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
It doesn't matter if they exist as exact copies in my opinion.

The law doesn't recognize a mathematical computer transformation as creating a new work with original copyright.

If you give me an image, and I encrypt it with a randomly generated password, and then don't write down the password anywhere, the resulting file will be indistinguishable from random noise. No one can possibly derive the original image from it. But, it's still copyrighted by the original artist as long as they can show "This started as my image, and a machine made a rote mathematical transformation to it" because machine's making rote mathematical transformations cannot create new copyright.

The argument for stable diffusion would be that even if you cannot point to any image, since only algorithmic changes happened to the inputs, without any human creativity, the output is a derived work which does not have its own unique copyright.

>>TheDon+F3
No. Humans decided to include artwork that they did not have any right to use as part of a training data set. This is about holding humans accountable for their actions.

>>mbgerr+66
"right" in the informal sense or in some legal sense?

>>andyba+Tb
Legal

>>mbgerr+2o
Can you clarify? My understanding is that it's very unclear whether there are any legal issues (in most jurisdictions) in scraping for training.

Obviously some fairy reputable organisations and individuals are moderately confident that there isn't otherwise they wouldn't have done it.

>>andyba+KA
"It's very unclear" in legal cases is synonymous with "it hasn't been challenged in court yet". You say they're moderately confident because they're fairly reputable, but remember that Madoff was a "reputable business man" for the 20 years he ran a ponzi scheme. They don't have to be confident in the legality to do it, they just had to be confident in the potential profit. With openai being values at $10B by Microsoft, I'd say they've successfully muddied the legal waters long enough to cash out.

>>Xelyne+JW
That's one company. There's dozens if not hundreds of companies, research groups and individuals working under the same assumption.

Maybe it's a mass delusion but that feels like a stretch.

Also your wording makes this sound entirely like a sinister conspiracy or cash grab. Many people think this is simply a worthy pursuit and the right direction to be looking at the moment.

>>andyba+Lf1
If I make it sound like a sinister conspiracy or cash grab, that's because that's what it as long as it's a private entity and not a public endeavor.

I don't deny that this might be a worthy pursuit or the right direction to be looking, or that that's the reason some people are in it. I just question the motivations of a private company valued at $10b which is going to have a lot more control over the direction of the industry than those passionate individuals.