Go to stablediffusionweb.com and enter "a person like biden" into the box. You will see a picture exactly like President Biden. That picture will have been derived from the trained images of Joe Biden. That cannot be in dispute.
First, there is a legal definition of a "derivative work" and there is an artistic notion of a "derivative work". If the two of us both draw a picture of the Statue of Liberty, artistically we have both derived the drawing based on the original statue. However, neither of these drawings in relation to the original sculpture nor the other drawing is legally considered a derivative work.
Let's think about a cartoonish caricature of Joe Biden. What "makes up" Joe Biden?
To what extent are these "constituent parts" present in every image of Joe Biden? All of them? Is the latent space not something that is instead hidden in all images of Joe Biden? Can an image of Joe Biden be made by anyone that is not derived from these "high order" characteristics of what is recognizable as Joe Biden across a number of different renderings from disparate individuals?
I can draw Biden, yes, but SD can only draw Biden by deriving it's output from the images on which it was trained. This is a simple tautology, because SD cannot draw Biden without having been trained on that data.
SD both creates derivative works and also sometimes creates pixel level copies from portions of the trained data.
The difference is that computers create perfect copies of images by default, people don't.
If a person creates a perfect copy of something it shows they have put thousands of hours of practice into training their skills and maybe dozens or even hundreds of hours into the replica.
When a computer generates a replica of something it's what it was designed to do. AI art is trying to replicate the human process, but it will always have the stink of "the computer could do this perfectly but we are telling it not to right now"
Take Chess as an example. We have Chess engines that can beat even the best human Chess players very consistently.
But we also have Chess engines designed to play against beginners, or at all levels of Chess play really.
We still have Human-only tournaments. Why? Why not allow a Chess Engine set to perform like a Grandmaster to compete in tournaments?
Because there would always be the suspicion that if it wins, it's because it cheated to play at above it's level when it needed to. Because that's always an option for a computer, to behave like a computer does.
You’re acting like the “computer” has a will of it’s own. Generating a perfect copy of an image would be a completely separate task from training a model for image generation.
There are no models I know of with the ability to generate an exact copy of an image from its training set unless it was solely trained on that image to the point it could. In that case I could argue the model’s purpose was to copy that image rather than learn concepts from a broad variety of images to the point it would be almost impossible to generate an exact copy.
I think a lot of the arguments revolving around AI image generators could benefit from the constituent parties reading up on how transformers work. It would at least make the criticisms more pointed and relevant, unlike the criticisms drawn in the linked article.
> There are no models I know of with the ability to generate an exact copy of an image from its training set
Is it "the model cannot possibly recreate an image from its training set perfectly" or is it "the model is extremely unlikely to recreate an image from its training set perfectly, but it could in theory"?
Because I am willing to bet it's the latter.
> You’re acting like the “computer” has a will of it’s own. Generating a perfect copy of an image would be a completely separate task from training a model for image generation.
Not my intent, of course I don't think computers have a will of their own. What I meant, obviously, is that it's always possible for a bad actor of a human to make the computer behave in a way that is detrimental to other humans and then justify it by saying "the computer did it, all I did is train the model".
To reproduce a copyrighted work. I'm sure people have done this with e.g. pixel art images of copyrighted IP of Mario or Link. At 400x400, it would take 160,000 pixels to do this. At 1 second per pixel, a human being could do this in about a week.
Because people have the capability of doing this, and in fact we have proof that people have done so using tools such as MS paint, AND because it is unlikely but possible that someone could reproduce protected IP using such a method, should we ban Microsoft Paint, or the paint tool, or the ability to input raw RGB inputs?
>The difference is that computers create perfect copies of images by default
are we looking at the output of the same program? because all of the output images i look at have eyes looking in different direction and things of horror in place of hands or ears, and they feature glasses meting into people faces, and that's the good ones, the bad one have multiple arms contorting out of odd places while bent at unnatural angles.
Storing and retrieving photos, files, music, exactly identical to how they were before, is what computers do.
Save a photo on your computer, open it in a browser or photo viewer, you will get that photo. That is the default behavior of computers. That is not in dispute, is it?
All of this machine learning stuff is trying to get them to not do that. To actually create something new that no one actually stored on them.
There is no need for rhetorical games. The actual issue is that Stable Diffusion does create derivatives of copyrighted works. In some cases the produced images contain pixel level details from the originals. [1]
> The actual issue is that Stable Diffusion does create derivatives of copyrighted works.
Nothing points to that, in fact even in this website they had to lie on how stablediffusion actually works, maybe a sign that their argument isn't really solid enough.
I don't call these defects copying either but overfitting characteristics. Usually they are there because there's a massive amount of near-identical images.
It's both undesirable and not relevant to this kind of lawsuit.
Correction: if you draw a copy of Biden and it happens to overlap enough with someone’s copyright of a drawing or image of Biden, you did create a derivative (whether you knew it or not).
No that’s not… at least in many countries. Unlike patents, “parallel creation” is allowed, this was fought out in case law over photography decades ago, because photographers would take images of the same
subject, then someone else would, and they might incidentally capture a similar image for lots of reasons and thus before ubiquitous photography in our pockets, when you had to have expensive equipment or carefully control the lighting in a portraiture studio to get great results… well it happened and people sued like those with money to spare for lawyers are want to do, and thus precedent has been established for much of this. You don’t see it a lot outside photography but it’s not a new thing for art copyright law and I think the necessity of the user to provide their own input and get different outcomes outside of extremely sophisticated prompt editing… will be a significant fact in their favour.
