zlacker

>>zacwes+(OP)
“Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions—and pos­si­bly bil­lions—of copy­righted images.”

That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies?

“Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bined to derive other images. It is, in short, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool.“

“Diffu­sion is a way for an AI pro­gram to fig­ure out how to recon­struct a copy of the train­ing data through denois­ing. Because this is so, in copy­right terms it’s no dif­fer­ent from an MP3 or JPEG—a way of stor­ing a com­pressed copy of cer­tain dig­i­tal data.”

The examples of training diffusion (eg, reconstructing a picture out of noise) will be core to their argument in court. Certainly during training the goal is to reconstruct original images out of noise. But, do they exist in SD as copies? Idk

>>dr_dsh+12
> That’s going to be hard to argue. Where are the copies?

In fairness, Diffusion is arguably a very complex entropy coding similar to Arithmetic/Huffman coding.

Given that copyright is protectable even on compressed/encrypted files, it seems fair that the “container of compressed bytes” (in this case the Diffusion model) does “contain” the original images no differently than a compressed folder of images contains the original images.

A lawyer/researcher would likely win this case if they re-create 90%ish of a single input image from the diffusion model with text input.

>>yazadd+X3
And how that's different from gzip or base64, which can re-create original image when given appropriate input?

>>magnat+h5
That’s my point, Diffusion[1] does seem to be “just like” gzip or base64.

And it would be illegal for me to sell or distribute zipped copies of images without the copyright holder’s consent. Similarly there might be an argument for why Diffusion[1] specifically can’t be built with copyrighted images.

[1] which is just one part of something like Stable Diffusion

>>yazadd+D9
A lossy compressor isn't just like a lossless compressor. Especially not one that has ~2 bytes for each input image.

>>astran+ka
I agree with you. My intuition is also that SD itself is not a violation of copyright.

That said it can sometimes be in violation of copyright if it creates a specific image that is “too close to another original” (just like a human would be in violation even if they never previously saw that image).

But the above is just my intuition (and possibly yours) that doesn’t mean a lawyer couldn’t make the argument that it’s a ”good enough lossy compression - just like jpeg but smaller” and therefore “contains the images in just 2 bytes”.

That lawyer may fail to win the argument, but there is a chance that they do win the argument! Especially as researchers keep making Diffusion and SD models better and better at being compression algos (which is a topic people are actively working on).