I would venture to guess that the author doesn't have a full understanding of what the AI is doing or how it works.
There are a gazillion artist who take clear inspiration from other artists, and there is no copywrite violation in doing so. The AI viewing his work isn't any different.
> I would venture to guess that the author doesn't have a full understanding of what the AI is doing or how it works.
Actually he does.
> There are a gazillion artist who take clear inspiration from other artists
Inspiration is not the same thing Stable Diffusion does.
We can't even define inspiration in a proper manner, but for sure we can say that if someone wants to draw comics in the way Tezuka made them, they have to study, exercise, rinse and repeat for at least a few years.
No human can scrape billions of images and take inspiration from all of them, not even in 10 life times.
Also, no human will make something similar to something else seen for the first time in 10 seconds.
We can go back and forth all day. But legally your friend has no legs to stand on. People do "like copies" of works all the time, and it's been ok'ed by the courts just as much.
Unless your friend thinks the AI is copying snippets of his work into generated images, I'm not sure where they are getting these ideas from.
> But legally your friend has no legs to stand on.
My friend is just upset.
Legally he has every right in the World, he's the author for Christ Sake!
Will he try anything?
Of course not.
Are you okay with this?
Well, then you should reconsider your values.
> People do "like copies" of works all the time,
If those copies are authorized, I don't see the problem.
Try to recreate a Star Wars image and sell it on the Internet.
See what happens.
> Unless your friend thinks the AI is copying snippets of his work into generated images
Would you bet your life on the fact that it doesn't?
You know why we Europeans came up with the GDPR?
Yes, exactly, because processing of the data, automatic or not, must be authorized by the holder of the rights on that data.
We are not talking about artistic expression here, I'm not sure where you are getting this idea from, this is not inspiration or art or human expression, this is simply data processing leading to algorithmic replica of other people's works.
Without people's work, no model could replicate it.
Impressive, still completely dependent on some kind of source material, that they scraped, they haven't produced it by themselves.
There will be a day when people like you will realize that appropriation is not right.
Books are different, most of the works models are trained on are in the public domain, Shakespeare is public Domain, nobody will ever contest that, but if you think a living author has no right to have a say before someone process their work, you're the one with crazy ideas.
I think you don't know how laws and Author rights work
The simple fact his work became part of something else he did not authorize is the problem here.
And yes, it could spit out something that is very close to the original, so close that fair use could not stand.
Fair use is not a right!
> If your friend is still upset, maybe they should consider the artists they "stole" their learning material from.
He does, don't imply differently, ad hominem are a stupid argument for very stupid people.
That's why he spent 30 years of his life learning and in the end he became good enough to meet the artists he "stole" from to thank them of what they did.
You seem to lack the ability to understand the difference between being a good person and being a senseless automata...
If the model physically does not have enough information to create a work that would be found to be infringing on your friend's rights, then why is your friend upset? The model viewed his work and learned from it in the same way that humans do.
If your friend published images on the internet, he clearly intended them to be viewed by (meat) neural networks. Why are silicon ones operated by humans any different?
Edit: To elaborate, if (10 years ago) someone saw your friends works and started producing derivatives and publishing them to DeviantArt, would your friend have any good reason to be upset?
I think that your and your friend's argument reduces to "the AI is not a human, but a machine-like, and thus can not be `inspired' but only `reproduce'". I don't know if it is a novel argument to be tried in a court of (copyright) law, but it is certainly a good one.
> I think that your and your friend's argument reduces to "the AI is not a human, but a machine-like, and thus can not be `inspired' but only `reproduce'".
That's the one argument, but it's not the most important important.
The most compelling issue here is that SD used copyrighted data scraped from the Internet without even informing the authors, who were not unknown to SD authors, because they tagged them in the model.
using work without permission is a violation copyright. imo the fact that the original has to be scrapped to create the dataset completely negates any argument about whether the final product is transformative b/c it cannot exist without the original data
There are a gazillion artist who take clear inspiration from other artists, and there is no copywrite violation in doing so. The AI viewing his work isn't any different.