Artist function is not limited to the act of producing the creation. Their value comes from creating the methods of exploring ideas or feelings and not from the output itself. Guernica is not invaluable because no one else can draw it and Picasso is not infamous because drew the best lines.

Just to be clear, I think art made with AI also can have value because it's a tool after all. My concern is, it breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's not OK.

> My concern is, it breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's not OK.

Why not? This is a website that's filled with programmers, almost all of our wealth is built on the skulls of jobs that once existed, and those programs were built without the consent of the people whose jobs were automated away, often through observing and rewriting the processes they used to do.

The standard, this has been going on for decades, the only reason it's getting backlash is because this is a group of people who never expected to have this happen to them.

We automate people's jobs, not taking their intellectual properties and build machines that can churn endless versions of it. The people put out of work by computers no longer work and they were paid in full for the work they did, unlike the people who developed intellectual property on their own dime hoping to be compensated later only to find out that their work was copied and distributed by the computer people.

Automated jobs do the physical work. Here the computer is redistributing the physical work made by the artists, however much diluted. AI cannot make art on its own, it needs to be fed physical art and then be told what it is and what to do with it. It is not automation, it is simply a data manipulating tool.

to me it's less about the process and jobs lost and more about some feeling loss related to the excitement about removing expression and experience from a domain for honestly very little real benefit

continuing to transform things which in part centered around exploration, discovery and experimentation into something cold and kind of dumb

like we will make some interesting things but it's the general trend of modern society that upsets people everything just getting easier/worse faster

That is also my feeling. There is nothing like having a pile of raw materials, or a set of new inks or water color pencils, etc. and to explore the boundaries of what you can do with them. Art being made from a menu seems rather sad.

On the other hand, paints and canvases are very very expensive, making art a domain of the rich. You can use the ai tools at the library, making art more proletarian.

I think the pushback is around status and elitism, and that people with certain backgrounds are societally expected to be not making art.

I picked up some nice canvases recently at the dollar tree. Masonite, wood and paper can be painted on. Masonite is actually preferable for acryllic paints and it is quite affordable, as are acryllic paints themselves. You can paint with coffee grinds and beet juice...the exploration is endless. I come from a family of seven living in the backwoods and most of my artist friends would not nearly qualify as rich. I had a teacher once who made the most beautiful art out of entirely recycled metal junk. Art is a reflection of culture, top to bottom and ingenuity plays a big role. Ingenuity is accessible to everybody.

What do you guys think Excel spreadsheets did? Back in the day people had pages with lots of boxes and did the calculations manually. The processes, terms, techniques, were all human inventions and shamelessly replicated by machines.

Almost everything computers do was once done by a person, and the people who did those jobs laid the framework for which the processes were automated through.

This has happened dozens of times. My entire job is writing software that was written in the 80s, which replaced customer service reps who are needed in the '70s, and the computer does what they used to do. It took what they invented, their processes, and made the computer do it.

This is what automation is. It's always built on top of, and replaced, human beings who used to do those jobs.

Ironically… Picasso was notorious for idea theft and other artists banned him from their studios.

It's completely different. The customizable fonts did not violate copyright.

We have no idea if images by Stable Diffusion violates copyright, there is no legal precedent.

Technically we do have examples of stable diffusion violating copyright, it will generate some exact clone images if you give it the right prompt and that image exists a few hundred times in the training data.

Just because stable diffusion can be used to violate copyright doesn't mean it only does.

For something like 11 images which were accidentally repeated hundreds of times in the training data this is true. They're more the exception that proves the rule.

That’s a sloppy answer. Right and wrong isn’t defined by how copyright law is written right now.

That’s kind of the whole point of this debate. Should we change the laws and if so, how?

Copyright already cover characters and stories. Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted

Style itself is not copyrighted, and that's a good thing.

I can create copyrighted content privately. I cannot share it. Law doesn't forbid imagination, wether human or ai and that's a good thing. But I cannot distribute these private rendition already without violating the content owner copyright.

Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.

Are there cases where an ai and a human can generate the same media but which result in the media having different legality?

> Law seem pretty complete and well defined to me.

I don't think lawyers would agree with you at all.

> Just because an ai (or a human) comes out with a copyrighted character in a novel pose, it doesn't mean it's not copyrighted

My understanding is that there isn't a legal consensus on whether or not thats true. Copyright law wasn't written with AI generated art in mind. For a work to be copyrightable, my understanding is that it requires that you can make a "sweat off my brow" argument. Ie, you had to work to create something.

Does an AI count? We don't know. Or to put it in other terms, we haven't (collectively) decided as a society whether it should be copyrightable.

On the other side, "fair use" arguments are also at play here. If I train a 1bn parameter model on 5bn images, I could probably make an argument that 1/5th of a f16 probably constitutes fair use of copyrighted work. If that argument holds, I can train my model with impunity on any amount of copyrighted work so long as my model is small and the number of training examples is large.

Will that argument sway a court room? I have no idea. Is that fair? I don't know!

The law is decided by people. And we haven't had AIs like stable diffusion and ChatGPT before, so the laws haven't been written with this stuff in mind. There isn't even a legal precedent yet for how the current laws should apply to AI art. Speculating is fun, but speculating on how a judge will apply old laws to a totally novel problem is a fool's errand.

If you want to read about fun edge cases to copyright law, look up the history of copyright law for maps (can facts be copyrighted?) and how that interacts with trap streets.

This stuff is hairy and complicated even for lawyers. As an outsider, boldly claiming that copyright law is simple only demonstrates that you don't understand law. It'd be like a lawyer boldly arguing (with no knowledge) that compilers are simple.

Training method and recall are of no consequences because copyright law doesn't deal with technology for the most part. There is a test to wether the image is stored or not which is interesting here for the topic at hand, but it's always in the context of distribution.

The worst is that weight may be considered storage, but the point is... Law already covers that. Because it doesn't concern with technology, but with results of actions.

That is the whole problem with the argumentation, law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.

> law is technology agnostic, just adding a layer of redirection doesn't matter, because tm it cares about the input and the output not what happens in between.

What makes you think that?

The law cares about whatever lawyers decide to care about. There was a case a few years ago where (if memory serves) a black woman sued an insurance company for discrimination after the insurance company refused to provide her cover. The company was using a neural net to decide whether to cover someone. The court demanded they explain the neural networks' decision - and of course, they couldn't. The insurance company lost the case.

In the aftermath they moved from a neural net to a decision tree based ML system. The decision tree made slightly worse decisions, but they figured if it lowered their legal exposure, it was worth it. With a decision tree, they can print out the decision tree if they were ever sued again and hand it to a judge.

> law is technology agnostic

Clearly not in this case.

There's plenty of other examples if you go looking. In criminal law, they care a great deal about the technology used in forensic analysis - both in its strengths and weaknesses.

If you don't know much about law, being humble and wrong will serve you better than being confident and wrong.

It's worth noting that "worse decisions" is from the point of view of the insurance company, which would prefer to act racist if only that pesky law didn't stop them, and will continue to do so to the extent they can get away with it.

Curious that you assume the insurance company was racist / malicious in this case. There's nothing to suggest that reading in the story I gave.

As you said, they were sued for discrimination and lost.

Also, differential insurance coverage tends to be one of the worst ways that systemic racism is perpetuated.

Insurance is not copyright and the case is not even the same subject matter.

And again that case is technology agnostic, discrimination law requires you to be able to provide proof that results are non discriminatory, law itself doesn't care that it was specifically a neural network, it only cares about the end result, the firm lost because it failed to provide required data about their decision process, not because it was using neural networks, that they used a neural network was irrelevant on its own, and it could have been fine if they baked explainability in it.

This doesn't seem too complicated to me. An AI trained on images that produces a new image even if in same style as the source database is not violating copyright. It sucks for artists but that's not an argument that current law bans it. If current law banned it, every artist who was inspired in their work by other styles or image would be violating copyright. E.g, all comic book artists study and are inspired by other comic book artists. I don't doubt there will be attempts by courts and/or legislatures hostile to AI to make up new law to impose some sort of penalty/license fee on AI generated images. One approach would be make an artists style a trademark (for all I know that is already established law but I doubt it). I doubt the effort will be successful as there will be a gazillion ways around it or it will result in a relatively small number of monopolies of protected styles which would seem even a worse outcome than a flood of AI generated art. Ultimately I think artists will need to be even more careful about branding and probably will insist on prominent displays of their signatures and promoting the idea that a premium should be placed on human generated art probably through some sort of "certified human art" label. It definitely will increase the supply of art and likely decrease the number of artists that can survive financially off their work.

> This doesn't seem too complicated to me. An AI trained on images that produces a new image even if in same style as the source database is not violating copyright

Yeah, software "doesn't seem too complicated" to non-programmers too.

No offense, but if you aren't a lawyer then your opinion on legal matters has about as much veracity as a dentist explaining how software is made.

I have a certain amount of scorn for non-engineers telling me how their app idea is a weekend job and I should do it for free. I'm sure lawyers feel the same way about us when we claim there are easy answers around stable diffusion and copyright law.

The AI was trained without permission on copyrighted data. If it was as cut and dry as you claim then why do both parties think its worth going to court?

I don't know much about the law, but I know enough to recognise when its a job for the lawyers to figure out.

> Right and wrong isn’t defined by how copyright law is written right now

It's a good thing I never mentioned right or wrong.

Incidentally, copyright law etc on fonts is very interesting. Many places license their fonts via in-page JavaScript. However, I believe that such a protection against the font designer doesn’t necessarily apply if for instance you use the font to create a logo. ( I’m sure I’ve missed some nuance here.)

Stable Diffusion isn't violating copyright for the same reason artists aren't violating copyright when they look at a bunch of images and make something similar.