

The whole 'magic' of Stable Diffusion is that you can create new works of art in the combined styles of art, photography etc that it has been trained on.

"WhiteOnly" Rimworld mod that removes all non-whites

This was in response to an already existing mod which removed all white people, which was deemed totally fine. AUTO1111 also made a all black MOD later, which you mentioned.

"BlacksOnly" mod that purportedly just disables technological progression

This is false: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103vsm2/we...

All it did was lock the available skintones.

/g/ has become increasingly far-right

Any data to back this up with ? And how can you even know that AUTO1111 is active on /g/ ? It's anonymous.

I saw this response debunking the whole mod accusation:

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103vsm2/we...

As for 4chan activity, how on earth can anything there be attributed to anyone ? It's a anonymous messaging board. I can go there and claim that I'm the prince of Wales and start making egregious statements.

Did he create the artists.csv file himself, or did he copy it from somewhere ?

This eagerness to attribute racism and 'white supremacy' to people has made the accusation pointless IMO.

I think the BlackLivesMatter movement was a big scam that fueled riots which cost people lives and a ton of economic damage while riding on a wave of legitimate but overblown criticism of police violence. Am I a white supremacist now ?

This was created in response to existing mods which had removed all white people

You can call it immature, I sure would, but still we can't have 'rules for thee'

Did he add the 'n' tag or did he just accept a PR with changes made to artists.csv ?

That's quite a important distinction.

As for the mods, I have no problem with those, he made the WhiteOnly mod as a response to existing mods which removed white people, and I can't argue against the George Floyd riots being anything but peaceful.

Well of course AI is going to take the programmer jobs, as a developer, this is practically the focal point of all discussions I've had with colleagues the past month, the consensus seem to be that within a 10 year window, software developer is going to be an almost niche occupation.

And yes, it will transform art completely, initially by lowering the barrier for producing quality art, and then by raising the bar in terms of quality, it's coming for every artistic field, 3d, film, music etc

If you want a career in these fields, you will need to ride this AI wave from the get go, but even that career will eventually succumb to automation, this is the inevitable end point, as an example, eventually you will be able to give a brief synopsis to an AI and it will be able to flesh that out and create a full movie of it with the actors you choose.

Japan is 98% ethnically homogenous, with the remaining 2% primarily consisting of Koreans and Chinese. I don't see why Japan would have any need for a discussion on 'race'.

Japan has the highest life expectancy in the whole world, which is certainly a factor in them skewing so old.

If their elder care was so terrible, I doubt their elders would be the world's most healthy and long-living.