this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023

223 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

technology@beehaw.org

43,465 readers

2,142 active

211 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 4 years ago

moderators

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

Greg Rutkowski Was Removed From Stable Diffusion, But AI Artists Brought Him Back - Decrypt (decrypt.co)

submitted 3 years ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

246 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski's style against his wishes using a LoRA model. While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski's art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5. The debate highlights the blurry line between innovation and infringement in the emerging field of AI art.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 11 points 3 years ago (2 children)

By that logic I can sell anything I download from the web while also claiming credit for it, right?

Downloading to view != downloading to fuel my business.

parent

hideshow 4 child comments

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

No, and that's such a ridiculous leap of logic that I can't come up with anything else to say except no. Just no. What gave you that idea?

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Because this thread was about the companies taking art feeding it into their machine a D claiming not to have stolen it.

Then you compared that to clicking a link.

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Yes, because it's comparable to clicking a link.

You said:

By that logic I can sell anything I download from the web while also claiming credit for it, right?

And that's the logic I can't follow. Who's downloading and selling Rutkowski's work? Who's claiming credit for it? None of that is being done in the first place, let alone being claimed to be "ok."

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Because that is what they're doing, just with extra steps.

The company pulled down his work, fed it to their AI, then sold the AI as their product.

Their AI wouldn't work, at all, without the art they "clicked on".

So there is a difference between me viewing an image in my browser and me turning their work into something for resell under my name. Adding extra steps doesn't change that.

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

The company pulled down his work, fed it to their AI, then sold the AI as their product.

If you read the article, not even that is what's going on here. Stability AI:

Removed Rutkowski's art from their training set.
Doesn't sell their AI as a product.
Someone else added Rutkowski back in by training a LoRA on top of Stability's AI.
They aren't selling their LoRA as a product either.

So none of what you're objecting to is actually happening. All cool? Or will you just come up with some other thing to object to?

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 3 points 3 years ago

But they did.

(I'm on mobile so my formatting is meh)

They put his art in, only when called out did they remove it.

Once removed, they did nothing to prevent it being added back.

As for them selling the product, or not, at this point, they still used the output of his labor to build their product.

That's the thing, everyone trying to justify why it's okay for these companies to do it keep leaning on semantics, legal definitions or "well, back during the industrial revolution..." to try and get around the fact that what these companies are doing is unethical. They're taking someone else's labor, without compensation or consent.

parent

[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

No, but you can download Rutkovski's art, learn from it how to paint in his exact style and create art in that style.

Which is exactly what the image generation AIs do. They're perhaps just a bit too good at it, certainly way better than an average human.

Which makes it complicated and morally questionable depending on how exactly you arrive at the model and what you do with it, but you can't definitively say it's copyright infringement.

parent

hideshow 4 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

You keep comparing what one person, given MONTHS or YEARS of their life could do with one artists work to a machine doing NOT THE SAME THING can do with thousands of artists work.

The machine is not learning their style, it's taking pieces of the work and dropping it in with other people's work then trying to blend it into a cohesive whole.

The analogy fails all over the place.

And I don't care about copyright, I'm not an artist or an IP lawyer, or whatever. I can just look at a company stealing the labor of an entire industry and see it as bad.

parent

hideshow 4 child comments

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

The speed doesn't factor into it. Modern machines can stamp out metal parts vastly faster than blacksmiths with a hammer and anvil can, are those machines doing something wrong?

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

The machine didn't take the blacksmiths work product and flood the market with copies.

The machine wasn't fed 10,000 blacksmith made hammers then told to, sorta, copy those.

Justify this all you want, throw all the bad analogies at it you want, it's still bad.

Again, if this wasn't bad, the companies would have asked for permission. They didn't.

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

That's not the aspect you were arguing about in the comment I'm responding to. You said:

You keep comparing what one person, given MONTHS or YEARS of their life could do with one artists work to a machine doing NOT THE SAME THING can do with thousands of artists work.

And that's what I'm talking about here. The speed with which the machine does its work is immaterial.

Though frankly, if the machine stamping out parts had somehow "learned" how to do it by looking at thousands of existing parts, that would be fine too. So I don't see any problem here.

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

And that's where we have a fundamental difference of opinion.

A company hiring an engineer to design a machine that makes hammers, then hiring one (or more) people to make the machine to then make hammers is the company benefiting from the work product of people they hired. While this may impact the blacksmith they did not steal from the blacksmith.

A company taking someone else's work product to then build their product, without compensation or consent, is theft of labor.

I don't see those as equitable situations.

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

At least now you're admitting that it's a difference of opinion, that's progress.

You think it should be illegal to do this stuff. Fine. I think copyright duration has been extended ridiculously long and should be a flat 30 years at most. But in both cases our opinions differ from what the law actually says. Right now there's nothing illegal about training an AI off of someone's lawfully-obtained published work, which is what was done here.

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 2 points 3 years ago

I'm not a fan of our copyright system. IMO, it's far to long and should also include clauses that place anything not available for (easy) access in the public domain.

Also, I'm not talking about what laws say, should say or anything like that.

I've just been sharing my opinion that it's unethical and I've not seen any good explanation for how stealing someone else's labor is "good".

parent

[–] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 3 points 3 years ago*

Speed aside, machines don't have the same rights as humans do, so the idea that they are "learning like a person so it's fine" is like saying a photocopier machine's output ought to be treated as an independent work because it replicated some other work, and it's just so good and fast at it. AI's may not output identical work, but they still rely on taking an artist's work as input, something the creator ought to have a say over.

parent

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

What makes it even trickier is that taking AI generated art and using it however you want definitively isn’t copyright infringement because only works by humans can be protected by copyright.

parent

hideshow 4 child comments

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 3 points 3 years ago

But that's not what they did, converting it into a set of instructions a computer can use to recreate it is just adding steps.

And, yes, that's what they've done else we wouldn't find pieces of others works mixed in.

Also, even if that was how it worked, it's still theft of someone's else's labor to feed your business.

If it wasn't, they would have asked for permission first.

parent

[–] Pulse@dormi.zone 1 point 3 years ago

I think my initial reply to you was meant to go somewhere else but Connect keeps dropping me to the bottom of the thread instead of where the reply I'm trying to get to is.

I'm going to leave it (for consistency sake) but I don't think it makes much sense as a reply to your post.

Sorry about that!

parent