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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except when it’s being used to enforce copyleft.