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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Seeing as no one else has discussed this, I'll try to give a brief overview of the Drama that has taken place in the Stable Diffusion community over the last few days.


On 7th Oct, most of the source code, private models, and proprietary technology of NovelAI is leaked on /sdg/.

NovelAI's anime art generation stack was (is) significantly better than the open source tech available, so tooling is quickly made available to work with the leaked models. More specifically, the developer for the most popular offline Stable Diffusion tool, AUTOMATIC1111, immediately implements features to work with NovelAI's "Hypernetworks".

Within a day, AUTOMATIC1111 is accused of code theft and banned from the Stable Diffusion community, a decision explicitly backed by Emad. This causes a lot of Drama to happen,

  • Because the stable-diffusion-webui project is extremely popular; no other open source tool comes close in functionality,

  • Because it's ambiguous whether any code was truly stolen or not,

  • Because NovelAI was discovered to have illegally copied open source code in their leaked repositories, an error that was admittedly quickly reverted by their devs,

  • Because of the optics of the situation -- Stability AI backing a closed-source company over a popular open source figure?

The drama expands further when links to stable-diffusion-webui are scrubbed from /r/stablediffusion, causing the former moderators of that subreddit to reveal that the moderation team of the subreddit experienced a quiet takeover by representatives of Stability AI. It is additionally claimed that a similar process occured for the SD Discord server.

And as an extra bonus, the coomers using SD have gone into high alert after Emad remarked in an interview that the release of SD V1.5 would be delayed to "handle edge cases" & (de)bias the model against "topless women".


Insofar as I have a take on all of this, it's going to be some blend of "holy shit Emad please stop doing bad PR" and the Seven Zillion Witches problem. I find it horrific that the mutually agreeable agenda of "let's keep AI open and available" is doing its best to self-destruct via the usual processes of internet catfights and the amplification of minor differences within what ought to be a united ingroup.

Because NovelAI was discovered to have illegally copied open source code in their leaked repositories, an error that was admittedly quickly reverted by their devs

So when they copy open source code without having the proper rights to do so, it's a problem, but when they copy art on the other hand...

They aren't copying art though...?

I can’t think of how training could occur if you didn’t make a copy in RAM of the images that were being trained on.

Honestly though, that’s a technicality that doesn’t actually matter. The point is that if software developers can reasonably request that their publicly-available code not be used in a proprietary SaaS, then artists should be able to request that their publicly-available images not be used to train AI models.

This is the same way that an art student "copies" the art of other artists by the light reflecting off the picture s activating their rods and cones which get converted to signals in the neurons in their brains which produce the perception of the image in their consciousness. By your definition of copying, all perception of media is copying; e.g. every time I listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, I'm copying the work of Queen. Which is a fine definition, but is also not exactly a common one and one that loses a lot of the meaning that's intended when people use that word.

As I already stated, the technicalities of what constitutes "copying" or not are quite beside the point.

Let's put it this way. Look at the license agreement for Visual Studio Community 2022. This is a freely (as in beer) available piece of software; anyone with an internet connection can go to Microsoft's website and download it and start using it. But the license agreement places all sorts of arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can't do with it - for example, you can't use it to develop software if you're an "enterprise" (according to their own arbitrary definition of what an enterprise is) and your application does not fall under the heading of "device driver", "SQL server development", or one of their other arbitrarily-decreed exceptions.

The question naturally arises: what gives Microsoft the right to control what I do with their bits and bytes like this? Obviously the answer is "because of the license agreement, duh", but why should the license agreement be binding? Why should they be allowed to write a "license agreement" in the first place? They put this sequence of bits (the compiled binary) on their website, in plain view, where anyone can look at it and download it. Once I download it, they can't take it away, or really have any direct control over what I do with it (modulo the fact that the application might call home sometimes, but we can assume that it doesn't, and nothing about the argument will change). Why can't I just tell Microsoft to sod off at this point? The bits are mine, I'll do what I want with them, I'll use them for enterprise application development and you can't stop me?

I do think that Microsoft should have the right to enforce this sort of license agreement, and I think it stems from a simple and general principle: people who create and distribute sequences of bits should have wide-but-reasonable latitude to determine how those bits are used, and they should be able to seek redress when those agreements are violated. It's hard for me to see how the frameworks of copyright and software licensing can even exist at all unless one endorses that principle, or one that is roughly equivalent.

Similar to how Microsoft can say "here are some free bits, just don't use them for enterprise software development", an artist should be able to say "here are some free bits, just don't use them to train an AI model". The fact that the artist's bits represent an image rather than a compiled binary doesn't seem like a relevant difference.

Naturally, this is all very vague by legal standards and makes no reference to actual IP law, by design. I'm not a lawyer and I won't pretend to know anything about the law. I'm approaching this from an ethical/philosophical standpoint and arguing based on what I perceive to be fair and equitable. The technicalities of the law are of secondary importance to me; laws can change, after all.

There’s an old article I’ve thought of when faced with definitional absurdities in aspects of IP law versus seemingly plain common sense: What Colour are your bits?

Yes, the concept of intellectual property brings along with it a number of intractable philosophical puzzles. But, so does every other concept that one could name, so it's in good company in that regard.

As I already stated, the technicalities of what constitutes "copying" or not are quite beside the point.

I mean, the whole subthread started from your comment:

but when they copy art on the other hand...

Which I guess you're walking back from with your further clarification in this post, I suppose.

Similar to how Microsoft can say "here are some free bits, just don't use them for enterprise software development", an artist should be able to say "here are some free bits, just don't use them to train an AI model". The fact that the artist's bits represent an image rather than a compiled binary doesn't seem like a relevant difference.

This is a good point, and I agree that the artist should be able to say that. Any artist who publishes their art somewhere where viewers agree to license that demands as such before viewing that artwork - much like Microsoft has the end user "sign" a license agreement at some point before running their free software - is on solid ethical (and legal I think, though IANAL) grounds to complain if someone uses it for AI art model training. Plenty of artists already do a similar thing with paid art on places like Patreon where the end user has to agree not to share the art with anyone else.

If they publish it on a public forum, then that's a different matter. They don't get to publish something publicly for free public consumption and demand that others don't view their art and take inspiration from them; that'd be having their cake and eating it too.

I have to wonder how much of this is "your first mistake was posting anything publicly on the internet." Even back in the 2000's and 2010's, people tried to enforce what were weak ethical norms for art (no tracing, no reuploading without permission). Ultimately, though, there aren't actual legal mechanisms beyond DMCA takedowns.

We're back to MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. territory with this kind of logic.

MAI Systems (who argued with that sort of logic) won that one, and the subsequent statutory exceptions do not cover art.