So in effect, they are pitting Disney's understanding of copyright (maximally strict) against that of the AI companies (maximally loose).
Even if it's technically the responsibility of the user not to publish generated images that contain copyrighted content, I can't imagine that Disney is very happy with a situation where everyone can download Stable Diffusion and generate their own arbitrary artwork of Disney characters in a few minutes.
So that strategy might actually work. I wish them good luck and will restock my popcorn reserves just in case :)
The problem I see though is that both sides are billion dollar companies - and there is probably a lot of interest in AI tech within Disney themselves. So it might just as well happen that both sides find some kind of agreement that's beneficial for both of them and leaves the artists holding the bag.
It doesn't mean that. You could "find" Mickey in the latent space of any model using textual inversion and an hour of GPU time. He's just a few shapes.
(Main example: the most popular artist StableDiffusion 1 users like to imitate is not in the StableDiffusion training images. His name just happens to work in prompts by coincidence.)
Go to a baker and commission a Mickey Mouse cake. Is that a violation if the bakery didn't advertise it? (To note, a bakery can't advertise it due to trademark, not copyright. Right?)
For that matter, any privately commissioned art? Is that really what artists want to lock away?
In 2018[0], didn't Getty force Google to change how Google Images presented results, following a lawsuit in 2016[1]?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/google-eu-antitr...
Absolutely. Google previously had a direct link to the full-size image, but it has removed this due to potential legal issues. See [0].
> Is that a violation if the bakery didn't advertise it?
According to Disney, it is. See [1].
> Any privately commissioned art?
Not any art, no. Only that which uses IP/material they do not have a license to.
[0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/12/say-goodbye-to-the-view-im...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_copyright#Copyright_of_ar...
The matters of the baker and the privately comissioned art are more complicated. The artist and baker hold copyrigh for their creation, but their products are also derived from copyrighted work, so Disney also has rights here [1]. This is just usually not enforced by copyright holders because who in their right mind would punish free marketing.
A latent space that contains every image contains every copyrighted image. But the concept of sRGB is not copyrighted by Disney just yet.
That's actually a tricky question and lengthy court battles were held over this in both the US and Europe. In the end, all courts decided that the image result page is questionable when it comes to copyright, but generally covered by fair use. The question is how far fair use goes when people are using the data in derivative work. Google specifically added licensing info about images to further cover their back, but this whole fair use stuff gets really murky when you have automatic scrapers using google images to train AIs who in turn create art for sale eventually. There's a lot of actors in that process that profit indirectly from the provided images. This will probably once again fall back to the courts sooner or later.
"Mickey" does work as a prompt, but if they took that word out of the text encoder he'd still be there in the latent space, and it's not hard to find a way to construct him out of a few circles and a pair of red shorts.
-> here is the actual judgement though: https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/do...
There are noninfringing usecases for generating images containing Mickey Mouse - not least, Disney themselves produce thousands of images containing the mouse's likeness every year; but also parody usecases exist.
But even if you are just using SD to generate images, if we want to make sure to avoid treading on Disney's toes, the AI would need to know what Mickey Mouse looks like in order to avoid infringing trademark, too. You can feed it negative weights already if you want to get 'cartoon mouse' but not have it look like Mickey.
The AI draws what you tell it to draw. You get to choose whether or not to publish the result (the AI doesn't automatically share its results with the world). You have the ultimate liability and credit for any images so produced.
In any case, in the example images here, the AI clearly knew who Mickey is and used that to generate Mickey Mouse images. Mickey has got to be in the training data.
In the same way, making the model deliberately unable to generate Micky Mouse images would be much more far-reaching than just removing Micky imagery from the trainset.
Of course that probably means that those copyrighted images exist in some encoded form in the data or neural network of the AI, and also in our brain. Is that legal? With humans it's unavoidable, but that doesn't have to mean that it's also legal for AI. But even if those copyrighted images exist in some form in our brains, we know not to reproduce them and pass them off as original. The AI does that. Maybe it needs a feedback mechanism to ensure its generated images don't look too much like copyrighted images from its data set. Maybe art-AI necessarily also has to become a bit of a legal-AI.
Copyright infringement does generally require you to have been aware of the work you were copying. So for sure there's an issue with using AI to generate art where you could use the tool to generate you an image, which you think looks original, because you are unaware of a similar original work, so you could not be guilty of copyright infringement - but if the AI model was trained on a dataset that includes an original copyrighted work that is similar, obviously it seems like someone has infringed something there.
But that's not what we're talking about in the case of mickey mouse imagery, is it? You're not asking for images of 'utterly original uncopyrighted untrademarked cartoon mouse with big ears' and then unknowingly publishing a mouse picture that the evil AI copied from Disney without your knowledge.
I think this is exactly the problem that many artists have with imagine generators. Yes, we could all easily identify if a generated artwork contained popular Disney characters - but that's because it's Disney, owners of some of the most well-known IP in the world. The same isn't true for small artists: There is a real risk that a model reproduces parts of a lesser known copyrighted work and the user doesn't realise it.
I think this is what artists are protesting: Their works have been used as training data and will now be parts of countless generated images, all with no permission and no compensation.
So Disney don’t need to worry about AI art tools - so ‘attacking’ them with such tools does nothing.
The Mickey Mouse case though is obviously bs, the training data definitely does just have tons of infringing examples of Mickey Mouse, it didn't somehow reinvent the exact image of him from first principles.
Which is why e.g. Bethesda is not going to slap you for your Mr House or Pip-Boy fanart, but will slap the projects that recreate Fallout 3 in engine X.