zlacker

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

>>magnat+(OP)
well I guess it wouldn't be different, only there aren't any companies zipping up millions of images and then offering people the chance to get those images by putting in the text prompt that recreates them without paying any fees to the artists whose images were used.

>>magnat+(OP)
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+m4
A lossy compressor isn't just like a lossless compressor. Especially not one that has ~2 bytes for each input image.

>>astran+35
How many bytes make it an original work vs a compressed copy?

>>astran+35
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).

>>bryanr+q1
Search engines do that.

>>synu+Q5
Usually judges would care more about whether the bytes came from than how many of them there are.

Since SD is trained by gradient updating against several different images at the same time, it of course never copies any image bits straight into it. Since it's a latent-diffusion model, actual "image"ness is limited to the image encoder (VAE), so any fractional bits would be in there if you want to look.

The text encoder (LAION OpenCLIP) does have bits from elsewhere copied straight into it to build the tokens list.

https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-2-1/raw/...

>>astran+B8
The important distinction then is using another program or device to analyze the bits but without copying them, that takes its own new impression? Like using a camera?

>>rysert+H6
good point, but didn't Google Image search lose some case and have to change their behavior?

>>synu+fc
Well, theoretically more like a vague memory of it or taking notes on it.

>>astran+35
So it's fine to distribute copyrighted works, as long as they're jpeg(lossy) encoded? I don't think the law would agree with you.

>>astran+B8
“any fractional bits would be in there if you want to look.”

What do you mean by this in the context of generating images via prompt? “Fractional bits” don’t make sense and it’s more misleading if anything. Regardless, a model violating criteria for being within fair use will always be judged by the outputs it generates rather than its composing bytes (which can be independent)

>>Xelyne+sP
If I compress a copyrighted work down to two bytes and publish that, I think that judges would declare it legal. If it can't be uncompressed to resemble the copyrighted work in any sense, no judge is going to declare it illegal.

>>synu+Q5
One, of your compressor is specialised enough…so you can see how slippery this argument can be.

>>bryanr+ed
If it's what I'm thinking about, I think they were forced to have decentralized image caching (i.e. the "user" is the one downloading images, Google just indexes).

LAION-5b is also just an indexer (in terms of images).

>>derang+S01
Fractional bits makes perfect sense. Do you know how arithmetic coders work?