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
I don't think you have to reproduce an entire original work to demonstrate copyright violation. Think about sampling in hip hop for example. A 2 second sample, distorted, re-pitched, etc. can be grounds for a copyright violation.

>>akjetm+D3
The difference here is that the images aren't stored, but rather an extremely abstract description of the image was used to very slightly adjust a network of millions of nodes in a tiny direction. No semblance of the original image even remotely exists in the model.

>>Salgat+R3
This is very much a 'color of your bits' topic, but I'm not sure why the internal representation matters. It's pretty trivial to recreate famous works like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night or Monet's Water Lily Pond. Obviously some representation of the originals exist inside the model+prompt. Why wouldn't that apply to other images in the training sets?

>>AlotOf+D7
It’s not quite a one to one. Copyright law isn’t as arbitrary as it would seem in my experience. Also there’s the conflation of two things here: whether the model is within copyright violation and whether the works generated by it are

The “color of your bits” only applies to the process of creating a work. Stable Diffusion’s training of the algorithm could be seen as violating copyright but that doesn’t spread to the works generated by it.

In the same vein, one can claim copyright on an image generated by stable diffusion even if the creation of the algorithm is safe from copyright violation.

“some representation of the originals exist inside the model+prompt” is also not sufficient for the model to be in violation of copyright of any one art piece. Some latent representation of the concept of an art piece or style isn’t enough.

It’s also important to note the distinction that there is no training data stored in its original form as part of the model during training, it’s simply used to tweak a function with the purpose of translating text to images. Some could say that’s like using the color from a picture of a car on the internet. Some might say it’s worse but it’s all subjective unless the opposition can draw new ties of the actual technical process to things already precedent.