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Greg Rutkowski Was Removed From Stable Diffusion, But AI Artists Brought Him Back - Decrypt (decrypt.co)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

Taking someone's work product and converting it, without compensation and consent, into your profit is theft of labor.

Adding extra steps, like, say, training an AI, doesn't absolve the theft of labor.

We're it ethical, the companies doing it would have asked for permission and been given cinsent. They didn't.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Taking someone’s work product and converting it, without compensation and consent, into your profit is theft of labor.

    That's not what's going on here. The finished product contains only the style of the artist that the AI was trained on, and style is not copyrightable. Which is a damn good thing, as humans have been learning from each other's "work products" and mimicking each others' styles since time immemorial.

    BTW, theft of labor means failing to pay wages or provide employee benefits owed to an employee by contract or law. You're using that term incorrectly too, Greg Rutkowski wasn't hired to do anything for the people who trained the AI off of his work.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    No, I'm not using it incorrectly, I'm just not concerned with the legal definition as I'm not a lawyer or anyone tied up in this mess.

    If you do a thing, and it takes time and skill to do it, then someone copies it, they stole your labor.

    Saying they "copied his style", the style he spent a lifetime crafting, then trying to say they didn't benefit, at no cost, to the labor he put into crafting that style because "well actually, the law says..." is a bad argument as it tries to minimize what they did.

    If their product could not exist without his labor, and they did not pay him for that labor, they stole his labor.

    For, like, the fourth time in this thread: were this ethical, they would have asked for permission, they didn't.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    If you're just going to make up the meanings of words there's not much point in using them any further.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    But I'm not.

    You're trying to say that, because this one law doesn't say it's bad it must therefore be good (or at least okay).

    I'm simply saying that if you profit from someone else's labor, without compensating them (or at least getting their consent), you've stolen the output of that labor.

    I'm happy to be done with this, I didn't expect my first Lemmy comment to get any attention, but no, I'm not going to suddenly be okay with this just because the legal definition of "stealing labor" is to narrow to fit this scenario.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    The law doesn't even say it's okay. What FaceDeer is referring to is that copyright infringement is a different category of crime than theft, which is defined as pertaining to physical property. It's a meaningless point because, as you said, this isn't a courtroom and we aren't lawyers and the concept of intellectual property theft is well understood.

    It's a thing engineers and lawyers often seem to do, to take the way terms are used in a particular professional jargon and assume that that usage is "the real" usage.

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