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.
While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski’s art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5.
What kind of argument is that supposed to be? We’ve stolen his art before so it’s fine? Dickheads. This whole AI thing is already sketchy enough, at least respect the artists that explicitly want their art to be excluded.
His art was not “stolen.” That’s not an accurate word to describe this process with.
It’s not so much that “it was done before so it’s fine now” as “it’s a well-understood part of many peoples’ workflows” that can be used to justify it. As well as the view that there was nothing wrong with doing it the first time, so what’s wrong with doing it a second time?
pirating photoshop is a well-understood part of many peoples’ workflows. that doesn’t make it legal or condoned by adobe
I don’t know what this has to do with anything. Nothing was “pirated”, either.
His work was used in a publicly available product without license or compensation. Including his work in the training dataset was, to the online vernacular use of the word, piracy.
They violated his copyright when they used his work to make their shit.
The product does not contain his work. So no copying was done, therefore no “piracy.”
i’m not making a moral comment on anything, including piracy. i’m saying “but it’s part of my established workflow” is not an excuse for something morally wrong.
only click here if you understand analogy and hyperbole
if i say “i can’t write without kicking a few babies first”, it’s not an excuse to keep kicking babies. i just have to stop writing, or maybe find another workflow
The difference is that kicking babies is illegal whereas training and running an AI is not. Kind of a big difference.
did you click the thing saying that you understand analogies?
You’re using an analogy as the basis for an argument. That’s not what analogies are for. Analogies are useful explanatory tools, but only within a limited domain. Kicking a baby is not the same as creating an artwork, so there are areas in which they don’t map to each other.
You can’t dodge flaws in your argument by adding a “don’t respond unless you agree with me” clause on your comment.
Yes, it was.
One human artist can, over a life time, learn from a few artists to inform their style.
These AI setups are telling ALL the art from ALL the artists and using them as part of a for profit business.
There is no ethical stance for letting billion dollar tech firms hoover up all the art ever created to the try and remix it for profit.
No, it wasn’t. Theft is a well-defined word. When you steal something you take it away from them so that they don’t have it any more.
It wasn’t even a case of copyright violation, because no copies of any of Rutkowski’s art were made. The model does not contain a copy of any of the training data (with an asterisk for the case of overfitting, which is very rare and which trainers do their best to avoid). The art it produces in Rutkowski’s style is also not a copyright violation because you can’t copyright a style.
There is no ethical stance for letting billion dollar tech firms hoover up all the art ever created to the try and remix it for profit.
So how about the open-source models? Or in this specific instance, the guy who made a LoRA for mimicking Rutkowski’s style, since he did it free of charge and released it for anyone to use?
Yes copies were made. The files were downloaded, one way or another (even as a hash, or whatever digital asset they claim to translate them into) then fed to their machines.
If I go into a Ford plant, take pictures of their equipment, then use those to make my own machines, it’s still IP theft, even if I didn’t walk out with the machine.
Make all the excuses you want, you’re supporting the theft of other people’s life’s work then trying to claim it’s ethical.
Yes copies were made. The files were downloaded, one way or another (even as a hash, or whatever digital asset they claim to translate them into) then fed to their machines.
They were put on the Internet for that very purpose. When you visit a website and view an image there a copy of it is made in your computer’s memory. If that’s a copyright violation then everyone’s equally boned. When you click this link you’re doing exactly the same thing.
Here is where a rhethorical sleight of hand is used by AI proponents.
It’s displayed for people’s appreciation. AI is not people, it is a tool. It’s not entitled to the same rights as people, and the model it creates based on artists works is itself a derivative work.
Even among AI proponents, few believe that the AI itself is an autonomous being who ought to have rights over their own artworks, least of all the AI creators.
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.
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?
no one’s art is being “stolen”. you’re mistaken.
That’s true, but only in the sense that theft and copyright infringement are fundamentally different things.
Generating stuff from ML training datasets that included works without permissive licenses is copyright infringement though, just as much as simply copying and pasting parts of those works in would be. The legal definition of a derivative work doesn’t care about the techological details.
(For me, the most important consequence of this sort of argument is that everything produced by Github Copilot must be GPL.)
It’s actually not copyright infringement at all.
Edit: and even if it was, copyright infringement is a moral right, it’s a good thing. copyright is theft.
Edit: …copyright infringement is a moral right, it’s a good thing. copyright is theft.
Except when it’s being used to enforce copyleft.
It’s likely copyright infringement but that’s for the courts to decide, not you or me. Additionally, “copyright infringement is a moral right” seems fairly wrong. Copyright laws currently are too steep and I can agree with that but if I make a piece of art like a book, video game, or movie, do I not deserve to protect it in order to get money? I’d argue that because we live in a capitalistic society so, yes, I deserve to get paid for the work I did. If we lived in a better society that met the basic needs (or even complex needs) of every human then I can see copyright laws being useless.
At the end of the day, the artists just want to be able to afford to eat, play games, and have shelter. Why in the world is that a bad thing in our current society? You can’t remove copyright law without first removing capitalism.
Additionally, “copyright infringement is a moral right” seems fairly wrong. Copyright laws currently are too steep and I can agree with that but if I make a piece of art like a book, video game, or movie, do I not deserve to protect it in order to get money? I’d argue that because we live in a capitalistic society so, yes, I deserve to get paid for the work I did.
No. And it’s not just me saying that; the folks who wrote the Copyright Clause (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson) would disagree with you, too.
The natural state of a creative work is for it to be part of a Public Domain. Ideas are fundamentally different from property in the sense that property’s value comes from its exclusive use by its owner, wheras an idea’s value comes from spreading it, i.e., giving it away to others.
Here’s how Jefferson described it:
stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me. that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benvolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. inventions then cannot in nature be a subject of property. society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility. but this may, or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.
Thus we see the basis for the rationale given in the Copyright Clause itself: “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” which is very different from creating some kind of entitlement to creators because they “deserve” it.
The true basis for copyright law in the United States is as a utilitarian incentive to encourage the creation of more works - a bounty for creating. Ownership of property is a natural right which the Constitution pledges to protect (see also the 4th and 5th Amendments), but the temporary monopoly called copyright is merely a privilege granted at the pleasure of Congress. Essentially, it’s a lease from the Public Domain, for the benefit of the Public. It is not an entitlement; what the creator of the work “deserves” doesn’t enter into it.
And if the copyright holder abuses his privilege such that the Public no longer benefits enough to be worth it, it’s perfectly just and reasonable for the privilege to be revoked.
At the end of the day, the artists just want to be able to afford to eat, play games, and have shelter. Why in the world is that a bad thing in our current society? You can’t remove copyright law without first removing capitalism.
This is a bizarre, backwards argument. First of all, a government-granted monopoly is the antethesis of the “free market” upon which capitalism is supposedly based. Second, granting of monopolies is hardly the only way to accomplish either goal of “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts” or of helping creators make a living!
That’s incorrect in my opinion. AI learns patterns from its training data. So do humans, by the way. It’s not copy-pasting parts of image or code.
AI doesn’t “learn” anything, it’s not even intelligent. If you show a human artwork of a person they’ll be able to recognize that they’re looking at a human, how their limbs and expression works, what they’re wearing, the materials, how gravity should affect it all, etc. AI doesn’t and can’t know any of that, it just predicts how things should look based on images that have been put in it’s database. It’s a fancy Xerox.
Why do people who have no idea how some thing works feel the urge to comment on its working? It’s not just AI, it’s pretty much everything.
AI does learn, that’s the whole shtick and that’s why it’s so good at stuff computers used to suck at. AI is pretty much just a buzzword, the correct abbreviation is ML which stands for Machine Learning - it’s even in the name.
AI also recognizes it looks at a human! It can also recognize what they’re wearing, the material. AI is also better in many, many things than humans are. It also sucks compared to humans in many other things.
No images are in its database, you fancy Xerox.
And I wish that people who didn’t understand the need for the human element in creative endeavours would focus their energy on automating things that should be automated, like busywork, and dangerous jobs.
If the prediction model actually “learned” anything, they wouldn’t have needed to add the artist’s work back after removing it. They had to, because it doesn’t learn anything, it copies the data it’s been fed.
Just because you repeat the same thing over and over it doesn’t become truth. You should be the one to learn, before you talk. This conversation is over for me, I’m not paid to convince people who behave like children of how things they’re scared of work.
At the heart of copyright law is the intent. If an artist makes something, someone can’t just come along and copy it and resell it. The intent is so that artists can make a living for their innovation.
AI training on copyrighted images and then reproducing works derived from those images in order to compete with those images in the same style breaks the intent of copyright law. Equally, it does not matter if a picture is original. If you take an artist’s picture and recreate it with pixel art, there have already been cases where copyright infringement settlements have been made in favor of the original artist. Despite the original picture not being used at all, just studied. Mile’s David Kind Of Bloop cover art.
You’re correct in your description of what a derivative work is, but this part is mistaken:
The intent is so that artists can make a living for their innovation.
The intent is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” so that, in the long run, the Public Domain is enriched with more works than would otherwise exist if no incentive were given. Allowing artists to make a living is nothing more than a means to that end.
It promotes progress by giving people the ability to make the works. If they can’t make a living off of making the works then they aren’t going to do it as a job. Thus yes, the intent is so that artists can make a living off of their work so that more artists have the ability to make the art. It’s really that simple. The intent is so that more people can do it. It’s not a means to the end, it’s the entire point of it. Otherwise, you’d just have hobbyists contributing.
I like what you’re saying so I’m not trying to be argumentative, but to be clear copyright protections don’t simply protect those who make a living from their productions. You are protected by them regardless of whether you intend to make any money off your work and that protection is automatic. Just to expand upon what @grue was saying.
Re: Stolen. Not stolen comments Copyright law as interpreted judges is still being worked out on AI. Stay tuned if it’s defined as stolen or not. But even if the courts decide existing copyright law would define training on artists work as legitimate use. The law can change and it still could swing the way of the artist if congress got involved.
My personal opinion, which may not reflect what happens legally is I hope we all get more control over our data and how it’s used and sold. Wether that’s my personal data like my comments, location or my artistic data like my paintings. I think that would be a better world
Copyright law as interpreted judges is still being worked out on AI. Stay tuned if it’s defined as stolen or not.
You just contradicted yourself in two sentences. Copyright and theft are not the same thing. They are unrelated to each other. When you violate copyright you are not “stealing” anything. This art is not “stolen”, full stop.
“Is copyright infringement theft” is something that had been debated for as long as mp3s were a thing. This is an old argument with lots of material on both sides scattered across the web. I clearly fall on the side of copyright infringement is theft and theft is stealing.
There’s absolutely no debate, legal or otherwise.
Theft, by definition, requires you to deprive someone of something. That simply cannot happen when you copy stuff. That’s why it’s called copyright infringement and not theft.
You can only steal art by physically stealing an art piece - then and only then it’s theft.
What do you mean there is no debate? You’re debating it right now.
Plenty of artists view it as theft when people take their work and use it for their own ends without their permission. Not everyone, sure. But it’s a bit odd to state so emphatically that there is no debate.
AI art is factually not art theft. It is creation of art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it; except computers and AIs do not run on meat-based hardware that has an extraordinary number of features and demands that are hardwired to ensure survival of the meat-based hardware. It doesn’t have our limitations; so it can create similar works in various styles very quickly.
Copyright on the other hand is, an entirely different and, a very sticky subject. By default, “All Rights Are Reserved” is something that usually is protected by these laws. These laws however, are not grounded in modern times. They are grounded in the past; before the information age truly began it’s upswing.
Fair use generally encompasses all usage of information that is one or more of the following:
- Educational; so long as it is taught as a part of a recognized class and within curriculum.
- Informational; so long as it is being distributed to inform the public about valid, reasonable public interests. This is far broader than some would like; but it is legal.
- Transformative; so long as the content is being modified in a substantial enough manner that it is an entirely new work that is not easily confused for the original. This too, is far broader than some would like; but it still is legal.
- Narrative or Commentary purposes; so long as you’re not copying a significant amount of the whole content and passing it off as your own. Short clips with narration and lots of commentary interwoven between them is typically protected. Copyright is not intended to be used to silence free speech. This also tends to include satire; as long as it doesn’t tread into defamation territory.
- Reasonable, ‘Non-Profit Seeking or Motivated’ Personal Use; People are generally allowed to share things amongst themselves and their friends and other acquaintances. Reasonable backup copies, loaning of copies, and even reproduction and presentation of things are generally considered fair use.
In most cases AI art is at least somewhat Transformative. It may be too complex for us to explain it simply; but the AI is basically a virtual brain that can, without error or certain human faults, ingest image information and make decisions based on input given to it in order to give a desired output.
Arguably; if I have license or right to view artwork; or this right is no longer reserved, but is granted to the public through the use of the World Wide Web…then the AI also has those rights. Yes. The AI has license to view, and learn from your artwork. It just so happens to be a little more efficient at learning and remembering than humans can be at times.
This does not stop you from banning AIs from viewing all of your future works. Communicating that fact with all who interact with your works is probably going to make you a pretty unpopular person. However; rightsholders do not hold or reserve the right to revoke rights that they have previously given. Once that genie is out of the bottle; it’s out…unless you’ve got firm enough contract proof to show that someone agreed to otherwise handle the management of rights.
In some cases; that proof exists. Good luck in court. In most cases however; that proof does not exist in a manner that is solid enough to please the court. A lot of the time; we tend to exchange, transfer and reserve rights ephemerally…that is in a manner that is not strictly always 100% recognized by the law.
Gee; Perhaps we should change that; and encourage the reasonable adaptation and growth of Copyright to fairly address the challenges of the information age.
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Rutowski, Monet, and Rockwell could also not create without human art.
All creativity is a combination of past creativity.
Even Monet.
Even Shakespeare.
Even Beethoven.
@selzero @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon But human creativity is not ONLY a combination of past creativity. It is filtered through a lifetime of subjective experience and combined knowledge. Two human artists schooled on the same art history can still produce radically different art. Humans are capable of going beyond has been done before.
Before going too deep on AI creation spend some time learning about being human. After that, if you still find statistical averages interesting, go back to AI.
@glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon
I mean, yes, you are right, but essentially, it is all external factors. They can be lived through external factors, or data fed external factors.
I don’t think there is a disagreement here other than you are placing a lot of value on “the human experience” being an in real life thing rather than a read thing. Which is not even fully true of the great masters. It’s a form of puritan fetishisation I guess.
@selzero @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon I don’t think it’s even contraversial. Will sentient machines ever have an equivalent experience? Very probably. Will they be capable of creating art? Absolutely.
Can our current statistical bulk reincorporation tools make any creative leap? Absolutely not. They are only capable of plagiarism. Will they become legitimate artistic tools? Perhaps, when the people around them start taking artists seriously instead of treating them with distain.
@glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon
This angle is very similar to a debate going on in the cinema world, with Scorsese famously ranting that Marvel movies are “not movies”
The point being without a directors message being portrayed, these cookie cutter cinema experiences, with algorithmically developed story lines, should not be classified as proper movies.
But the fact remains, we consume them as movies.
We consume AI art as art.
@selzero @glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon And thousands of people’s creativity is in the Marvel movie, but one person hammering out a prompt on the AI art. They’re still vastly different. Even the most banally corporate movie is still a work of staggering human creativity and _working together_.
Stable diffusion image generators are not.
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Actually. It is necessary. The process of creativity is much much more a synergy of past consumption than we think.
It took 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci.
Yes we always find ways to draw, but the pinnacle of art comes from a shared culture of centuries.
It doesn’t change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not “a virtual brain” that creates “art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it.” What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.
Today’s large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don’t make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers – they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They’re not striving to make the correct answer. They’re just producing the most statistically average output given the input.
Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn’t create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person’t style, it must make a copy of that person’s work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.
None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.
Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.
This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they’re eventually “destroyed”; the model doesn’t contain them at all, and it doesn’t need to refer back to them to generate new images.
It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn’t contain any of the original images.
None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren’t getting a cut. That’s bad.
But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you’re going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn’t cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That’s also bad. I’m pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.
The best you’re likely to do in that situation is say it’s ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.
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Just as quickly as people disregard the human art enjoyer, who now has access to a powerful tool to create art undreamed of a year ago.
I have found over the years that forums that claim to be about various forms of art are almost always really about the artists that make that art, and have little to no regard for the people who are there just for the art itself. The AI art thing is just the latest and most prominent way of revealing this.
Here’s my argument: tough titties. Everything Greg Rutkowski has ever drawn or made has been inspired by other things he has seen and the experiences of his life, and this applies to all of us. Indeed, one cannot usually have experiences without the participation of others. Everyone wants to think they are special, and of course we are to someone, but to everyone no one is special. Since all of our work is based upon the work of everyone who came before us, then all of our work belongs to everyone. So tough fucking titties, welcome to the world of computer science, control c and control v is heavily encouraged.
In that Beatles documentary, Paul McCartney said he thought that once you uttered the words into the microphone, it belonged to everyone. Little did he know how right he actually was.
You think there is a line between innovation and infringement? Wrong, They are the same thing.
And for the record, I’m fine with anyone stealing my art. They can even sell it as their own. Attribution is for the vain.
There’s a lot of disagreement here on what is theft, what is art, what is copyright… etc
The main issue people have with AI is fundamentally how is it going to be used? I know there isnt much we can do about it now, and its a shame because there it has so much potential good. Everyone defending AI is making a lot of valid points.
But at the end of the day it is a tool that is going to be misused by the rich and powerful to eliminate hundreds of millions of well paying careers, permanently. MOST well paying jobs in fact, not just artists. What the hell are people supposed to do? How is any of this a good thing?
What the hell are people supposed to do?
Eat the rich :)
More concretely, there are a number of smaller and larger sociopolitical changes that can be fought for. On the smaller side, there’s rethinking the way our society values people and pushing for some kind of UBI, on the larger side there’s shifting to postcapitalist economics and organisation to various degrees .)
But the rich are the ones buying a lot of the art! Who will pay the artists if you eat the people with the money?
What blurry line? An artist doesn’t what his art stolen from him. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
If I look at someone’s paintings, then paint something in a similar style did I steal their work? Or did I take inspiration from it?
No, you used it to inform your style.
You didn’t drop his art on to a screenprinter, smash someone else’s art on top, then try to sell t-shirts.
Trying to compare any of this to how one, individual, human learns is such a wildly inaccurate way to justify stealing a someone’s else’s work product.
If it works correctly it’s not a screenprinter, it’s something unique as the output.
The fact that folks can identify the source of various parts of the output, and that intact watermarks have shown up, shows that it doesn’t work like you think it does.
Does that mean the AI is not smart enough to remove watermarks, or that it’s so smart it can reproduce them?
LLMs and directly related technologies are not AI and possess no intelligence or capability to comprehend, despite the hype. So, they are absolutely the former, though it’s rather like a bandwagon sort of thing (x number of reference images had a watermark, so that’s what the generated image should have).
LLMs […] no intelligence or capability to comprehend
That’s debatable. LLMs have shown emergent behaviors aside from what was trained, and they seem to be capable of comprehending relationships between all sorts of tokens, including multi-modal ones.
Anyway, Stable diffusion is not an LLM, it’s more of a “neural network hallucination machine” with some cool hallucinations, that sometimes happen to be really close to some or parts of the input data. It still needs to be “smart” enough to decompose the original data into enough and the right patterns, that it can reconstruct part of the original from the patterns alone.
