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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31076 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Show me where, in the stability AI software, the getty photos are saved. Show me how to get one of the getty images out of stability AI.

You can't.

Folks are workin' on it. We'll get there.

https://old.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/zesklv/getty_images_watermark_appears_in_results_has/

As far as the device knows, that’s an abstract picture element as meaningful as the letter T or Donald Trump’s hair.

As far as the device knows, that’s an abstract picture element as meaningful as the letter T or Donald Trump’s hair.

Good luck getting a judge or jury to believe you.

The facts of the matter are almost irrelevant to the legal case; the tech-savviness of Some Boomer in a black robe is the decisive factor, making me think that the artists are probably going to win

Not out of place when discussing court cases, mind you, but when I see these rather strictly legalistic arguments used in the context of unprecedented, transformative tools, they seem lacking. Surely the circumstances call for more than pointing to such and such paragraph? From my shallow understanding of how society handled previous such changes, it's a vain hope, losers will simply have to cope.

This is where the legislator is supposed to actually be of any use to people.

He's supposed to get all the people in a room, hash out some compromise that doesn't completely destroy norms or completely stifle innovation and drill down some new norms so the people getting made redundant can merrily go into irrelevance without destitution.

But that only works if you have competent elites, so I guess legal fights it will be.

Overfitting is a thing, and it's certainly possible to use the base Stable Diffusion model to recreate closely-enough-to-count-as-infringement some famous artworks such as the Mona Lisa. Dunno if there are any non-public domain artworks for this applies, though, and in the general case, certainly these models don't particularly enable someone to create copies of copyrighted images.

I'm not sure if such details matter, though. The lawsuits seem to be claiming that the very act of training on the copyrighted images is infringement, and I don't know if that argument relies fully on the false notion that the models allow for reliable reproduction of training images outside of extreme edge cases.

What you could maybe do is prove that prompts such as "in the style of artist X" derive distinctive features from that artist's corpus, and maybe you could likewise build a more complex case showing that the results of Getty-related prompts yield images sharing features of Getty stock pictures. Sounds like a difficult task though and of uncertain legal status even if possible.

Meanwhile I am sure the damage to Getty's business will be immense. Just from my own experience, advertising clients right now are rejecting high-priced images and time-intensive comps left right and centre in favour of AI visuals they can create themselves in seconds, and this is happening even with some quite deep pocketed clients.

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