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

Agent Abe Caprine · Jan 15, 2023

Mr.Miyagi said:
"So you're telling me that the computer is drawing the picture?"
"That's correct, Your Honor."
"Are you sure there's not a little man inside the computer box that's drawing it?"
"We're reasonably sure, Your Honor."

"Back in my day, we drew stick figures with mud and liked it. When will this campooter fad end?"

Vesperus · Jan 15, 2023

None of that art is worth shit, though, so where's the loss?

I do like art. Actual art on canvas. There's a couple of oil paintings that cost me a depressing amount of money, but that's because they are physical things made by an artist.

Digital shit is worth nothing.

WelfareNiggerQueen · Jan 16, 2023

Lol. We're at the point in clown world where math is going to become illegal and along with it fanart and hentai unless you're one of the 3 dudes in the world who actually draw OC.

I don't expect the case to rule in these faggots favor but the possibility of the aforementioned thing coming true is now possible and when this doesn't rule in their favor I expect these fags to somehow end up with a large ass warchest to launch endless legal harassment campaigns to fuck with these projects.

The Ugly One · Jan 16, 2023

WelfareNiggerQueen said:
Lol. We're at the point in clown world where math is going to become illegal and along with it fanart and hentai unless you're one of the 3 dudes in the world who actually draw OC.

Basing models on other people's data for commercial purposes is a legal minefield even when your model is just boring bullshit like a linear regression fit. If I count the butterflies I see each day during the month of June, and I publish it, and I specify that it's for non-commercial use only, you'd better not use my butterfly numbers in literally anything you do that is commercial at all, from publishing a book of butterfly counts, to selling consulting services to help autistic retards predict butterfly numbers, to developing the Butterfly Predictor 9000 at your job. There is a wealth of information on the internet, but you have to be really careful about how you use it.

People have been warning these AI/ML guys about this since it got going, but they seemed to think that if your model has 50 million parameters instead of 5, and can't actually work at all if you aren't allowed to just ignore who owns the data you feed it, then you get to ignore copyright completely and do what you want.

IANAL, so I'm not predicting how these lawsuits will turn out, but they aren't being filed by people who have never won suits before.

I'm Not Racist Anymore · Jan 16, 2023

AI outputs seem like they're transformative enough to be different than the art they "steal" or whatever.

Rei is Shit. · Jan 16, 2023

Yet another reason why China will come to dominate AI.

Stoneheart · Jan 16, 2023

since this is clownworld, i predict that they will force them to use a DMCA filter at the input level, so all we will be getting in the future are AI pictures that use free material like old art.

Synthetic Smug · Jan 16, 2023

Monkey Pink said:
Thanks, Karla Ortiz!View attachment 4274978

That insecure goblin is acting as a catspaw to enable Disney and other large copyright holders to expand copyright law to new realms as any further extension of current laws are nonviable. Fear not, she'll fuck this up too. Her and that Pokémon golem.

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid · Jan 16, 2023

I'm Not Racist Anymore said:
AI outputs seem like they're transformative enough to be different than the art they "steal" or whatever.

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.

Secret Messenger said:
Copyright is evil. I would rather live in an A.I dystopia than give any power to companies that enforce DMCA.

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.

AnonymousKot · 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.

I hope what you said is true, I'd hate to see the only good progress in AI in years get scrubbed due to some 'Artist' wanting it removed, here's hoping it gets dragged out for long though so that it has time to go mainstream

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid · Jan 16, 2023

AnonymousKot said:
I hope what you said is true, I'd hate to see the only good progress in AI in years get scrubbed due to some 'Artist' wanting it removed, here's hoping it gets dragged out for long though so that it has time to go mainstream

You do realize what I said means that Stable Diffusion has a weaker case, right?

ArthuriusMartyrius · Jan 16, 2023

I will never stop laughing over the fact that smug ivory tower fuckers talked about how AI would make manual labor like trucking and stacking shelves obsolete and literally the very first thing it did was make them obsolete.

Vesperus · Jan 16, 2023

ArthuriusMartyrius said:
I will never stop laughing over the fact that smug ivory tower fuckers talked about how AI would make manual labor like trucking and stacking shelves obsolete and literally the very first thing it did was make them obsolete.

The only question is, how fast can it make class-action lawyers obsolete?

The Mass Shooter Ron Soye · Jan 16, 2023

Epoch said:
It was fun while it lasted boys, can't wait for copyright law to ass rape these projects out of existence

Maybe, but it's possible they will lose. Imagine that you wanted to sue over a single piece of AI-generated art, used as an album cover or something so damages can be easily proven. If you can't find a picture that has had sections directly copied to put side-by-side with the AI art, do you have a case? If there's no Mickey Mouse in this scenario, then trademark law doesn't need to be invoked.

You're not supposed to be able to copyright an art style. The lawsuits over song similarity come close, but I think those cases still allege deliberate copying of specific arrangements of notes, or use bullshittery that would not be as easy with two images.

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

It could slow the field down, but not by much. Researchers will continue to gather big datasets of copyrighted images and make AI image models. If the model leaks, oopsie.

If Stability AI goes bankrupt from lawsuits and tech giants like Google are scared off, that means their censorship-friendly approach is gone with them. Open source efforts can try to build in censorship, but they can be forked.

I think Null mentioned that there are image models being trained on child pornography right now. If TPTB can't even stop people from sharing those models, which technically do not contain images, then there's no chance of stopping Stable Diffusion forks in general. At worst, you have to torrent it over a VPN or download it from a server in Belarus.

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.

It doesn't change the nature of the lawsuit. If you take an exact copy of someone's copyrighted work, and use it in some unauthorized way while proclaiming it to be copyright-free in the public domain, then you could be successfully sued.

Weppers · Jan 16, 2023

This stuff always struck me as well-laundered copying and pasting. I’m convinced that a lot people are defending it only because they bought into the marketing bullshit of the training images “disappearing into the algorithm” and now they don’t want to admit Big Tech can trick them that easily.

If the plaintiffs can get those AIs to spit out any large, unaltered chunks of copyrighted images then they can definitely win this case.

Roland TB-303 · Jan 16, 2023

Vesperus said:
The only question is, how fast can it make class-action lawyers obsolete?

Not long now.

Weppers said:
If the plaintiffs can get those AIs to spit out any large, unaltered chunks of copyrighted images then they can definitely win this case.

It’s still a derivative work unless it’s 100% identical, which won’t happen.

indigoisviolet · Jan 16, 2023

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.

Drazen · Jan 16, 2023

These AI art software projects need to move to russia, china or somewhere else where they don't have to deal with these unjust accusations. Fuck these bloodsuckers.

We've known for a long time now that AI will be coming for every area of human expertise. Artists, photographers and the like do not have special immunity.

SNEED.EXE · Jan 16, 2023

I can't wait to see 80 year old senators trying to describe AI as "a series of tubes".

Coolio55 · Jan 16, 2023

Synthetic Smug said:
That insecure goblin is acting as a catspaw to enable Disney and other large copyright holders to expand copyright law to new realms as any further extension of current laws are nonviable. Fear not, she'll fuck this up too. Her and that Pokémon golem.

Big companies are all for legislation. After all, they already have massive stockpiles of licenced images.
They want to force you to PAY THEM for the privilage of something you could do at home.
Adobe and Disney were donators to some anti ai class action fundraiser a while back. Could've even been this one!
Adobe's terms of service allow then to train *their* ai on anything you put into lightroom unless you opt out in some obscure preference setting.

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…

Agent Abe Caprine

Stole Hitler's Mercedes Bens.

Vesperus

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

WelfareNiggerQueen

Mup da doo didda po mo gub dat tum muhfugen bix no

The Ugly One

Piss Towel Therapist

I'm Not Racist Anymore

Do NOT patronize me when I relapse.

Rei is Shit.

Stoneheart

Well hung, and snow white tan

Synthetic Smug

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid

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

AnonymousKot

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid

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

ArthuriusMartyrius

Vesperus

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

The Mass Shooter Ron Soye

You CAN'T NOT DO IT!

Weppers

Roland TB-303

Acid Generator

indigoisviolet

Drazen

SNEED.EXE

Sneed Creepypasta Connoisseur

Coolio55

Hateful big goat