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
If you take that tack, I'll go one step further back in time and ask "Where is your agreement from the original author who owns the copyright that you could use this image in the way you did?"
The fact that there is suddenly a new way to "use an image" (input to a computer algorithm) doesn't mean that copyright magically doesn't also apply to that usage.
A canonical example is the fact that television programs like "WKRP in Cincinnati" can't use the music licenses from the television broadcast if they want to distribute a DVD or streaming version--the music has to be re-licensed.
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.
What are you talking about? I've been doing drawing and digital painting as a hobby for a long time and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common". I don't know anybody who has ever done this.
> fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common)
This is true in the sense that many artists do it (besides confusing trademark law and copyright law: the character designs are copyright-protected, trademarks protect brand names and logos). However, it is not fair use (as far as I'm aware at least, I'm not a lawyer). A rightholder can request for fanart to be removed and the artist would have to remove it. Rightsholders almost never do, because fanart doesn't hurt them.
There's also more examples of it reproducing copyright-protected images, I pulled the "bloodborne box art" prompt from this article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03860.pdf But I agree with you that reproducing images is very much not the intention of Stable Diffusion, and it's already very rare. The way I see it, the cases of Stable Diffusion reproducing images too closely is just a gotcha for establishing a court case.
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.
- Extending the slant roof in the background, it intersects with the left figure at around the height of the nose, but in the painting it intersects with the middle of her neck.
- Similarly the line of the fence on the left is at the height of her hairline, but in the painting it is at the height of the middle of the head, and also more slanted than in the frame.
- On the right side, the white part of the pillar is similarly too low compared to the figure.
- The pole in the background has a lot of things off with regards to size, thickness, or location too.
Essentially, everything is a bit off with regards to location, size and distance. It doesn't really make sense to paint over something and then still do everything differently from the base layer, so it was probably just drawn from reference the normal way -- probably having the picture on another screen and drawing it again from scratch, rather than directly painting over the frame.
I agree with regards to Warhol but that doesn't really establish it as very common amongst painters.
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.