Re:Search 5.8B images used to train popular AI art models
by bdowling on Thursday September 15, 2022 @05:16PM
(#32858557)
> ... when I use my memory of having seen someone else's copyrighted materials to produce my own wholly new but similar looking works.
That's called "non-literal" copyright infringement. Plaintiffs win on the claims and appeals courts uphold the judgments. (See, e.g., the "Blurred Lines" case. https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/music/robin-thicke-pharr...).
A person could infringe the copyright in an original image if they painted their own version by hand. The AI is basically irrelevant.
Likewise there is no copyright infringement occurring when an ML model is trained on copyrighted works.
Stable Diffusion is a 5GB matrix of floating-point numbers trained on 240TB of data. It does not, and cannot, contain infringing data from the training set. It is physically impossible for it to contain such data. There is not, and cannot be, any infringement occurring.