IceMetalPunk
commented
1 year ago Two things.
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Humans are capable of copying each others' style very well, and as such, this issue was settled (at least from a legal standpoint) long before generative AIs existed. It was brought before various courts, and the rulings were explicitly defined: you can copyright specific works of art, but you cannot copyright styles of art. Anyone is free to study a particular artist's repertoire in order to mimic their style, and it is NOT a violation of copyright, because it is not considered stealing or unethical, since the actual piece of work you end up creating is novel. This applies to humans, and there's no good reason it shouldn't also apply to AIs.
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While the input space of a diffusion model does include the pixel values of the training images, that is not the same as saying it learns to "copy" those pixels. It learns aspects of the training images at an abstract level, the same way an art student might study an artist's work to learn new painting techniques or, as previously mentioned, to learn how to paint like that artist. The fact that the AIs can do this "better than humans" is irrelevant; otherwise the argument reduces to "all of this is fine to do, as long as the entity doing it isn't too smart". If a human prodigy were born who could match the artistic learning and generation ability of the best AI, saying they would be an exception to the existing precedent decisions because they're "too good at it" would be ridiculous. Therefore, it's equally ridiculous to use that logic to say AIs should be an exception to the precedents because "they're too good at it".
TL;DR: There is no copying of individual works here (and, in the exceptional times when there is copying due to overfitting, THAT is certainly copyright infringement and it's up to the user to reject those generations). You cannot legally steal a style, and these models are analogous to very smart art students learning techniques and taking inspiration; therefore, calling it stealing or unethical is inaccurate and disingenuous.
gaming-se
Hello Stable Diffusion Community. I would like to point out to a problem that happened recently. Specifically, someone used the Stable Diffusion tools to train a model using only images of one Artist to mimic the artist's style and being able to create the images that are similar to the art of the Artist, but the Artist never agreed to it.
I like Stable Diffusion and I see a big use for the tools that are based on it, but there is a difference in responsible use of the tools and having ethical standards, of not trying not to harm ppl and there are others ... they try to active goals and the goals or results of them are more important to them than the ppl that they might hurt. This special case, of training a model to recreate the artist's style is in my opinion the extreme version of anti-ethical use of the tools. some of the users of this model argument that it's an AI, it just learned how to create images and learning on itself should be allowed because learning has no copyright. But does the concept of learning apply on an Algorithm that uses only one source of input without any other influence? AI having a high precision in applying the creation process? Memorizing things, in a way ... that humans are usually not able? I do not think so.
From my current knowledge (simplified), this AI uses the Pixel space as input and the model that been trained, gain decision weights based on pixel use positions and the pixel value, that way it is capable of mimicking directly/indirectly
To be able to mimicking other Artist as human, you would need to have all the Artist's images in your memory and to be able to do that perfectly you would need to have a high class visual memory without flaws, and a huge amount of time. AI don't need that it's a computer programm, it has its "Visual memory" saved in the weights of the model. Comparing it to human standards of learning would be wrong, because even if you ask an artist to recreate an image that he draw, the artist would have some differences in results (based on complexity of image) while the AI would be able to recreate the image it has been able to create before (if the randomization factors are known / seeds) Even thought it sounds so Powerful. In my Opinion, the Artists going to remain in advantage in the Art system. Mainly because the most deterministic language to describe how the picture should be is the drawing process itself. But it takes time and effort to do so. The AI on the other hand can mass produce art, it seems to be similar to the images its model been trained on. it's not a full replacement of the artist. But, by some luck, it can produce some acceptable pieces for a low amount of effort. And that kinda sounds not right. While the artist took a huge amount of time effort and skill to build his internal model (that he uses for his decision-making process on what color brush etc. he uses, his proportions, etc.) the artist images are used without consent to create a replica of the artist own internal decision model, to be used to create art that is going to compete against the Artist. This kind of problem need more awareness and some kind of handling.
(btw. the problem persist even if the inputs are multiple artists, but there is a switch that decides that specific weights of one artist should be used)
In my opinion, only Images from Artists that want to participate in AI should be included (Option-in)
I like AI, but misuse of it, can cause damage that makes life for artists hard, and some of them struggle already.
I took the approach to reach out here because in my opinion you have the most influence to propagate how the tools should be used. It's advanced technology, but with great power comes great responsibility.
*Somting that I also want to mention is that if you know who is the artist or who is the model creator, please don't mentioned them because it leads to harassment on both sides. And please don't try to shift the view doing something like whataboutism. Im shure this community is better than that and educated enough to see straight through the whataboutism argumentation.
Kind regards