I'm not aware of it occurring for any copyrighted inputs, but it occurs for many famous artworks-- it's nearly impossible to convince Stable Diffusion to style "Mona Lisa" at all.
It's probably helpful to think of embeddings for generative models in a similar way; it's a very specific embedding function, like a locality sensitive hash, which doesn't require actually storing the data.
Trademarks are even broader.
Arguably, "learning" and "compression" are the same thing.
In this sense, you can view SD as a compression algorithm where the decoder is the model, the compressed file is the prompt + tweakable params, and there aren't any error checks made, so you can feed random data into the decoder and get something out.
But you certainly can get things like watermarks without any real memorization. Watermarks have been a nuisance in GANS, for example - the StyleGAN CATS model was filled with watermarks or attempted meme text captions, even though the cats were so nightmarish that they obviously weren't 'plagiarized' so nobody made a big deal about it back then and they understood the GAN had simply learned that watermarks were a thing in many real images and it would try to imitate them where plausible in a sample.
There's a specific prompt which makes a human artist produce such an image without img2img too: "Please draw the Mona Lisa". There - you just did it in your head while reading this comment!
I doubt you're suggesting SD, Dall-E, etc., are producing parodies so bringing in parody considerations muddies the water a lot. Also, Shakespeare's works are out of copyright.
If you sell a painting signed with a [facsimile] signature of Dali then it's pretty hard to say you didn't copy the signature, as a minimum. Thats likely to be a trademark violation too. Now, suppose you include aspects in the image specifically associated with the artist, and a signature, ... there's no way to genuinely deny that is a derivative.
That's not what's happening here though.
If you look at the original tweet (https://twitter.com/LaurynIpsum/status/1599953586699767808) it seems that the complaint is about the "mangled remains of an artist’s signature". I don't see any examples where it's actually copying the signature of a specific artist.
(Please do share an example of that if there is one.)
That's not what it did, of course. But if you start from the assumption...
I agree with the rest of your post, but this point seems a bit uncharitable.
I think the claims would be:
1. It's a breach of copyright for Megaface to share the images in any case without attribution & replicating the CC-NC license. It would (presumably) be OK assuming Megaface were to correctly apply the CC-NC licenses to the dataset.
2. It's a breach of copyright for anyone consuming Megaface (e.g. Google) to use those images for commercial purposes.
And your argument for SD applies to 2. that regardless of license, it's OK to create a transformative work. But it still doesn't get Megaface off the hook for 1. - distributing those images without the license.
> SD et al are defended on the grounds of being transformative use they do not distribute (ie copy) the original training images, and they are not a derivative work due to transformativeness, so the license of the original images is completely irrelevant.
If this is irrelevant, why is Stability.AI creating an "opt out" system for artists? It's almost like they know they are copying digital artists works without their explicit consent. This wouldn't be an issue if they only used images in the public domain.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/16/1065247/artists-...
And we both know that Stable Diffusion have Dreambooth which you have to pay to use the platform, so this is clearly not fair use.
https://platform.stability.ai/docs/getting-started/credits-a...
It might also be because there's a huge backlash against the concept of stable diffusion in certain circles. Whether or not that backlash matches the legalities, or if their logic is sound at all, has absolutely nothing to do with it.
They definitely are, and I deliberately chose a public domain writer for my example to get away from the narrow procedural grounds and focus on the issue: does generating a 'signature' or 'watermark' prove copying? No, of course not, and that's true whether you are in or out of the public domain.
> If this is irrelevant, why is Stability.AI creating an "opt out" system for artists?
What is prudent or nice or moral or good PR != legal. (And vice-versa, of course.)
The criticism here is that distributing (copying) the original image violates the non-commercial clause of the original images because someone, somewhere, might somehow have made money in some way because the dataset exists; but as they somewhat lamely acknowledge later, what counts as 'commercial' has never been clearly defined, and it probably can't be defined (because for most people 'commercial' seems to be defined by 'ewww'), and this is why CC-NC licenses are heavily discouraged by WMF and other FLOSS groups and weren't part of FLOSS from the beginning even though Stallman was in large part attacking commercial exploitation.