Stability AI Plans To Let Artists Opt Out of Stable Diffusion 3 Image Training (arstechnica.com) 45
Stability AI has announced it would allow artists to remove their work from the training dataset for an upcoming Stable Diffusion 3.0 release. From a report: The move comes as an artist advocacy group called Spawning tweeted that Stability AI would honor opt-out requests collected on its Have I Been Trained website. The details of how the plan will be implemented remain incomplete and unclear, however. As a brief recap, Stable Diffusion, an AI image synthesis model, gained its ability to generate images by "learning" from a large dataset of images scraped from the Internet without consulting any rights holders for permission. Some artists are upset about it because Stable Diffusion generates images that can potentially rival human artists in an unlimited quantity.
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Correct: it should be opt in, possibly after the artist being paid a fee.
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Correct: it should be opt in, possibly after the artist being paid a fee.
I wonder if they could figure out a way to estimate the artist's contribution to a particular generated image, and compensate them based on that.
Maybe run a secondary model (this painting looks like artist X) and split up compensation based on that?
Of course, you start doing that and you definitely need to be opt in, which doesn't happen if you don't offer decent cash. I'm not sure these image generators are viable for anything but public domain (or compatible Creative Commons) imagery.
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Just like every human artist is required to pay rights holders for every piece of media they've ever studied. Oh, wait, humans don't pay that. It is completely legal because that's pretty much the point of art: taking existing ideas and transforming or combining them in new and novel ways.
If artists do not wish other artists to learn from their work, they need to keep their art private.
Stopping copying is fine, but stopping learning? That's taking copyright way too far.
(PS: I am an artist with my work out o
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Re: That won't work... (Score:2)
So? Why is that relevant?
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This. Exactly this.
Current generations of AI are statistical models. They don't create, they only forecast based on existing data. They remix, much like an artist who traces the work of another and reworks it (and receives the same scorn).
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They don't receive the same scorn. The ones that truly mix up ideas from multiple sources are hailed as visionaries who found a new pattern out of previous pieces. For example, Afrocelt is nothing but taking classic African and Irish rhythms over each other, and the result is amazing and new.
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By publishing your work online for free, there's a reasonable expectation that it will be looked at. The training loop of these diffusion models does just that: looks at it, adjusts its weights to minimize a loss function that helps it get somewhat close to that image as an output, discards the image, and repeats that for *millions* of images.
What fees do artists deserve for this? Or should it not be allowed? It's unanswered still, but one thing is clear, it's going to happen whether we like it or not. If i
Re:That won't work... (Score:5, Insightful)
By publishing your work online for free, there's a reasonable expectation that it will be looked at.
Looked at - fine.
Used as part of <anything, even potentially commercial> is very different.
Also, even though you can "look at" a picture/painting/whatever, its use might be subject to specific licensing.
So, just because "it's out there" doesn't mean anyone can "just use it" for whatever without consequences.
Re:That won't work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Looked at - fine. Used as part of is very different.
How is training an AI artist with your painting meaningfully different than me using your painting as part of my learning process and inspiration when learning to paint? That is the analogous activity when comparing what an AI artist is doing as compared to a human artist.
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But why does that difference matter? Subsentient is still capable of learning. And the sentient part is when the person who generates a new image says, "Yes, that's what I had in my head." If they use the tool to create a direct copy, that's just as illegal as if they had sat in front of a painting and recreated it stroke for stroke. But if they use it to create a completely new image? Nothing illegal or immoral about that.
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Your claim is an interesting hypothesis, but certainly not an established one.
If we knew it to be correct, we would know quite a bit more about human learning than we do.
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Your claim is an interesting hypothesis, but certainly not an established one.
If we knew it to be correct, we would know quite a bit more about human learning than we do.
I'm not implying the mechanism which humans use to learn and how computers learn are the same, simply that they are both using input which likely includes examples of art which was created by someone else. I doubt there are many who disagree with that, so I would say it is an established hypothesis.
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An AI creates nothing new. It only remixes what it has seen (it's a statistical model, after all) in ways it thinks you want it to. Much like a weather forecaster.
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An AI creates nothing new. It only remixes what it has seen (it's a statistical model, after all) in ways it thinks you want it to. Much like a weather forecaster.
This is simply not true. Chess AI applications are teaching human grandmasters how to play better these days. They have created new strategies and new ways of looking at how to play chess and train humans how to play chess better.
One of the most impactful differences between AI and human intelligence is we actually know how AI works. Human intelligence is still a black box, so it can trick us into thinking there is more too our thoughts than there is. Just like ChatGPT can trick people into it has more inte
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Looked at - fine. Used as part of is very different.
How is training an AI artist with your painting meaningfully different than me using your painting as part of my learning process and inspiration when learning to paint? That is the analogous activity when comparing what an AI artist is doing as compared to a human artist.
Human artist who is doing some art reproduction [artistsnetwork.com] whould not be so stupid to copy also original artist's signature [twitter.com].
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By "look at" I also mean "looked at as part of the process of learning how other people make art," which is what artists do on a constant basis, and something I'm applying here to AI.
And yes, when you publish your images you certainly are aware that artists may be learning from it, or even copying your style. Happens constantly.
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So you admit it yourself - it doesn't just "look at" things - it uses it for other purposes to.
From your original post (emphasis mine):
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>But at least sentient things (ie. humans), don't blatantly copy/rip off [twitter.com] the thing they're using to learn from.
1. What universe are you living in? Sentient things rip off artists all the time.
2. Your link isn't an example of the AI copying and pasting the art. The copied signature (which is indeed close enough to be called copied) doesn't indicate the art was taken, which is why no one can point to the art and show a side-by-side of a copy/paste job. You can argue that AI shouldn't be repro
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1. What universe are you living in? Sentient things rip off artists all the time.
Same as everyone else. The real question is: what drugs are you smoking? 'Cause I want some of that!
2. Your link isn't an example of the AI copying and pasting the blah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah I'm gonna blah blah keep posting blahblah the blahblahblah same blahblahblah thing until blahblah I get blah the last blah word blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblahblah blahblah blah blah blahblah blabblahblah
Amirite?
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It would save everyone a lot of trouble if, at the start of conversations, you'd disclose that you're retarded rather than requiring people to realize it
What is Art? (Score:1)
"Some artists are upset about it because Stable Diffusion generates images that can potentially rival human artists in an unlimited quantity."
When the brush changes from man to machine, the race that invented the concept of "art", probably has a right to question the newfound definition.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder lens?
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When the brush changes from man to machine, the race that invented the concept of "art", probably has a right to question the newfound definition. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder lens?
There will be plenty of time for the species who first created and appreciated "art" to define whether AI generated art is still art. We will decide through what we buy, view in galleries, watch in movie theaters, etc. For instance, very few people are interested in watching robots play sports, and I doubt that will change much as robotics improve. Humans seem to want to watch the pinnacle of human physical achievement when watching sports, not the pinnacle of human engineering. We shall see how they feel a
They could, you know, ask them first. (Score:1)
Steal first, offer opt out later is such a corporate thing to do.
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Steal first, offer opt out later is such a corporate thing to do.
Also, pretending this gesture means anything is another corporate thing to do. All they care about now is good press. Once they are actually making most of their money from customers instead of investors, none of these gestures will matter anymore. They will do whatever it takes to get more revenue.
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It's not stealing to learn from an image. Any human artist does the same thing -- looking at lots of existing works, sometimes learning to copy them exactly, then apply the techniques to new images. If it copies exactly, that's stealing, but taking an idea from one piece of art and transforming it in a new way or by combination with other ideas is explicitly allowed under copyright.
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Steal first, offer opt out later is such a corporate thing to do.
Nothing has been stolen.
Still not sure about this one (Score:3)
If an AI is learning a style or technique, how is this any deferent from a new artist initially copying techniques from other artists?
If some of the output is absolute direct imagery from an artist, then I could see being really angry - but so far that's not exactly the case.
The part where I start to feel more iffy about things is where you can tell the AI to spit out an image in the style of a particular artist, somehow that feels more like stepping over a line.
But regardless of how I or any one of us feel, you just have to understand that this cannot be stopped, that it will continue to advance. I still believe that human artists can win out via creativity, as someone who is creative creating something from scratch will always have more thought put into all parts than someone who may be creative in concept but not really putting in the work to little details in an artwork.
I do think that AI will cause there to be less marginal artists that can survive on work. Then again, maybe those people will essentially turn into AI art directors, able to use the innate creativity they have to build prompts that have the AI produce much better work than some scrub just asking for a car by a waterfall. So they might even be better off in terms of ability to earn income than that category of people were before.
Re: Still not sure about this one (Score:2)
Today's list of professions that will be obsolete soon: journalists, musicians, artists, "coders"... soon also bottom
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Today's list of professions that will be obsolete soon: journalists, musicians, artists, "coders"... soon also bottom of the line legal people, para-legals.
There will still be individuals in each of these professions, but this kind of technology has the potential to increase or decrease their demand. It depends if this technology can be used to make human operators more efficient, and therefore make their output cheaper to buy. Software developers have had tools increase their productivity for years, and it only increased demand. There is almost an infinite amount of software to build, and the cheaper developer output is the more developers we will hire.
If AI
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Those same artists still work (Score:1)
Be cold blooded like a corporation. Why would you pay a person when AI does it copyright free?
Well for starters, maybe they want art that features people that don't have wonky fingers...
That aside, what I am saying is all that corporate art produced by cheap artists now, will move to being produce by AI- at the direction of people who in the past may have been cheap artists. Otherwise they'll just end up with bad art. The AI tools are not magic, they produce good results only with expert prompting.
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The finest artists do not make art based on all the art they've seen. They make art from the life they've seen, and the things they think about.
That's ignoring how the finest artists learned to be the finest artists.
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the difference is that an artist will feel flattered if someone is studying and learning by copying their style.
take bridgman, loomis, they *wanted* you to copy their stuff. there is no stealing but learning, like playing a piano music piece. take the late richard schmid, few heard of him. these teachers basically teach you how to paint like them. french atelier system.
you are encouraged to learn, even copy master paintings. In the US, some galleries will give you a free space and an easel to do just that.
I
AI Piracy will be a thing. (Score:2)
Horse already out... (Score:2)
I don't see how this would change anything. First, it's not like there aren't masses of out of copyright artworks that can be used to train AI. Second, most artists aren't as unique as they think - even if one opts out, there'll be another ten creating art in a close enough style that the machine can learn from. So this is really locking the door after the horse has already fled the stable and is merrily gallumphing among the roses.
Moreover, after quite a few visits to various galleries and museums of moder
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More than that, it's the double-standard. (Score:2)
The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs [youtube.com]