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?
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.
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, 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.
For disclosure I am a former member of the American Photographic Artists/Advertising Photographers of America, and I have works registered at the United States Copyright Office.
When we put works in our online portfolio, send mailers or physical copies of our portfolios we’re doing it as promotional works. There is no usage license attached to it. If loaded into memory for personal viewing, that’s fine since its not a commercial application nor violating the intent of that specific release: viewing for promotion.
Let’s break down your example to help you understand what is actually going on. When we upload our works to third party galleries there is often a clause in the terms of service which states the artist uploading to the site grants a usage license for distribution and displaying of the image. Let’s look at Section 17 of ArtStation’s Terms of Service:
- License regarding Your Content
Your Content may be shared with third parties, for example, on social media sites to promote Your Content on the Site, and may be available for purchase through the Marketplace. You hereby grant royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, licenses (the “Licenses”) to Epic and our service providers to use, copy, modify, reformat and distribute Your Content, and to use the name that you provide in association with Your Content, in connection with providing the Services; and to Epic and our service providers, members, users and licensees to use, communicate, share, and display Your Content (in whole or in part) subject to our policies, as those policies are amended from time-to-time
This is in conjunction with Section 16’s opening line:
- Ownership
As between you and Epic, you will retain ownership of all original text, images, videos, messages, comments, ratings, reviews and other original content you provide on or through the Site, including Digital Products and descriptions of your Digital Products and Hard Products (collectively, “Your Content”), and all intellectual property rights in Your Content.
So when I click your link, I’m not engaging in a copyright violation. I’m making use of ArtStation’s/Epic’s license to distribute the original artist’s works. When I save images from ArtStation that license does not transfer to me. Meaning if I were to repurpose that work it could be a copyright violation depending on the usage the artist agrees to. Established law states that I hold onto the rights of my work and any usage depends on what I explicitly state and agree to; emphasis on explicitly because the law will respect my terms and compensation first, and your intentions second. For example, if a magazine uses my images for several months without a license, I can document the usage time frame, send them an invoice, and begin negotiating because their legal team will realize that without a license they have no footing.
- Yes, this also applies to journalism as well. If you’ve agreed to let a news outlet use your works on a breaking story for credit/exposure, then you provided a license for fair compensation in the form of credit/exposure.
I know this seems strange given how the internet freely transformed works for decades without repercussions. But as you know from sites like YouTube copyright holders are not a fan of people repurposing their works without a mutually agreed upon terms in the form of a license. If you remember the old show Mystery Science Theater 3000, they operated in the proper form: get license, transform work, commercialize. In the case of ArtStation, the site agrees to provide free hosting in compensation for the artist providing a license to distribute the work without terms for monetization unless agreed upon through ArtStation’s marketplace. At every step, the artist’s rights to their work is respected and compensated when the law is applied.
If all this makes sense and we look back at AI art, well…
Meaning if I were to repurpose that work it could be a copyright violation depending on the usage the artist agrees to.
Training an AI doesn’t “repurpose” that work, though. The AI learns concepts from it and then the work is discarded. No copyrighted part of the work remains in the AI’s model. All that verbiage doesn’t really apply to what’s being done with the images when an AI trains on them, they are no longer being “used” for anything at all after training is done. Just like when a human artist looks at some reference images and then creates his own original work based on what he’s learned from them.
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.
Copies that were freely shared for the purpose of letting anyone look at them.
Do you think it’s copyright infringement to go to a website?
Typically, ephemeral copies that aren’t kept for a substantial period of time aren’t considered copyright violations, otherwise viewing a website would be a copyright violation for every image appearing on that site.
Downloading a freely published image to run an algorithm on it and then deleting it without distribution is basically the canonical example of ephemeral.
Its what you do with the copies thats the problem, not the physical act of copying.
One human artist can, over a life time, learn from a few artists to inform their style.
These AI setups […] ALL the art from ALL the artists
So humans are slow and inefficient, what’s new?
First the machines replaced hand weavers, then ice sellers went bust, all the calculators got sacked, now it’s time for the artists.
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.
We stand on the shoulders of generations of unethical stances.
“other people were bad so I should be bad to.”
Cool.
Yes, which is why we should try to do better.
I don’t like when people say “AI just traces/photobashes art.” Because that simply isn’t what happens.
But I do very much wish there was some sort of opt-out process, but ultimately any attempt at that just wouldn’t work
There’s nothing stopping someone from licensing their art in a fashion that prohibits their use in that fashion.
No one has created that license that I know of, but there are software licenses that do similar things, so it’s hardly an unprecedented notion.The fact of the matter is that before people didn’t think it was necessary to have specific usage licenses attached to art because no one got funny feelings from people creating derivative works from them.
People that say that have never used AI art generation apps and are only regurgitating what they hear from other people who are doing the same. The amount of arm chair AI denialists is astronomical.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
By the same token, a human can easily be deemed to have infringed copyright even without cutting and pasting, if the result is excessively inspired by some other existing work.
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.
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!
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.
… You realize the reason it promotes progress is because it allows the creators to get paid for it, right? It’s not “they deserve it” it’s “they need to eat and thus they aren’t going to do it unless they make money.” Which is exactly my argument.
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
It’s a silly way to put that since the “privilege granted” is given in to Congress in the Constitution.
Overall though, you are referencing a 300-year-old document like it means something. The point comes down to people needing to eat in a capitalistic society.
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.
Capitalism isn’t really based on a free market and never has been in practice.
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!
Sure but first enact those changes then try to change or break copyright. Don’t take away the only current way for artists to make money then say “Well, the system should be different.” You are causing people to starve at that point.
Edit: …copyright infringement is a moral right, it’s a good thing. copyright is theft.
Except when it’s being used to enforce copyleft.
deleted by creator
Well said. Copyright is whatever, but the disrespect shown here is remarkable.
What blurry line? An artist doesn’t what his art stolen from him. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
I don’t disagree but stolen is a bit of a stretch
I don’t fully understand how this works, but if they’ve created a way to replicate his style that doesn’t involve using his art in the model, how is it problematic? I understand not wanting models to be trained using his art, but he doesn’t have exclusive rights to the art style, and if someone else can replicate it, what’s the problem?
This is an honest question, I don’t know enough about this topic to make a case for either side.
TL;DR The new method still requires his art.
LoRA is a way to add additional layers to a neural network that effectively allow you to fine tune it’s behaviour. Think of it like a “plugin” or a “mod”
LoRas require examples of the thing you are targeting. Lots of people in the SD community build them for particular celebrities or art styles by collecting examples of the that celebrity or whatever from online.
So in this case Greg has asked Stable to remove his artwork which they have done but some third party has created an unofficial LoRA that does use his artwork to mod the functionality back in.
In the traditional world the rights holder would presumably DMCA the plugin but the lines are much blurrier with LoRA models.
Great explanation, thanks!
Do you know how they recreated his style? I couldn’t find such information or frankly have enough understanding to know how.
But if they either use his works directly or works created by another GAI with his name/style in the prompt, my personal feeling is that would still be unethical, especially if they charge money to generate his style of art without compensating him.
Plus, I find that the opt-out mentality really creepy and disrespectful
“If he contacts me asking for removal, I’ll remove this.” Lykon said. “At the moment I believe that having an accurate immortal depiction of his style is in everyone’s best interest.”
I still have trouble understanding the distinction between “a human consuming different artists, and replicating the style” vs “software consuming different artists, and replicating the style”.
there’s no distinction. people are just robophobic.
But if they either use his works directly or works created by another GAI with his name/style in the prompt, my personal feeling is that would still be unethical, especially if they charge money to generate his style of art without compensating him.
LORA’s are created on image datasets, but these images are just available anywhere. It’s really not much different from you taking every still of The Simpsons and using it. What I don’t understand is how these are seen as problematic because a majority of end users utilizing AI are doing it under fair use.
No one charges for LORA’s or models AFAIK. If they do, it hasn’t come across the Stable Diffusion discords I moderate.
People actually selling AI generated art is also a different story and that’s where it falls outside of fair use if the models being used contain copy-written work. It seems pretty cut and dry, artists complained about not being emulated by other artists before AI so it’s only reasonable that it happens again. If people are profiting off it, it should be at least giving compensation to the original artist (if it could be adjusted so that per-token payments are given as royalties to the artist). However, on the other hand think about The Simpsons, or Pokemon, or anything that has ever been sold as a sticker/poster/display item.
I’m gonna guess that a majority of people have no problem with that IP theft cause it’s a big company. Okay… so what if I love Greg but he doesn’t respond to my letters and e-mails begging him to commission him for a Pokemon Rutkowski piece? Under fair use there’s no reason I can’t create that on my own, and if that means creating a dataset of all of his paintings that I paid for to utilize it then it’s technically legal.
The only thing here that would be unethical or illegal is if his works are copywritten and being redistributed. They aren’t being redistributed and currently copy-written materials aren’t protected from being used in AI models, since the work done from AI can’t be copywritten. In other words, while it may be disrespectful to go against the artists wishes to not be used in AI, there’s no current grounds for it other than an artist not wanting to be copied… which is a tale as old as time.
TL;DR model and LORA makers aren’t charging, users can’t sell or copywrite AI works, and copywritten works aren’t protected from being used in AI models (currently). An artist not wanting to be used currently has no grounds other than making strikes against anything that is redistributing copies of their work. If someone is using this LORA to recreate Greg Rutkowski paintings and then proceeds to give or sell them then the artist is able to claim that there’s theft and damages… but the likelihood of an AI model being able to do this is low. The likelihood of someone selling these is higher, but from my understanding artistic styles are pretty much fair game anyway you swing it.
I understand wanting to protect artists. Artists also get overly defensive at times - I’m not saying that this guy is I actually am more on his side than my comment makes it out, especially after how he was treated in the discord I moderate. I’m more just pointing out that there’s a slippery slope both ways and the current state of U.S. law on it.
Generally speaking, the way training works is this:
You put together a folder of pictures, all the same size. It would’ve been 1024x1024 in this case. Other models have used 768z768 or 512x512. For every picture, you also have a text file with a description.The training software takes a picture, slices it into squares, generates a square the same size of random noise, then trains on how to change that noise into that square. It associates that training with tokens from the description that went with that picture. And it keeps doing this.
Then later, when someone types a prompt into the software, it tokenizes it, generates more random noise, and uses the denoising methods associated with the tokens you typed in. The pictures in the folder aren’t actually kept by it anywhere.
From the side of the person doing the training, it’s just put together the pictures and descriptions, set some settings, and let the training software do its work, though.
(No money involved in this one. One person trained it and plopped it on a website where people can download loras for free…)
they charge money to generate his style of art without compensating him.
That’s really the big thing, not just here but any material that’s been used to train on without permission or compensation. The difference is that most of it is so subtle it can’t be picked out, but an artist style is obviously a huge parameter since his name was being used to call out those particular training aspects during generations. It’s a bit hypocritical to say you aren’t stealing someone’s work when you stick his actual name in the prompt. It doesn’t really matter how many levels the art style has been laundered, it still originated from him.
It is unconditionally impossible to own an artistic style. “Stealing a style” cannot be done.
Just wait until you can copywrite a style. Guess who will end up opening all the styles.
Spoiler, it’s wealthy companies like Disney and Warner. Oh you used cross hatching? Disney owns the style now you theif.
Copyright is fucked. Has been since before the Mickey mouse protection act. Our economic system is fucked. People would rather fight each other and new tools instead of rallying against the actual problem, and it’s getting to me.
You’re right, copyright won’t fix it, copyright will just enable large companies to activate more of their work extract more from the creative space.
But who will benefit the most from AI? The artists seem to be getting screwed right now, and I’m pretty sure that Hasbro and Disney will love to cut costs and lay off artists as soon as this blows over.
Technology is capital, and in a capitalist system, that goes to benefit the holders of that capital. No matter how you cut it, laborers including artists are the ones who will get screwed.
Me, I’ll benefit the most. I’ve been using a locally running instance of the free and open source AI software Stable Diffusion to generate artwork for my D&D campaigns and they’ve never looked more beautiful!
And yet the artist’s name is used to push the weights towards pictures in their style. I don’t know what the correct semantics are for it, nor the legalities. That’s part of the problem, the tech is ahead of our laws, as is usually the case.
And yet the artist’s name is used to push the weights towards pictures in their style.
That’s not even vaguely new in the world of art.
Imitating style is the core of what art is. It’s absolutely unconditionally protected by copyright law. It’s not even a .01 out of 10 on the scale of unethical. It’s what’s supposed to happen.
The law might not cover this yet, but any law that restricts the fundamental right to build off of the ideas of others that are the core of the entirety of human civilization is unadulterated evil. There is no part of that that could possibly be acceptable to own.
I totally agree with you on protecting the basics of creativity and growth. I think the core issue is using “imitate” here. Is that what the LLM is doing, or is that an anthropomorphism of some sense that there’s intelligence guiding the process? I know it seems like I’m nitpicking things to further my point, but the fact that this is an issue to many even outside artwork says there is a question here of what is and isn’t okay.
It’s only using his name because the person who created the LORA trained it with his name. They could have chosen any other word.
True, and then because it’s a black box there wouldn’t be a known issue at all. Or maybe it would be much less of an issue because the words might have blended others into the mix, and his style wouldn’t be as obvious in the outputs, and/or it would be easier to dismiss. Did the training involve actual input of his name, or was that pulled from the source trained on? How much control was in the training?
Is drawing Mickey Mouse in a new pose copying the style or copying Mickey Mouse?
You said it yourself. You’re drawing Micky mouse in a new pose, so you’re copying Mickey mouse.
Drawing a cartoon in the style of Mickey mouse isn’t the same thing.
You can’t have a copyright on “big oversized smile, exaggerated posture, large facial features, oversized feet and hands, rounded contours and a smooth style of motion”.
The second.
I’m not sure how that’s relevant here, though. There is nothing at all being copied but an aesthetic.
There is nothing at all being copied but an aesthetic.
Although to me it is interesting that, even without literal copying, a generator might be capable of potentially emulating some key features of a specified source. Can this sometimes arguably extend beyond just “an aesthetic”? We’ve all seen examples similar to this one (from the SD online demo, default setting, with a familiar public-domain source) — https://i.imgur.com/PUJs3RL.png
Do you know how they recreated his style? I couldn’t find such information or frankly have enough understanding to know how.
I don’t, but another poster noted that it involves using his art to create the LoRA.
Plus, I find that the opt-out mentality really creepy and disrespectful
I don’t know about creepy and disrespectful, but it does feel like they’re saying “I know the artist doesn’t want me to do this, but if he doesn’t specifically ask me personally to stop, I’m going to do it anyway.”
You’re pretty spot on. It’s not much different from a human artist trying to copy his style by hand but without reproducing the actual drawings.
Nothing was stolen.
Drawing inspiration from someone else by looking at their work has been around for centuries.
Imagine if the Renaissance couldn’t happen because artists didn’t want their style stolen.
His art was not “stolen.”
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.
They can’t, and “intact” watermarks don’t show up. You’re the one who is misunderstanding how this works.
When a pattern is present very frequently the AI can learn to imitate it, resulting in things that closely resemble known watermarks. This is called “overfitting” and is avoided as much as possible. But even in those cases, if you examine the watermark-like pattern closely you’ll see that it’s usually quite badly distorted and only vaguely watermark-like.
Yes, because “imitate” and “copy” are different things when stealing from someone.
I do understand how it works, the “overfitting” was just laying clear what it does. It copies but tries to sample things in a way that won’t look like clear copies. It had no creativity, it is trying to find new ways of making copies.
If any of this was ethical, the companies doing it would have just asked for permission. That they didn’t says a everything you need to know.
I don’t usually have these kinds discussions anymore, I got tired of conversations like this back in 2016, when it became clear that people will go to the ends of the earth to justify unethical behavior as long as the people being hurt by it are people they don’t care about.
And we’re back to you calling it “stealing”, which it certainly is not. Even if it was copyright violation, copyright violation is not stealing.
You should try to get the basic terminology right, at the very least.
Does that mean the AI is not smart enough to remove watermarks, or that it’s so smart it can reproduce them?
It means that it’s stupid enough that it reproduces them - poorly.
It’s not smart or stupid. It does what it’s been trained on, nothing more.
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).
It’s like staring yourself blind at artworks with watermarks until you start seeing artworks with blurry watermarks in your dreams
what I’m getting from all the AI stuff is the people in charge and the people that use it are scumbags
Pretty much. There are ways of using it that most artists would be okay with. Most of the people using it flat out refuse to use it like that though.
Edit: To expand on this:
Most artists would be okay with AI art being used as reference material, inspiration, assisting with fleshing out concepts (though you should use concept artists for that in a big production), rapid prototyping and whatnot. Most only care that the final product is at least mostly human-made.
Artists generally want you to actually put effort into what you’re making because, at the end of the day, typing a prompt into stable diffusion has more in common with receiving a free commission from an artist than it has with actually being an artist. If you’re going to claim that something AI had a hand in as being your art, then you need to have done the majority of the work on it yourself.
The most frustrating thing to me, however, is that there are places in art that AI could participate in which would send artists over the moon, but it’s not flashy so no one seems to be working on making AI in those areas.
Most of what I’m personally familiar with has to do with 3d modeling, and in that discipline, people would go nuts if you released an AI tool that could do the UV work for you. Messing with UVs can be very tedious and annoying, to the point where most artists will just use a tool using conventional algorithms to auto-unwrap and pack UVs, and then call it a day, even if they’re not great.
Another area is in rigging and weight painting. In order to animate a model, you have to rig it to a skeleton (unless you’re a masochist or trying to make a game accurate to late 90s-early 00s animation), paint the bone weights (which bones affect which polygons, and by how much), add constraints, etc. Most 3d modelers would leap at the prospect of having high-quality rigging and UVs done for them at the touch of a button. However, again, because it’s not flashy to the general public, no one’s put any effort into making an AI that can do that (afaik at least).
Finally, even if you do use an AI in ways that most artists would accept as valid, you’ll still have to prove it because there are so many people who put a prompt into stable diffusion, do some minor edits to fix hands (in older version), and then try to pass it off as their own work.
Sadly, AI isn’t as good with sparse data like vertices and bones, so most attempts to use AI on 3D stuff is via NERFs, which is closer to a “photo” you can walk around in than to an actual 3D scene.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the silicon valley tech era! Everything must be profitable at all costs! Everything must steal every tiny fact about you! Everything must include ! Everything must go through enshittification!
The real issue here is the transfer of power away from the artist. This artist has presumably spent years and years perfecting his craft. Those efforts are now being used to line someone else’s pockets, in return for no compensation and a diminishment in the financial value of his work, and, by the sounds of it, little say in the matter either. That to me seems very unethical.
Personally, as an artist who spends the vast majority of their time on private projects that aren’t paid, I feel like it’s put power in my hands. It’s best at sprucing up existing work and saving huge amounts of time detailing. Because of stable diffusion I’ll be able to add those nice little touches and flashy bits to my work that a large corporation with no real vision has at their disposal.
To me it makes it much easier for smaller artists to compete, leveling the playing field a bit between those with massive resources and those with modest resources. That can only be a good thing in the long run.
But I also feel like copyright more often than not rewards the greedy and stifles the creative.
But that’s sort of the nature of the beast when you put your content up for free on a public website. Does Kbin or Beehaw owe us money for our comments on this thread? What about everyone currently reading? At least KBin and Beehaw are making profit off of this.
The argument is not as clear cut as people are making it sound and it has potential to up-end some fundamental expectations around free websites and user-generated content. It’s going to affect far more than just AI.
At least KBin and Beehaw are making profit off of this.
How?
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.
Copying art for personal, non-commercial use is not theft, but copying someone’s art and then profiting (using their image without permission to enrich yourself) is theft.
No.
- Copying someone’s art without permission is copyright violation, not theft.
- These AIs aren’t copying anyone’s art, so it’s not even copyright violation.
That’s your opinion. The contrary opinion would be that copyright infringement is the theft of intellectual property, which many people view as of equal substantiality to physical property.
You can disagree with the concept of intellectual property but clearly there’s an alternative to your point of view that you can’t just dismiss by declaration.
Take your opinion to a court of law and see how far it gets. They actually pay close attention to what words mean there. If copyright violation was theft why do they have two different sets of laws to deal with them?
I’m sure you’re aware that the manner in which legal bureaucracies define terms is a form of jargon that differentiates legal language from actual language.
They have separate categories of laws to deal with them because physical property is different than intellectual property. The same reason they use a different category of law to deal with identity theft.
Breaking Copyright is a contract/license violation, not theft. Depending on where you live, breach of contract is handled very differently than theft in most jurisdictions.
The “nothing of value was lost when you pirate” argument. I’m a game developer who fully encourages people to pirate my games (or email me if they can’t afford my games and want a free Steam key) but I can tell you value is lost when people pirate content. Even if that’s simply a positive Steam review which in turn will put you higher up on placements on Steam’s algorithm which will gain you more sales. Something of value is lost when you pirate. It’s on the artist to determine if that value is acceptable to be lost. If they made their art for the sake of humanity or if they made art for the sake of survival in our shitty capitalistic society.
So sorry, yes, something is lost and it’s because of capitalism. I’d argue otherwise if it didn’t mean someone didn’t get to eat or pay rent. I pirated a lot of media back in my day when I couldn’t afford that media. I used to tell myself I wouldn’t have likely bought those things anyways. That I wasn’t taking from someone. In reality, I would have waited for a sale and gotten that media for 5 dollars. 5 dollars is still a lot of money when selling something though. If I just gave you 5 dollars you could do something small but nice for yourself. You could go buy a lot of things with that sale money. Just because you aren’t spending 60 dollars on it doesn’t mean you would never buy it. The fact that you want to play it says you’d probably buy it. Maybe you’d refund it. Maybe you wouldn’t. Your time is worth something to you though. Thus when you pirate something you are committing something of value from yourself to search, download and ingest that media.
So how does this deal with copyright theft? Stealing something and using it devalues the original product. You’ve seen it a dozen times for better or worse. Minecraft is a great example of how it got devalued for a while there when everyone made Minecraft clones. My kid told me the other day that he got Minecraft on his tablet for free. It was some terrible knockoff he had been playing. I explained this and asked if he wanted the real thing. He said yes and I went and bought Minecraft. That in itself is proof that value is being lost by even legally taking an idea and copying it. A kid’s parent who didn’t know better would have just been like “Hmm, that’s great, have fun.” The best point I can make is that if there was one video game ever, to play a video game you would have to buy that one game. That one game would have more sales than any single game out there today. Clearly, something of value is being created by the exclusivity of copyright.
There is, of course, a balance. What is copyrightable? What stifles creativity and innovation? I would say if these AI artists were able to recreate the style from prompts and only train the AI on images that it has the authority to distribute (public domain images, CC0, etc.) then it’s fair game. Training AI on copyrighted materials and then distributing derived works is copyright theft and should be deemed as such.
“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.
😀 just want to note theres a call out to this debate in the Wikipedia page on copyright infringement. I promise I didn’t add that paragraph there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
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.
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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.
@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.
@raccoona_nongrata @fwygon your reply caused me to consider an image of humans stuffed in a room making art for AI to use. Then I realized we have those: art made in prisons and schools are ripe for AI to steal.
@raccoona_nongrata @fwygon This is absolutely correct!
This is a very nice and thorough comment! Can you provide a reputable source for these points? (no criticism intended: as you seem knowledgeable, I’d trust you could have such reputable sources already selected and at hand, that’s why I’m asking).
Not the poster you’re replying to, but I’m assuming you’re looking for some sort of source that neural networks generate stuff, rather than plagiarize?
Google scholar is a good place to start. You’d need a general understanding of how NNs work, but it ends up leading to papers like this one, which I picked out because it has neat pictures as examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02200
What this one is doing is taking an input in the form of a face, and turning it into a cartoon. They call it an emoji, cause it’s based on that style, but it’s the same principle as how AI art is generated. Learn a style, then take a prompt (image or text) and do something with the prompt in the style.
All this proves to me, based on the context from this post, is that people are willing to commit copyright infringement in order to make a machine produce art in a specific style.
It doesn’t say anywhere they used copyrighted art though?
Seems the new model might use art inspired by him, not his art itself.
It’s a moral gray zone. If you add enough freely available works inspired by someone, the model can produce a similar style without using any original works.
Is it still copyright infringement at that point?
If it’s inspired then at that point I guess it might not be copyright infringing unless it’s an accurate enough recreation of a copyrighted piece… And it looks like my mind filled in the gaps to assume it was copyrighted work being used.
Its unlikely that this did not use his work, these models require input data. Even if they took similar art, that would only resolve the issue of Greg himself but would shift it to those other artists. Unless there is some sort of unspoken artistic genealogical purity that prevents artists with similar or inspired styles from having equal claim on their own creations when inspired by another.
It also could be outputs generated from another AI model. But I don’t think people who see ethical problems in this care about the number of steps removed and processing that occurs when the origin is his artwork and it ultimately outputs the same or similar style. The result is what bothers people, no matter how disparate or disconnected the source’s influence is. If the models had simply found the Greg Rutkowski latent space through random chance people would still take issue with it.
The ability and willingness to generate images in a style associated with a person, without consent, is a threat to that persons job security and shows a lack of value for them as a human. As if their creative expression is worth nothing but as a commodity to be consumed.
The people supporting this don’t care though. They want to consume this person’s style in far greater quantities and variations then a human is capable or willing to fulfill. That’s why these debates are so fierce, the two sides have incentives that are in direct conflict with one another.
We currently lack the economic ingenuity or willingness to create a system that will satisfy both parties. The barrier of entry to AI is low, someone at home has every incentive to maintain the status quo or even actively rail against artists. Artists will need a heavy handed approach from the government or as a collective to combat this effectively.
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.
Greg wants to get paid, remove the threat of poverty from the loss of control and its a nonissue.
If an image is represented as a network of weighted values describing subtle patterns in the image rather than a traditional grid of pixel color values, is that copy of the image still subject to copyright law?
How much would you have to change before it isn’t? Or if you merged it with another representation, would that change your rights to that image?
It doesn’t matter how you recreate an image, if you recreate someone else’s work that is a violation of copyright.
Stealing someone’s style is a different matter.
The copyright argument is a bad argument against AI art. But there are also good arguments against it.
This person has no idea what machine learning actually is. And they hate such a generic concept on a “gut feeling” and come up with the reasons later?
If you want good reasons to hate AI generated art you won’t find them in this shitty blogpost.
This is NOT how you use text-shadow! 🤮
@trashhalo
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