Class Action Filed Against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt for DMCA Violations, Right of Publicity Violations, UnlawfulCompetition, TOS Breach

Astro Galactic Megalul · Jan 16, 2023

Sulla said:
But stable diffusion is open source... What are they going to do, confiscate everyones harddrives?

They'll code a virtual jail for the AI and put it behind binary bars.

Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0 · Jan 16, 2023

If streaming music can be accomplished within the law, so can AI products.

The thing is, it's not all the same. Streaming music isn't about creation, it's about distribution.

What about the rights of AI to be creative?

When one day we get true, sentient AI (not the "AI" that everyone is trumpeting now), this would make it illegal for them to be creative. Think Data on Star Trek doing his paintings. The last thing you want is Skynet becoming a frustrated painter. That didn't work out too well for the world 100 years ago...

Glossy Paper · Jan 16, 2023

I think most people who use the arguments that AI art is "derivative" or "transformative" don't exactly understand why the artists are big mad. In the art bubble there is an invisible no-stealing-100%-nah-uh honor system in place, and the more famous/popular the artists are, the more strictly it is enforced. People have been accused of stealing composition, lighting, specific character poses, etc in their own "derivative" and "transformative" artworks. And once you get branded as an art thief other artists will be sure to remind any employer and patrons about your theft, which unusually scares off any potential work you might get. If an artist knows that their own work show shadows of inspiration from another's, they most often say so in the description, or link the inspiration in some way. (This does not always work and the "inspiration piece" artist might try to make them delete the art post. Twitter fights and drama ensues)
Looking at it from the outside one might say "wow these artists are such whiny babies! just share your skills!", but please understand that art and design is a competitive and time sensitive field. One art piece with the right elements posted at the right moment could earn someone a contract or project. On and beyond the mid-upper rungs of the art arena most artists operate on that honor system. It's what everyone has agreed to be fair.

AI art is steamrolling and pissing all over that.

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid · Jan 16, 2023

Homofascism said:
Not long now.

Oh fantastic, a rigged robot will get to judge your guilt, no conscious, no individuality, no humanity, an autonomous tool of the single party state.

Mango Cobra · Jan 16, 2023

Honestly? Good. AI artbros are the most obnoxious faggots I've ever encountered.

Way way way too many of those faggots are going and saying shit like "Now art is no longer gatekept behind artists" or you've got lazy asshole artists who use it to scam commissioners.

For example, two years ago I commissioned an artist to draw my sister's D&D character as a gift for her. When my turn for him to work on the piece came around, he worked on it for a month and then sent a DM saying that he was going to be moving to Brazil from Japan, and then vanished for a year and a half.

After I pestered him to either finish the art that I had paid for or give me a refund when he had returned, he said that the picture had been lost and he needed to restart it, and then a week later he gave some lazy ass AI art that looked nothing like the references my sister had drawn, and that he had lazily traced... But the dude was so retarded that he traced everything, including the extra fingers and other giveaways that it was AI generated.

So seriously, fuck AI art, fuck AI artbros, and fuck lazy artists. Maybe AI art has some use for giving artists ideas but the way it is being championed as a replacement for artists will never catch on, since it is soulless shit.

Go ahead and give me all the MATI stickers, because I legitimately am mad at AI bros and have no time for faggots who don't see the issues with AI art.

TowinKarz · Jan 16, 2023

Glossy Paper said:
I think most people who use the arguments that AI art is "derivative" or "transformative" don't exactly understand why the artists are big mad. In the art bubble there is an invisible no-stealing-100%-nah-uh honor system in place, and the more famous/popular the artists are, the more strictly it is enforced. People have been accused of stealing composition, lighting, specific character poses, etc in their own "derivative" and "transformative" artworks. And once you get branded as an art thief other artists will be sure to remind any employer and patrons about your theft, which unusually scares off any potential work you might get. If an artist knows that their own work show shadows of inspiration from another's, they most often say so in the description, or link the inspiration in some way. (This does not always work and the "inspiration piece" artist might try to make them delete the art post. Twitter fights and drama ensues)
Looking at it from the outside one might say "wow these artists are such whiny babies! just share your skills!", but please understand that art and design is a competitive and time sensitive field. One art piece with the right elements posted at the right moment could earn someone a contract or project. On and beyond the mid-upper rungs of the art arena most artists operate on that honor system. It's what everyone has agreed to be fair.

AI art is steamrolling and pissing all over that.

That just shows why these suits are a joke - the cardinal rule of art : DONUT STEEL! : as you said, is a gentleman's agreement at best, and such can never ever be enforced through a court. You have to sign an actual contract, and absent that, it comes down to the law, which already has plenty of cases that say it takes more than just similarity of character designs for a genre to prove someone stole your shit.

This isn't new, either, back in Web 1.0 there were BBS fights over accusations of theft between game programmers because someone was insisting THEY came up with the idea of the bulky, buzzcut, space marine and Quake II ripped them off!!!

Sugriva · Jan 16, 2023

Glossy Paper said:
AI art is steamrolling and pissing all over that.

Am I supposed to be upset about this? Fuck artists. 90% of them are autistic drama queens.

Tasty Tatty · Jan 16, 2023

Glossy Paper said:
In the art bubble there is an invisible no-stealing-100%-nah-uh honor system in place, and the more famous/popular the artists are, the more strictly it is enforced.

Glossy Paper said:
On and beyond the mid-upper rungs of the art arena most artists operate on that honor system. It's what everyone has agreed to be fair.

Yeah, these people should fuck off.

Rembrandt, 1655 / Soutine, 1924

Velasquez 1653 / Picasso 1957

Van Gogh 1890 / Dore 1872

All those tantrums are pure jealousy. They're mad that they aren't as unique and talented as they think they are. The big masters of art through history did things nobody else did before, even if they copied others. Picasso and Van Gogh added their own style, which then was new and original on itself and became something new. That's why they are copied or inspire others until today.

These modern "artists" will never be this groundbreaking and they resent when someone with equal talent shows up. They are also not very original. Or their work is basically fanart, whose copyright is already debatable on itself. There was a good thread about how good artists are still around painting original stuff

These people aren't the ones complaining about AI. Jee, wonder why.

Burd Turglar · Jan 16, 2023

OC lawsuit, donut steel.

round robin · Jan 16, 2023

Glossy Paper said:
I think most people who use the arguments that AI art is "derivative" or "transformative" don't exactly understand why the artists are big mad. In the art bubble there is an invisible no-stealing-100%-nah-uh honor system in place, and the more famous/popular the artists are, the more strictly it is enforced. People have been accused of stealing composition, lighting, specific character poses, etc in their own "derivative" and "transformative" artworks. And once you get branded as an art thief other artists will be sure to remind any employer and patrons about your theft, which unusually scares off any potential work you might get. If an artist knows that their own work show shadows of inspiration from another's, they most often say so in the description, or link the inspiration in some way. (This does not always work and the "inspiration piece" artist might try to make them delete the art post. Twitter fights and drama ensues)
Looking at it from the outside one might say "wow these artists are such whiny babies! just share your skills!", but please understand that art and design is a competitive and time sensitive field. One art piece with the right elements posted at the right moment could earn someone a contract or project. On and beyond the mid-upper rungs of the art arena most artists operate on that honor system. It's what everyone has agreed to be fair.

AI art is steamrolling and pissing all over that.

wow these artists are such whiny babies

Synthetic Smug · Jan 16, 2023

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
There's one detail you've forgotten about, the Supreme Court had already ruled that any intellectual property generated by an AI can't be copyrighted because it wasn't created by a person, and copyright is for people.

So basically you want to live in China, where any idea or invention you create can just be taken from you by the government without compensation or recourse, and you live under the oppression of an AI that manages your life through a social credit score system & facial recognition cameras? Because that's essentially the sum of what you just said.

You're going to wind up with precedent being like Shorpy(historical photos) where the original negatives are in the public domain but the human operator afterwards doing levels adjustment and dust removal creates a copyrightable derivative image. The real strength of AI is in a hybrid approach.

Glossy Paper · Jan 16, 2023

Tasty Tatty said:
All those tantrums are pure jealousy. They're mad that they aren't as unique and talented as they think they are.

Of course it is jealousy. No human in this world will ever be able ingest and remix millions of images produced throughout centuries of history. Any skilled artist would understand this. Art is the human expression of sad limited mortals, and now we have a glimpse of what a limitless being could do. But should we push for artists to concede and diminish the human value in their work? And do you honestly believe people will rollover when their jobs are at risk? In fact it would be psychotic if they do. "Here, take my job that I spent countless hours of my life dedicated to honing the skills for!" said no one.

Do note that I have not yet taken a side in my original post, I was only explaining the artists' point of view which not many understand.
I noticed in your examples that the "copiers" have done so with paintings that are 2 decades or older. As per my post the "time sensitivity" is an important factor, nobody would be mad at the many parodies of the iconic terminator movie poster done now. Also if you think that people only paint "original" still life with physical medium then you're in for a ride.

The big masters of art through history did things nobody else did before, even if they copied others. Picasso and Van Gogh added their own style, which then was new and original on itself and became something new. That's why they are copied or inspire others until today.

We can credit Picasso and Van Gogh for their efforts, so that more people can learn about art and history. Man I wonder how I could ever credit the [fantasy][elf][4k][artstation trending][forest] pieces.

Anyhow. "Nobody cares". Just as what the twitter thread you included have said. But it only makes sense for many artists to be sad that things are this way.

Zero Day Defense · Jan 16, 2023

Weppers said:
This stuff always struck me as well-laundered copying and pasting.

That's algorithmically not what it is. I'm not even sure if something like that is possible, but the end result of such a thing would be an obvious collage.

Mango Cobra said:
Honestly? Good. AI artbros are the most obnoxious faggots I've ever encountered.

Way way way too many of those faggots are going and saying shit like "Now art is no longer gatekept behind artists" or you've got lazy asshole artists who use it to scam commissioners.

For example, two years ago I commissioned an artist to draw my sister's D&D character as a gift for her. When my turn for him to work on the piece came around, he worked on it for a month and then sent a DM saying that he was going to be moving to Brazil from Japan, and then vanished for a year and a half.

After I pestered him to either finish the art that I had paid for or give me a refund when he had returned, he said that the picture had been lost and he needed to restart it, and then a week later he gave some lazy ass AI art that looked nothing like the references my sister had drawn, and that he had lazily traced... But the dude was so retarded that he traced everything, including the extra fingers and other giveaways that it was AI generated.

So seriously, fuck AI art, fuck AI artbros, and fuck lazy artists.

You get screwed over by someone you commissioned a conventional artpiece from that disappeared for nearly two years and then only afterwards phoned in your commission, but you're mad at AI art?

You do realize that he was going to phone it in, either way, right?

Glossy Paper said:
Of course it is jealousy. No human in this world will ever be able ingest and remix millions of images produced throughout centuries of history. Any skilled artist would understand this. Art is the human expression of sad limited mortals, and now we have a glimpse of what a limitless being could do. But should we push for artists to concede and diminish the human value in their work? And do you honestly believe people will rollover when their jobs are at risk? In fact it would be psychotic if they do. "Here, take my job that I spent countless hours of my life dedicated to honing the skills for!" said no one.

If you're prompting for anything more than a single subject, it's absolutely uncanny and severely unnerving-- which is expected from a soulless automaton performing something that requires a soul. Artists that are threatened by it don't even know what it is, AND they suffer from being equally soulless to the point they consider a complex algorithm "competition".

The Ugly One · Jan 16, 2023

Sulla said:
But stable diffusion is open source... What are they going to do, confiscate everyones harddrives?

The important question is, if they win their suit, what can anyone who has it actually legally do with it that even matters? Stable Diffusion gets reduced from something that was going to revolutionize the graphic design industry to a little toy that software pirates can play with on their home PCs for fun.

Even researchers won't be able to use it, they'll have to rebuild it and ensure the training data is all used with permission.

Zero Day Defense said:
That's algorithmically not what it is. I'm not even sure if something like that is possible, but the end result of such a thing would be an obvious collage.

The end result includes other mathematical operations - transformations, convolutions, etc, but it's still fundamentally derived from the training inputs. Sometimes it's really obvious what the training inputs were, sometimes it's not, but "it's not obvious how my software used your copyrighted image without permission to derive an output" is probably not enough on its own to settle whether or not I actually need your permission.

Example of obviousness:
Original photo:

AI asked to produce "Karl Marx leaning on a desk":

TowinKarz said:
That just shows why these suits are a joke - the cardinal rule of art : DONUT STEEL! : as you said, is a gentleman's agreement at best, and such can never ever be enforced through a court. You have to sign an actual contract, and absent that, it comes down to the law, which already has plenty of cases that say it takes more than just similarity of character designs for a genre to prove someone stole your shit.

Among other things, the plaintiffs are alleging that DeviantArt providing their art to be used to tune art-generating software is a violation of a written contract. Virtually none of the images on the internet are free of written T&Cs, which is precisely the problem with doing any kind of bulk scraping of content and then doing well, pretty much anything other than academic research with it.

I know of an AI project where every single piece of data is provided under written permission by its owners to be used for that purpose. So it's not a trivial issue that is just now coming out of the blue. Plenty of people have known for years that this could get you in trouble, but the Stable Diffusion group just didn't give a shit and treated images from the internet like they were free for them use in any way they wanted without permission, and now they've got a lawsuit on their hands. So now we're going to find out if a court thinks copyright covers using images to build a model or not.

TracdacianTortoise · Jan 16, 2023

indigoisviolet said:
If the defence is clever, they'll demonstrate the dire negatives of Stable Diffusion live in court. I've played with Stable Diffusion for hours on end after finally getting it to run on PC. As a fun timesink, 10/10, it pushed everything else I was doing out of the way for about a week. As an artistic tool, though? 2/10, and that's being generous. For comparison I'd rate the Daz3D Dollhouse 8/10 if you're not adversed to stealing digital assets / not adversed to spending a small fortune, and things like the gelbooru search engine are 10/10, you can always instantly find fresh ideas there given very few prompts.

What Stable Diffusion is very good at:
(1) Boring yet beautiful landscapes devoid of characters and indeed character.
(2) Utterly cursed images. More amusing than genuinely disturbing, yet once in a while it will accidentally make something horrifying out of the most innocent prompt.

Problems with dream.py that aren't just bitching about the 8GB+ GPU hogging:
(1) It doesn't do humans well. Right off the bat, what is the point? If you're not trying to make a headshot portrait, or with a huge struggle a cowboy portrait (cut off just below the waist, preferably with hands hidden behind back or above head) forget it. There is no magical combination of prompt text that will trick this AI into understanding limbs. It shits itself over fingers and toes, and as often as not adds random arms, legs, hands etc. At best you accidentally luck out with a seed that generates something approximating human and can zero in from there; spoiler: the results aren't worth it.
(2) It is horribly obvious that much of the weighting is draw from social media. Wanna pump out an insta's worth of bland art-ho still life bullshit? dream.py has you covered. The other source is blatantly Artstation, which is better, but in terms of seeing something new, forget it. Much of that stuff might as well be created by AI to begin with anyway; not one new idea to be found, it's all horribly safely colouring in between the lines.
(3) Blandness is the core issue that kills dream.py artistically. It doesn't appear to understand verbs, so in the unlikely event you luck out and get it to generate a passable scene, you cannot simply edit the action. It also chooses the least energetic poses imaginable. Great if you want characters to mill about aimlessly, but beyond that it really struggles.
~~(4) 512 by 512 px is a joke, isn't it? How is that sending swim's poor GTX Titan into a tizzy? Oh, yeah, I wasn't going to bitch about this...~~

Problems with img2img.py that aren't identical to the above, or bitching about the computer dork pedantry of the parameter phrasing:
(1) What is perspective? This AI doesn't know. Unless the seed image is 90 degrees flat on, it misinterprets the visual prompt as having deformed body proportions. Often amusingly, to be fair, but not helpfully so.
(2) "You're supposed to feed it with stick figures..." yeah, no. Fuck off. The whole point of an AI enhanced image is to make the existing one better. Or remixed into the style of artist you feed the prompt. Whilst the AI makes an attempt - and indeed, the very best outputs are of this nature, try Hieronymus Bosch, Caravaggio, and even Larry Elmore which I was notably impressed at - it just doesn't work as intended. It either scratches at the input picture S=<0.5 or gives up attempting to interoplate entirely S>=0.7 which means you're pretty much stuck with S=0.6 and tough shit if it doesn't work with that.
(3) Related to perspective, this AI flattens and simplifies backgrounds unless you obsessively tell it not to do so, and even then it just ignores you most of the time. One of the hardest things to do is place characters into an environment where they appear naturalistic; img2img.py doesn't even bother trying. Even if you seed it with a beautifully balanced picture, nope, get that background out of here, and have some additional limbs while you're here.
(4) I can see the variance. After a short while I began to spot the patterns the AI pulls from, to the point of being able to predict them. Extending the output iterations eventually resulted in a loop, even.

As it stands, it was fun, often amusing, but I'm not inclined to go back to it. There is no danger this is going to replace anyone as an artisan, let alone an artist, even with a custom ultra user-friendly interface. I'd be very interested to see the hidden base prompts novelai uses to lock down output images into a pleasingly generic genre output, but beyond that curiosity, I probably won't use Stable Diffusion again.

Take prompt suggestions from the court regarding a scene with human figures interacting. Stable Diffusion will shit itself live on the court monitors, and case dismissed.

It’s not just human figures AI is shit at, it’s trash at architecture. It looks fine at a glance, but then you’ll notice doors in the middle of walls, arches of differing heights on the same level and all sorts of shit that’s just wrong. The building blocks are there, but it doesn’t know how to arrange them.

Mango Cobra · Jan 16, 2023

Zero Day Defense said:
You get screwed over by someone you commissioned a conventional artpiece from that disappeared for nearly two years and then only afterwards phoned in your commission, but you're mad at AI art?

You do realize that he was going to phone it in, either way, right?

Him being a scumbag is irrelevant and just a symptom of the greater issue.

Zero Day Defense · Jan 16, 2023

The Ugly One said:
The end result includes other mathematical operations - transformations, convolutions, etc, but it's still fundamentally derived from the training inputs.

By your own description, it's literally "transformative".

The only difference between Stable Diffusion and (most) artists is that the former doesn't have a soul, but that's it.

also I can't stand that damned picture, the fingers are Lovecraftian abominations, the face is wrong, it's just straight up icky-- if you're worried about this coming for your job, you have no soul

Mango Cobra said:
Him being a scumbag is irrelevant and just a symptom of the greater issue.

The "greater issue" is that you got scammed by a guy that ghosted you for nearly two years and then phoned in your work.

He could have done that without Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion didn't make him a flake.

Mango Cobra · Jan 16, 2023

Zero Day Defense said:
The "greater issue" is that you got scammed.

Fair enough about me being scammed, but no, the greater issue is that a lot of scumbags are using it to scam their clients. So far only two types of people use Stable Diffusion and call it art:

1) Faggots who couldn't cut it as artists / never bothered to try / hate artists for whatever reason - The kind of people sobbing about how "you don't understand it man" in this thread
2)Lazy asshole artists who think that its a good replacement for the work they had done in the past.

The Ugly One · Jan 16, 2023

Zero Day Defense said:
By your own description, it's literally "transformative".

Moving something three pixels to the right is literally a transformation. Applying a blur filter is literally a transformation. The problem is, applying linear transformations, Gaussian filters, convolutions, eigendecompositions, and other mathematical transformations to electronic data given to you under license does not absolve you of having to comply with the terms of the license. That's how contracts work. Lots of images on Flickr and DeviantArt specify "no derivative works" & require attribution. A judge may very well determine that the StableDiffusion AI is itself a derivative work, and is therefore a violation of the CC Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 license. Maybe he won't, though, maybe he'll rule that creation of an AI model doesn't have to comply with any terms under which you obtain data.

However, if a judge rules that StableDiffusion is not a derivative work, nor can the output of the model be considered derivative works, we'll see an updated Creative Commons license with an additional clause barring the use of the image for training an AI. And then it won't be ambiguous at all.

All that's ambiguous right now is whether licenses that were written before people really knew about the possibility of them being used to fit billion-parameter models can be interpreted as potentially baring this use of the licensed content. If it were obvious, there wouldn't be two open lawsuits right now concerning exactly this.

Zero Day Defense said:
The only difference between Stable Diffusion and (most) artists is that the former doesn't have a soul, but that's it.

No, actually, your brain doesn't internally have a fancy nonlinear function that's fitted to a bunch of data points. They don't work anything at all the same.

Zero Day Defense · Jan 16, 2023

Mango Cobra said:
Fair enough about me being scammed, but no, the greater issue is that a lot of scumbags are using it to scam their clients.

This is why you look at their portfolios and arrange a way to not pay in full before you see a sketch of what they're intending.

The Ugly One said:
Applying linear transformations, Gaussian filters, convolutions, eigendecompositions, and other mathematical transformations

You keep saying the word, but you keep denying my point.

The Ugly One said:
Or, I don't know, do you think if you got a CAD model under NDA, you could distribute it on the internet after transforming it a bit?

>take a base and edit it a bit
Even now, that's not how Stable Diffusion works.

The Ugly One said:
No, actually, your brain doesn't internally have a fancy nonlinear function that's fitted to a bunch of data points.

The "fancy nonlinear function that's fitted to a bunch of data points" is an inferior mathematical representation of natural human creative processes-- that's my point.

Class Action Filed Against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt for DMCA Violations, Right of Publicity Violations, UnlawfulCompetition, TOS Breach

Class Action Filed Against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for DMCA Violations, Right of Publicity Violations, Unlawful Competition, Breach of TOS

Class Action Filed Against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt f…

Astro Galactic Megalul

Bigot Sandwich Connoisseur

Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0

Shitlord

Glossy Paper

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid

This will all end in tears, I just know it.

Mango Cobra

Anime is the thinking man's media

TowinKarz

Suffering From a Messaging Problem

Sugriva

Whose toes are those?!?!???

Tasty Tatty

Alpaca Expert

Burd Turglar

You say tomato, I say potato.

round robin

Synthetic Smug

Glossy Paper

Zero Day Defense

Includes Rumble Pak (tm)

The Ugly One

Piss Towel Therapist

TracdacianTortoise

Mango Cobra

Anime is the thinking man's media

Zero Day Defense

Includes Rumble Pak (tm)

Mango Cobra

Anime is the thinking man's media

The Ugly One

Piss Towel Therapist

Zero Day Defense

Includes Rumble Pak (tm)