Stable Diffusion sometimes reproduces the large watermarks used by stock photo providers on their free sample images. That’s embarrassing at the minimum, and potentially a trademark violation.
Surely at the very least it'd be a TOS violation? I doubt any stock photo service grants you enough rights to redistribute their watermarked free image samples? Especially not in the context of a project like Stable Diffusion?
If it faithfully memorized and reproduced a set of watermarks, it would be premature to conclude that it hadn’t memorized other (non-generic) graphical elements.
Just like it's the person's responsibility to only recombine jpeg basis states when they don't correspond to a copyrighted image? It seems more and more to be the case that the trained model is, in large part, a very compact representation of the training data. I'm not seeing a difference between distributing a model that can be used to reconstruct the input images, as opposed to distributing jpeg basis states that can be used to reconstruct the original image.
It's not broadcasting an exact replica though, it's instructions to recreate an approximation of the original image. If I look at an image describe it and have someone else or even myself recreate it later that in general isn't copyright infringement, that's just a normal process in art. A more extreme example is the Fairy Hope image and the original AP but even that is more similar to the original than the output created by stable diffusion. Approximate recreations aren't generally copyright violations.
On the subject of trademarks the issue is as far as I know even more on the end user because the protections on them is around use in commerce and consumer confusion not about just recreating them like copyright protections.
