There is likely a legal threat by NAI involved in the decision calculus here.
Unless these AI companies want google and facebook to be literally the only companies in the world that can train large scale machine learning (by using their TOS to get licenses from their users) they should tread carefully.
In this particular case the leaked code apparently exposed that the proprietary codebase was also using the OSS developer's work without attribution.
There's an interesting anecdote around how stand-up comedians protect jokes against theft, given how weak copyright is on jokes: it's keying cars, poisoning drinks (generally non-fatally, but it's hard to have a good night on stage when your lower GI tract wants to be elsewhere), and never-work-in-this-town-again agreements. We put these protections into the law because the alternative isn't no protection; it's people-take-it-into-their-own-hands protection.
The users of these models and the developers are fundamentally different.
If it costs $10 million to find information/weightings/etc., our current legal system would consider that intellectual property which might not be copyrightable but would be considered IP theft if stolen.
If they were negligent in handling it, e.g. left it on a publicly accessible share and some member of the public stumbled into it, then trade secret protection would likely be lost.
If some employee violated their NDA and snuck it out-- well that would be a different matter. etc.
Another perspective that may become important is the fact that not all cultures share the same interpretation of copyright. In Japan there was a case in which a court ruled that selling a memory card with preloaded save data for a video game was a breach of the original work's integrity.[1]
This I think will get greater attention in the near future because a large portion of the interest in SD stems from generating new art derived from the styles of art on Pixiv, a Japanese website. The data for many popular forks of SD like Waifu Diffusion and the proprietary NovelAI model were sourced from Western sites like Danbooru, which has been known for violating copyright and artist takedown requests by reposting art without the creator's permission for many years. With the sheer popularity of SD and the fact that so much of the innovation came off of the backs of thousands of artists who weren't so much as asked for consent, it remains to be seen if attitudes towards those sites and this process of mass-scale data collection will remain the same in the near future.
I also have to wonder what the implications would have been if NovelAI ended up launching what is now the leaked model as a paid service, given the unresolved question of consent that surrounds the original data.
HN and the people who support SD can have their own opinions about copyright not applying in this specific case. They can delve into the technicalities of why they think the models are not copyrightable. But even beyond legal means, the artists can still ask the programmers to take everything down, and potentially be refused. The insistence that "it's different in this case" can break the hearts of people that see the world differently.
I think this will be a debate that transcends arguing over the technicalities of copyright, involving fundamentally differing cultural values of how the acts of creation and reproduction should be treated with respect. It will not end with "how will this fit into the existing (Western-centric) framework of copyright," but "what is the right thing to do."
[1] https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...
Anyone who sets their ethics based on the law is probably acting like a big jerk.
:)
huh? It was launched as a paid (subscription only) service before even getting leaked.
Looking back it seems many in the Japanese community on Twitter aren't happy with discovering their art is being used as training data. In the last week since the NovelAI announcement the number of banned artists on Danbooru has doubled, approximately the same amount as all the banned artists that were registered in the site's entire history.
Beyond the training issue there is the fact that the art was reposted on another site at all, which is what many take note of. It seems Danbooru's initial statement to Japanese users made it seem like it was NovelAI's fault that things blew over, without bringing up the reposting part that was the root issue, and it didn't seem to be an effective apology as a result.
Possibly that's why artists taking down from Danbooru , it's their right.
My understanding might be out of date, but as I recall it seemed that the code he thought was stolen from his open-source work actually originated from a third project that's MIT licensed.
1. Accusations that AUTOMATIC1111 (the web frontend developer) copied code from the NovelAI leak relating to the loading of hypernetworks
2. The leak revealing that Anlatan (the company behind NovelAI) had copied code from AUTOMATIC1111's repo (who, as above, Anlatan are accusing of copying from them) relating to the weighting of words. AUTOMATIC1111's repo does not have a permissive license to allow this
The third party MIT-licensed code is relevant to #1. Some code AUTOMATIC1111 was accused of copying from the leak (https://i.imgur.com/r1AkvBG.png) actually already appears in multiple older permissively-licensed public repos (https://github.com/lucidrains/perceiver-pytorch/blob/main/pe..., https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/main/ldm/mo...), one of which was credited in the readme by AUTOMATIC1111.
For #2, the Anlatan CEO blamed it on an intern (https://i.imgur.com/BFjKG1V.png). The leak shows that the offending code was committed by the CEO (https://i.imgur.com/aLiA2tr.png), which doesn't necessarily rule it out originating from an intern (e.g: "send me the code over teams to review and I'll add it") but doesn't look great.
From other examples I'd say AUTOMATIC1111 did get a bit sloppy in terms of not following clean-room design regarding the leak, but I'm inclined to give some leeway to a solo developer making a hugely popular public tool for free.
The additional drama includes that said open-source author has looked at the leaked code and concluded that it stole some of his open source work in the way it tunes text parameters.