Why would those celebs pay Stability any significant money for this, given they can get it for a one off payment of at most a few hundred dollars salary/opportunity cost by paying an intern to gather the images and feed it into the existing free tools for training a LoRA?

I think in this case the celebs are getting paid for using their likeness.

That sounds like the "lose money on every sale" philosophy of the first dot-com bubble, only without even the "but make it up in volume" second half.

You can already do that with reference images and even for inpainting. No training required. Also no need to pay actors outrageous sums to use their likeness in perpetuity as long as you do business. The licensing still tricky anyways, because even if the face is approved and certified, the entire body and surroundings would also have to be. Otherwise you basically re-invented the celebrity deepfake porn movement. I don't see any A-lister signing up for that.

I think the following isn't said often enough: there must be a reason why there are extremely few celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and it cannot be something abstract and bureaucratic as copyright concerns although those are problematic.

It's just not there yet. GenAI outputs aren't something audiences wants to hang on a wall. It's something that evoke sense of distress. Otherwise everyone's tracing them at least.

Most people mix up all the different kinds of intellectual property basically all the time[0], so while people say it's about copyright, I (currently) think it's more likely to be a mixture of "moral rights" (the right to be named as the creator of a work) and trademarks (registered or otherwise), and in the case of celebrities, "personality rights": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

> It's just not there yet. GenAI outputs aren't something audiences wants to hang on a wall.

People have a wide range of standards. Last summer I attended the We Are Developers event in Berlin, and there were huge posters that I could easily tell were from AI due to the eyes not matching; more recently, I've used (a better version) to convert a photo of a friend's dog into a renaissance oil painting, and it was beyond my skill to find the flaws with it… yet my friend noticed instantly.

Also, even with "real art", Der Kuss (by Klimt) is widely regarded as being good art, beautiful, romantic, etc. — yet to me, the man looks like he has a broken neck, while the woman looks like she's been decapitated at the shoulder then had her head rotated 90° and reattached via her ear.

[0] This is also why people look at a Google street view image with a ©2017 Google[1] tiled over on a blue sky and say "LOL, Google's trying to own the sky", or why people even on this very forum ask how some new company can trademark a descriptive term like "GPT"[2], seemingly surprised by this being possible even though there's already a very convenient example of e.g. Hasbro already having "Transformers".

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7319434,10.8655264,3a,77.2y,...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35692476

> Der Kuss (by Klimt) is widely regarded as being good art,

The point is, generative AI images are not widely regarded as good art. They're often seen as passable for some filler use cases and hard to tell apart from human generations, but not "good".

It's not not-there-yet because AI sometimes generates sixth fingers, it's something another level from Gustav Klimt, Damien Hirst, Kusama Yayoi, or the likes[0]. It could be that genAI is leaving something that human artist would filter out, or because images are too disorganized that they appear to us to be encoding malice or other negative emotions, or maybe I'm just wrong and it's all about anatomy.

But whatever the reason is, IMO, it's way too rarely considered good, gaining too few supportive celebrities and artists and audiences, to work.

0: I admit I'm not well versed with contemporary art, or art in general for that matter

> The point is, generative AI images are not widely regarded as good art. They're often seen as passable for some filler use cases and hard to tell apart from human generations, but not "good".

> It's not not-there-yet because AI sometimes generates sixth fingers, it's something another level from Gustav Klimt

My point is: yes AI is different — it's better. (Or, less provocatively: better by my specific standards).

Always? No. But I chose Der Kuss specifically because of the high regard in which it is held, and yet to my eye it messes with anatomy as badly as if he had put 6 fingers on one of the hands (indeed, my first impression when I look closely at the hand of the man behind the head of the woman, is that the fingers art too long and thumb looks like a finger).

> and yet to my eye it messes with anatomy

wait what? Isn't that missing the point of expressionism? Klimt's Judith I is basically a photo, surely he can draw sh*t if he wanted to?

But myriad predecessors such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, da Vinci, et al., have done enough in realism, and also photography was becoming more viable and more prevalent, that artists basically started diversifying? Isn't that what lead to various forms of early 20th century arts like surrealism(super-real -ism), cubism, etc?

I don't mean offense but that's just, surely that level of understanding can't be basis of policy decisions when it comes to moral rights and licensing discussions and "artists should just use AI" and such???

I think you're conflating "good" in the sense of "competent" with "good" in the sense of "ethical" or "legal".

I am asserting here that the AI is (at its best) more competent, not any of the other things.

I suspect that the law will follow the economics, just as it often has done for everything else before — you're communicating with me via a device named after the job that the device made redundant ("computer").

But I said "often" not "always", because the business leaders ignoring the workers they were displacing 200 years ago led to riots, and eventually to the Communist Manifesto. I wouldn't discount this repeating.

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I've just looked up "Judith I" (I recognise the art, just not the name), and I don't even understand why you're holding this up as an example of "basically a photo".

As for the other artists demonstrating realism: photography made realism redundant despite being initially dismissed as "not real art". Artists were forced to diversify, because a small box of chemistry was allowing unskilled people do their old job faster, cheaper, and better. Photography only became an art in its own right when people found ways to make it hard, for example by travelling the world and using it to document their travels, or with increasingly complex motion pictures.

I suspect that art fulfils the same role in humans as tails fulfil in peacocks: an expensive signal to demonstrate power, such that the difficulty is the entire point and anything which makes it easy is seen as worse than not even trying. This is also why forgeries are a big deal, instead of being "that's a nice picture", and why an original painting can retain a high price despite (or perhaps because of) a large number of extremely cheap prints being plastered onto everything from dorm rooms to chocolate wrappers.

> sign up all the celebrities and artists who are cool with AI

"Cool with AI" and "sell my likeness so nobody ever needs to hire me again" are too close for comfort on this one.

And also, here's a way to just make so much pornography of me.

I'm betting the list of folks who would sign the AI license are pretty small, and mostly irrelevant.