SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The AI software Stable Diffusion has a remarkable ability to turn text into images. When I asked the software to draw "Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonald's sign," for example, it generated the picture you see above.
Stable Diffusion can do this because it was trained on hundreds of millions of example images harvested from across the web. Some of these images were in the public domain or had been published under permissive licenses such as Creative Commons. Many others were not—and the world's artists and photographers aren't happy about it.
In January, three visual artists filed a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, the startup that created Stable Diffusion. In February, the image-licensing giant Getty filed a lawsuit of its own.
[...]
The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit describe Stable Diffusion as a "complex collage tool" that contains "compressed copies" of its training images. If this were true, the case would be a slam dunk for the plaintiffs.But experts say it's not true. Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had "technical inaccuracies" and was "stretching the truth a lot." Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images.
Related:
Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer. (20230324)
Paper: Stable Diffusion "Memorizes" Some Images, Sparking Privacy Concerns (20230206)
Getty Images Targets AI Firm For 'Copying' Photos (20230117)
Pixel Art Comes to Life: Fan Upgrades Classic MS-DOS Games With AI (20220904)
A Startup Wants to Democratize the Tech Behind DALL-E 2, Consequences be Damned (20220817)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edinlinux on Tuesday April 04 2023, @05:17PM (2 children)
This raises a few questions..
1)Is the data of 'mouse' and the golden arches in our brains (the equiv to the AI databank) also a copyright violation? I mean it is data in a processing system. Are we 'violating copyright' by simply 'knowning' what the 'mouse' looks like as well as the golden arches
2)The obvious conclusion is if we get mired in legal problems in this country, the AI research and development will go to other countries like China, Russia..etc. where this isn't an issue at all. Note that similar legal problems are why large infrastructure projects (bullet trains, mass transit) are also basically impossible to do in the USA anymore.. just we fall behind in all areas where 'legal' gets in the way like this
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday April 05 2023, @07:25AM
1) Are you giving people copies of that image on demand, potentially for commercial gain or to advertise your "brain" company? No. It's not illegal to "think" of Mickey Mouse. It's illegal to put him on a T-Shirt and/or claim it's an official Mickey Mouse product.
2) You think Russia doesn't enforce its rights when it smells profit? I think you should read up on the story of Tetris, for instance (the movie is okay, but largely fabrication, try finding a real history). You think China would let an AI spew out Tiananmen Square images without having something to say about it?
"Legal" doesn't get in the way of infrastructure, it stops someone building a highway through your back garden or surrounding your little country house with skyscrapers or ghettos making it unsaleable.
Infrastructure projects in the US fail because infrastructure needs huge investment without profit first. Then you resell that service/infrastructure to for-profit companies who could never afford to do it on their own. Train lines, highways, space travel, telecoms (of old, it's easier now), postal services etc.
You *PUT MONEY INTO* infrastructure, there's no profit in it except exceptionally long-term (and hence it's good for government, useless for private companies to try it). You *MAKE MONEY* by utilising existing infrastructure to your advantage (for your workers, your services, etc.).
Literally, infrastructure is a socialist venture - everyone contributing so everyone benefits - and America doesn't understand that you can't be an entirely capitalist or an entirely socialist country. Infrastructure is socialism. Healthcare, transport, electrical networks, water supply, etc. Service provision on the back of that infrastructure is capitalist, and that's how you pay it back.
But without spending BILLIONS first, with no expectation of return, nobody is going to make profit. In the UK, the only original cable TV supplier went bankrupt because it was trying to do it all on its own. Its successor never actually installed that much more cable in 30+ years since.
It's the one thing Musk could be useful for, by the way, except he has no intention of actually providing for people, he's still expecting to get every penny he spends back.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2023, @10:17AM
No. But once you start drawing it and spreading copies it could be copyright violation (and probably trademark violation).
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_v._Koons [wikipedia.org]
Where even if you change the colors and put flowers on the mouse's head it could still be considered infringement in some scenarios.