What, summarize the submission? This is straight quoted from the link.
> The point is that basically all Stable Diffusion / DALL-E / MidJourney output is some shade of this
Yes, and that point is mistaken, or so generic as to be worthless. The network memorizes art for the same reason humans memorize art: because there's some art pieces we see so often that we can recall them easily.
Ask an artist to duplicate Starry Night or Scream from memory, you'll probably get at least a passable imitation. The more capable the artist, the more faithful it will be.
We know that SD can be made to plagiarize, given repeated training on a specific image. (This is just to say that a neural network can learn to regurgitate a sample, a capability that was not ever in question.) This is a far cry from the assertions that its art is generally plagiarized.
A human artist has been trained in the ethics and laws of their craft along with the skills required to make images.
A human artist, asked to clone Starry Night, will ask you what you are doing, and knows where the lines are between "a tribute", "plagiarism", and "outright forgery".
A human artist, asked to do work in the style of another artist, will have a certain respect for the other artist's ownership of their style. This is not a thing that is at all protected by intellectual property law but it is still a thing artists are trained to respect. There are exceptions - drawing just like your boss may be your job, drawing just like a living artist for a couple pieces is a useful way to break down their style and take a few parts of it to influence later work without going over the "style swipe" line, building your own work on the obvious foundation of an influential, dead artist's style is fine - but there are lines professionals will be very reluctant to cross.
For a relatively recent example of what happens if you break these unwritten laws, check out what happened when the American cartoonist Steve Giffen started doing a wholesale style swipe from the Argentinean cartoonist Muñoz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
Neural networks know none of these unwritten rules. Neither do the people who are training them. Feed it a bunch of work generated by a living artist and start making a profit off of that? Sure, no problem! Bonus points if your response to them getting pissed off about this is to call them a luddite who is resisting the inevitable, and should throw away a lifetime of passionate training and go get a new job.
Funny enough, this notion in terms of liability pairs very well with our legal system!
Even funnier, this notion in terms of authorship pairs very well with modern and contemporary art theory!
And here’s some very relevant precedent in both a legal and artistic sense:
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/richard-prin...
So fine, whatever, call it all shopping! Dr. Dre is just out there shopping. I don't think he minds if that's what you call it.
So here's the thing. Using a drum machine and sampling old funk songs from the 70s doesn't mean you end up with The Chronic. It's more likely that the average person ends up making something pretty mediocre. Hey, it would sure have sounded really impressive if it had been released in the 1940s, but with mass produced commercial music hardware a funky drum beat is just not that special any more.
The same applies to any kind of commodity tool. It's what the artist does with the tool in the context of a world filled with an audience and other artists.
Ok, time for my opinions! I think that DeviantArt style digital paintings are total trash. I don't care about the skill in rendering cliches hanging off of comically large breasts. Oh, it took a long time? I'm sure it would take a long time to dig a 10 foot deep hole in your backyard and then fill it up again as well, something I'd much rather experience as art than some video game hallucination... but you know what? Just because I don't like it doesn't mean that it isn't art, that it wasn't made by a "real" artist or that there isn't some audience that appreciates it (even if they're only two more YouTube videos away from becoming a full blown incels and driving a trucks through high school track meets).
Richard Prince speaks to me about authorship and what it means to make art in a world completely saturated with commercial imagery and part of that meaning comes from the fact that he had one of his assistants draw on top of someone else's photograph.
Listen, I have my issues with the world of fine art, the market manipulation, collusion, and the general fact that the art is primarily being made for the people who could afford it and not like, my neighbor. Regardless, I've found a lot of intellectual stimulation and new ways of appreciating aesthetic beauty through the works of 20th century modernists and postmodernists. Deeper meaning as opposed to a big shiny sword and a short skirt.
My favorite form of visual art is the watercolor, done quickly and out in public, capturing what the artist sees in the moment. It's the visual equivalent of the folk song played on an acoustic guitar. I like when the artist is a friend. I don't care if it isn't Rembrandt. I care that it moves me.
Stable Diffusion can easily render cliches hanging off of comically large breasts. In fact, I think that's what 90% of SD GPU cycles are currently working on. So to me Stable Diffusion is good at the part of the art that I'm not really that interested in. I'm interested in why the person chose the image that they did given these tools. That's where the meaning comes from! I mean, these tools run the same problems as drum machines and samplers... pretty soon their mediocre outputs become trite and unexpressive. I would imagine that artists that use SD do so in ways and using techniques that are not just the click of a button.
The corporations engaging in massive abuse of the grey areas of fair use to build these systems are, functionally, also very rich jerkasses who can afford to hire some very high-priced lawyers to make similar arguments.
This is absolutely not the point of the linked paper. It may be something you believe but you’re on the hook for providing evidence for it, this paper does not.
Or, you know, legislation. I'm kind of sick of everything being offloaded as a responsibility of the end-user as an excuse to externalize costs.
Plus, in this case it's not even like VHS or a photocopier, it's more like the printing press or the Jacquard loom: those with capital to invest in it benefit the most, at the expense of individuals being exploited.
Tools that are a burden to use, like tools that produce too many infringing works, are not going to sell as well as those that are not a burden to use.
This means that if someone makes a tool like this that also alerts the user of likely infringement it would perform better in a corporate, risk-averse marketplace.
Generating copyright images isn't a problem. Using them to make money is.
There is a lot of case law that supports this interpretation, Sony v Universal being the most important as it introduced the notion of “commercially significant non-infringing uses”, of which there will be many by the time this hits trial and the appeals process.
Lawyers for these companies know this and the faster that can get people building and buying tools that are clearly non-infringing the more likely that these models are seen as fair-use.
However, if they want to keep the lawyers at their customer’s firms happy they will really need to come up with a way to show users if a work is likely to infringe on an existing work.
The point is that basically all Stable Diffusion / DALL-E / MidJourney output is some shade of this; the only new data is that contrary to prior assertions, in some cases, it goes all the way to a verbatim copy.
I think there are some defensible stances one can take. One is to reject the idea of intellectual property. Another is to advocate for some specific legal or technical bar that the models would have to pass for it to qualify as "not stealing". Yet another is to argue it's a morally-agnostic technology like VHS or a photocopier, and the burden of using it in a socially acceptable way rests with the user.