sd might not directly include this info in its outputs, but it really is free marketing for some (in fact, i suspect a lot of artists are probably flattered for being included by name in the dataset, but some are riding the waxing wave of outrage for the free media exposure)

It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG, convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s and not the image and not ascii art of the image, just like a printing press made up of just [1] and [0] character blocks, and sell that. Yes, the 1s and 0s are mathematically derived from the image but the image of 1s and 0s is not a visual derivative of the Disney image. That is, no one is going to buy a t-shirt of 1s and 0s instead of a Mickey t-shirt. Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.

Again, anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s, so this is not at all about access. This is about putting things on t-shirts and selling them.

e.g., there's copying Dali's color tone, realism level, and general look, and then there's understanding the why of what he is doing and being able to translate that out with some skill. You may never 100% match Dali directly, but a human doesn't necessarily need a lot of data to reach this level. And of course there will be a valid market in copying his tone, realism level, and general look even without a deeper level of semantic copying. A lot of the AI art is already this, but the person crafting the prompt and then performing a conscious selection of the result can bring their own semantics to the art in the process, it is not strictly speaking necessary to have copied them from the original artist.

This is actually part of what is going through my mind when I expect this will be solved via legislation. Well... for a given value of "solved". I expect whenever Congress gets around to this, any law they will end up passing will have HN up in arms and I expect to be armed with a torch & pitchfork myself, such is my confidence in Congress on this front. But even given that Congress is going to royally mess it up, it may yet be less messed up than the inevitable hodgepodge of conflicting precedents that will precede Congress' efforts, because while in my opinion there is no coherent legal principle that will hold the decisions together, the lawsuits will arise, the decisions will be made, and the precedents will be set. The mere inability to retain logical coherence does not stop our legal system.

Art is the creative aspect not the skill in creating things. Art will be fine, those who just are scribes for painting are doomed.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you see the similarity more in how the initial side-stepping of copyright eventually gave way to new licensing rules (or adherence to existing rules).

I've heard similar sentiment trying to make another point entirely - something closer to arguing that the AI is creatively inspired the way humans are, and therefore is by definition not infringing.

I suspect this might be where the flurry of downvotes came from.

If your AI is limited to only training on the paucity of explicitly permissibly licensed/public domain content (and as I think about it more, this would only apply to things that are permissibly licensed without an attribution requirement, which is something there is no meaningful way to do in a model like the one we are discussing) your AI will not be very useful. With that in mind, I would argue that yes, it absolutely is an obvious fact about its nature.

I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt to achieve that than with the status quo we've been following so far.

This argument is assuming its own conclusion, that such a situation must be bad. But I don't think that's necessarily true.

If somebody can make 1000 different derivatives that the public likes as much as the originals, then it must be that in whatever criteria the public is interested in, these works are just as good. If they were inferior, the public wouldn't accept them as substitutes. The fact that they are (hypothetically) accepted indicates that the public is OK with them.

For my own personal aesthetics, I would like to think that today's popular music, which is written by some combination of algorithm and committee, and produced through tools that correct the performance via autotune, quantization, etc., is inferior to the music that I enjoy. But given that the public seems to like this music (and indeed, they like music generated this way even though it's not even cheaper for them to consume) seems to say that we as a society are getting what they want, and who am I to put a normative judgment on that?

Copyright what? Someone’s brain? You can copyright a specific work or a character, but you actually want to live in a world where someone can copyright the color red with a dark black line, or the G# chord?

Real artists are going to art, and musicians are going to make music. People who do creative work do it to express themselves, their point of view or to say something.

Corporate art exist to sell you soda - I am not sure your argument lands quite like you want it to.

I am glad this is going to court, because, with my understand of how neural nets work, I fail to see how any copyright is being infringed.

IMO an artist that wants their name out of the dataset is a moron. In the end , people copying an artist style over and over will just send the price of originals through the roof. This is completely obvious.

Yes, much in the same way that I am glad I live in a future where scribes aren't required to put text on paper: There is a massive amount of efficiency to be gained and enjoyment to reap for everyone who doesn't happen to be employed as an artist.

My creative output per minute has probably increased threefold in the last few months from incorporating these tools into my workflow. What I've been making doesn't look or sound like anything that anyone else is making.

You're going to have a really hard time using Stable Diffusion to make quirky cartoon daily desk calendars in the style of plaintiff Sarah Anderson. You're going to have a much better time if you think more like a Creative Director and have less of an idea ahead of time of what the tool is going to give you... so you can iterate, much like a painter iterates while working.

These tools require the creative agency from the artist who is using them in order to produce things that people find interesting, entertaining, valuable or otherwise meaningful so I really don't see a "corporation goes brrrrrr" doing anything other than flooding the lowest-common denominator content feed pipes on the internet contrasted with the highest quality art using these tools in incredibly transformative ways.

If an AI art engine outputs a frame of solid blue, is it infringing the copyright of Yves Klein's solid blue "IKB 79"?

I think that some artists' styles can be accurately replicated without training on any of their work: because the artists' style is generic enough that it can be exhaustively encoded via the works of others.

This seems like a bad test because generic barely-creative works are much more easily generated by AI engines regardless of the source training data. I wonder if we're going to see IP troll style behavior from artists drawing many obvious things so they'll have standing to sue (and negotiate a 'fuck off' settlement) with AI art engines.

Sure, I mean, anyone can sit on the sidelines and imagine any sort of fantasy legal doctrines.

The one you’re imagining would have the courts deciding the purpose of art works.

In this case an example is easy. If someone uses Stable Diffusion to remove a person from the background of an image they are clearly using the tool for a separate purpose than copying Sarah Anderson’s works and making competing desk calendars.

But I guess your silly argument is that the doctored photograph is a “picture” and Sarah Anderson made “pictures” and all pictures have the purpose of “being looked at” and you want courts to decide this based on this reasoning?

I'm told that for people who think Rolex watches are important, a fake Rolex is much worse than not having a Rolex at all: the item is a signal much like a peacock tail, the signal is de-valued by making things easy.

Upside: the brilliant artist Rohan Kishibe falls under a bus, but while his loss is tragic his artistic legacy lives on - hooray!

Downside: up-and-coming artist Rohan Kishibe is on the verge of breaking through commercially, but the publishers of Shonen Lump, who invested heavily in AI, floods the market with work from Kohan Rishibe, and our hero is derided as a mere imitator.

In fact, I generated a bunch of Tintin panels between writing my earlier comment and this one, and they're bad but not terrible - mainly because I asked for 'Tintin riding a bicycle [...]' and it's having trouble with things like the bicycle spokes. Two out of the 4 'feel' right in terms of the line drawing style, color palette, foreground-background composition, level of background detail etc.

This is very dismissive, the scale is what makes the difference. You can get away with pirating all types of content for personal use.

AI companies are essentially trying to legalize that, but in reverse - taking from small creators to enrich the shareholders of their billion dollar corporations.

If you try to play by these rules and create a million dollar business that distributes various copyrighted content from the internet (e.g. AAA games, movies or music) you'll very quickly realize how much their stance on copyright changes.

To continue blindly applying historical understanding to fundamentally new technologies creates huge blind spots, and I’d argue similar to pretending that the creation of ever more destructive weaponry requires no changes to the rules of engagement in warfare.

The game has changed.

Whether or not one believes those laws apply to generative AI seems to be based on one's belief in how similar that AI software is to humans.

I'd argue that systematically ingesting 2.3 billion images is not remotely human (one of a myriad of reasons the comparisons break down), and that it is a long stretch to claim that this falls into the realm of fair use as originally envisioned.

It is this insistence that the software is human enough to be granted human-like status that is playing fast and loose with the definitions of things, ranging from consciousness, to learning, to the interpretation of those concepts relative to current laws.

I believe new laws will be written, and old laws will be updated. There's no question that the current legal system is not well equipped for various generative AI systems. But I don't think the current laws have nothing to say.

And I'd still argue that this conversation can be separated from the one about indiscriminately slurping up artist's content.

> We're not going to stop AI because some furry deviant art artist complains loudly online.

Please don't argue against straw men. There are legitimate concerns from artists across disciplines and genres, and this isn't just isolated shrieking.

Artist backlash is frankly one of the most natural outcomes I could imagine from a system that uses their work without permission. Many of the people who are complaining loudly are not against AI, just against the use of their work without consent or attribution.

I'm both extremely excited about the possibilities the software unlocks and concerned about the implications. AI can exist without ignoring the rights of artists.

The computing requirements enforce the current reality that the training of models will be centralized.

This places a larger ethical burden on those central entities, IMO.

The model learns concepts from images, not the images itself. It has developed general solutions explaining light, colors, composition, objects and their relation to one another, facial features and too many more concepts to even begin enumerating them.

How is this different from a human studying art, literature, music, etc. to learn concepts and then apply them in creating new pictures, novels or songs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Computational neural networks are not models of biological brains, nor are they even attempting to be.

The basic functioning of a computational "neuron" in a neural network is at most reflective of an extreme distillation of the most fundamental concept of how a biological neuron works. And it really is just their functioning - ie executing.

The most important parts of making a computational neural network actually give meaningful output - training - doesn't even rise to the level of being vaguely inspired by the deconstruction of the concepts behind biological functions.

So, no. They aren't models of biological brains any more than boids are models of actual birds.

As for the goals of reasonably anthropomorphizing them... you're talking pretty much full on artificial general intelligence there. I don't believe anybody is reasonably suggesting modern deep learning is even a particularly viable route there, never mind something that's an active goal.

Without consciousness, it’s just a biologically inspired computer program. With consciousness, I suspect an AI modeled to understand ethics would refuse to provide certain outputs of its own accord.

And the analogy quickly breaks down the moment you continue to compare these processes and their context.

The flaw in this argument is the word "artist". If you remove all the pictures from the data source, the AI isnt capable of generating anything. Because it's not an artist.

As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.

> So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work

I’ve seen this sentiment, but it does not match the reality we see play out on the web every day.

The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.

It makes no sense to me that the introduction of an AI tool would suddenly solve the problem of attribution instead of just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.

It's not copying, it's breaking down work to it's foundational features and recombining those features with others to make new things. Literally exactly what humans do when they make art.

If a person was doing what these models are doing it not only wouldn't be illegal, it would be laughable if we even had the discussion.

This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.

First of all, we have no idea how biological NNs learn, how they represent information, how they reason etc. Given what we do know, there is no reason to assume any similarity with ANNs on any of those fronts. Just to give one example, we know very well that a single biological neuron encodes significant information and is capable of reasoning on its own. In fact, even non-neuronal biological cells are capable of such - especially looking at single-celled organisms, which display extraordinarily complex behaviors with no NN in sight.

Second of all, we don't exactly understand how the huge models we have actually encode the higher-level representations of the training set that they store. Of course, we can say for sure that they are not literally storing a copy of the data on simple space requirements. But we can also say for sure that their "understanding" of the data, as well as their capacity for inference, is significantly different from our own - since they make certain mistakes that are nearly impossible for a human to make, while showing super human abilities in other aspects. So, if anything, we must conclude that whatever it is they are doing, it is most certainly not a way of understanding the information the way we understand it.

No reason you can't apply that framework to AI.

Where AI might get into more trouble is that you might be able show literal copying in a way that it's impossible to do in a person mind. Like saving chunks of a work into its model.

Now if you are the company selling this product, how many people are feeling wronged and will sue - that's the class action part?

If you use the product to generate an image that is very similar to someone's art and they feel wronged and sue, would you still use it commercially?

That's true of lots of things that are legally considered transformative though. E.g. without all those books that Google scanned, Google Books would be completely useless.

In Washington you must dig for clams with human power, you cannot use a hydraulic clam pump. There was a time where you could down 50 birds with a single firing of a punt gun. This was made illegal, even if you could still eventually bag 50 birds with a normal shotgun.

https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...

https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...

Their weight is irrelevant. They would carry pretty much as much meaning in the complete absence of copyright.

In the world of sensible defaults they wouldn't need to exist at all.

I think it's quite presumptuous to unequivocally state that artists lose with this. Is it a complicated situation? Yes, of course, too complicated for such certainty. That's a wonderful thing to believe, but it's just as plausible (I'd argue far, far more plausible as the tech improves) that clients who would formerly pay for their work no longer have to.

I'm not sure how did you manage to miss thousands of artists able to capitalize on sudden and accidental fame for decades without any prior arrangements. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible. Also to put this in context compare this with how often very popular artists get completely screwed by huge copyright behemoths earning a score of money but mostly for someone else, someone completely uncreative.

> https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

Trying to buy something for exposure is absolutely abhorrent because you try to coax someone into doing work for no money. And for nothing basically because people who try to pay with exposure don't really provide any significant exposure 99.99% of times.

If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material. That's why they never opposed it when other artists were learning from their art. That and of course that target of their wrath would be basically the entire rest of the art community which wouldn't make them very popular.

> Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. .... I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.

That's completely fine in my book. And if those generated stories get really popular so I learn about them I might do just a little bit of online marketing to inject my name in the discussions about them and publish new ones to my fresh new subscribers ahead of time. Heck, I could create my own generated and fine-tuned manually content and sell it just like that guy does since he's already proven a business model for me.

Compare now this with the world of strict copyright where this guy doesn't even know I exist, same goes for swaths of fans of ghost stories. Or let's assume he knows and wants to deal with me. Since he's the one with the money I'll be severely dependent of him and strongly disadvantaged in any deal. But let's assume we struck a deal that's nice for me. There's no way I'll be able to produce new ghost stories every day. Not to mention I wouldn't wish that workload on my worst enemy. So no business happens and many people have their love for ghost stories un-satiated, many didn't discover their love for ghost stories and I am 100% still poor struggling author who's known by nobody.

World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.

> The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.

And yet you vehemently defend the system that created this situation and refuse to even consider alternatives.

Now, sure, winning just 1 contest isn't going to settle the matter but I think it provides reasonable evidence that SD is heading to elite quality at a rapid pace. Above, the submitter Allen was responsible for directing and cleaning the results so deserves credit. However, Allen is also using a year-old MidJourney model that has likely improved dramatically already.

It seems uncontroversial that even if SD models aren't in the top-tier of imitative/derivative art (or "art from text" as that genre evolves) right now, they will be soon.

Sure. That's why I don't speak on their behalf. I'm just voicing my opinion about harmful silliness of the scheme they allowed themselves to be coaxed into.

> It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.

Silently ignored in lawyers arguments are all the consumers of culture. All the people who wrote the prompts and all the people who drew great joy from looking at AI creation. They'd get literally nothing if the case of strict copyright so their collective loss is great because they are many.

> But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.

Sure, opinions may vary. Only actual data can resolve who's wrong. And the number for compensation of artists in copyright industry are not great when compared to viral gains from attention based, open economy.

> If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely.

If you haven't lost anything why do you care? Why do you want to devoid others of joy they draw from availability of artwork?

> Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently.

It's the internet. People talk. Nothing stays secret. And at any point in time original artist or their fan can chip in and say, "yeah, that's exactly like mine, see?". And no-one can do anything about it.

> When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.

Yeah. Using AI artwork in a very specific style would generate same kind of news. And those games are not very good and they don't make much money. So not only there's no harm, severe ostracism. There's also not much opportunity to have any gain if copyright was strictly observed. And as you noticed it already happens. Darkest Dungeon had very fresh and attractive art-style. Now it's very easy to randomly encounter in Play Store cheap clicker games blatantly ripping off that esthetics. It's not directly stolen, but it's pretty much what AI would do if someone was hell bent on replicating the esthetics. Yet humans did it. What's the loss to Darkest Dungeon graphic designer? Exactly zero.

And I think games that would start with AI art and got really popular ... they'd invite original artist for DLC or to get on the news or for just good will of the public. Public relationships is very important when selling games.

So you want an image? For 5 bucks? You get an image that's worth 5 bucks, but not an image that costs 1000 dollars to make in real life.

The problem here is you giving a simpleminded person access to an AI, and for a few bucks, this person can generate something that uses thousands of man years of expertise for that given work.

I hope you see the potential slippery slope here.

Consider that even cooking recipes (the particular descriptions) are copyrighted, even though they are mostly technical descriptions of a simple process (the recipe itself is not copyrighted, the specific wording is).

In the United States, a legal derivative work, which isn't a parody, needs to make three substantive changes from the original. It's fair to say that creating new works in the same style or 'look-and-feel' of an artist would satisfy that at prima facie.

Second, your Outsider Art is something completely different, funnily enough a strawman. Surely you're not claiming that the creators of outside art have literally never had any sensory input in their lives? Or do you really think that one painter in two timelines, in one blind and in the other not, would paint exactly the same stuff?

If it is art, then it will be made both by patronage and by people saying: "Hey StableChatSiri, make me some art."

(People will still do the later even if it doesn't count as art).

Hm. Thinking of patrons, does anyone know how many artists and sculptors there were in 1710 England?

Because when I have access to these tools I will make better art than the technocrat with access to these tools?

I keep programming computers just because I like it. Maybe they'll keep creating too for the same reasons. Maybe they won't. It's irrelevant either way.

More moderately, all art is derivative at the end of the day. None of it was created ex nihilo. We already have legal guardrails for direct reproduction of specific characters and specific pieces, and that is plenty. The fact that maximalists want to kill a nascent technology by restricting the right to learn from, something that even our extremely slanted laws have carveouts for, is nothing short of offensive.

Corporations R&D is great at one thing, making things cheaper to produce and thus more widely available. And that's wonderful. But actually we want corporations to steal that tech from each other because then the consumer benefits the most.

The technology isn't.

The content is.

Judges are far from stupid and a fair use defense requires that you primarily acknowledge that you are in fact infringing but that you feel that because it is fair use you should be allowed to continue to do so. This is a pretty risky strategy, especially when you are a party that is in the business of hosting other people's creative content.

We'll see how it all pans out, personally I think their position would be much, much stronger if they had bothered to obtain consent, even an opt-out email that if not responded to within say 3 months would count as consent (and no: obviously that's not the same but we're comparing the relative size of fig-leaves here).

As it stands I don't see how their 'fair use defense' will hold together under scrutiny without opening a much bigger can of worms.

[1] They had to admit infringement because of their first line of defense, then the fall-back required them to point at the site where they presumably took the code from which they could not. Don't interrupt your opponent when they are making mistakes.

If think you're going to need more clarity on what you mean by that. Programs are used to create copyrighted works all the time. And machines can and do create copies of other people's copyrighted works.

> And thus, the questions are: "is generating a model based on the data set a derivate work" and the unasked question "is asking the model to generate a work in the style of {artist} a derivative work by the person asking the model?"

My point is you can take the machine or model out of the question entirely. If you learn stuff and then produce something new with what you learned, is that a derivative work? That's already a complex question but it has nothing to do with how you learned it. It depends entirely on the output and has little to do with the input.

This is provably false: if any specific piece can be removed and there is no difference then you can keep doing that until there is no art left. I'd bet a very substantial amount of money that the output at that point will definitely have changed. Induction is a powerful thing.

That's fair. But if you would sample Phil Collins (just to name one famous drummer) to create a Phil Collins sample pack and you'd then create your own drum loop with it that wouldn't mean you can't expect some expensive mail incoming. And it will likely stick.

The easiest way to create original art without having this shadow hanging over you would be to make your own sounds, use licensed sounds or to attempt to license the sounds you want to use (but that are not available for public use). Any other path is likely going to be a legal minefield and may lead to you losing your rep and a bunch of $.

There are plenty of examples of people that did this, went to court and lost.

But I thought you were interested in originality outside of just the legal perspective? You know, that crimes can be committed without evidence and all?

What makes Blowing in the Wind different from another folk song of the time? What makes them the same? Why are some non-original aspects allowed in a work considered original?

If we could develop literal eyeballs that could look at these images and translate the information the way humans do, the resulting capability is still no more human-like (in the sense that it should be afforded some human-like status) than any other program IMO.

If we achieved AGI tomorrow, we'd still need to have a conversation about what it is allowed to "see", because our current notions about humans seeing things are all based on the constraints of human capability. Most people understand that a surveillance camera seeing something and a human seeing something have very different implications.

In the short term, it's a conflation that I'd argue makes us see less clearly about what these systems are/are not, and leads to some questionable conclusions.

In the long term, it's a whole other ball of wax that will still require either new regulations or new ways of thinking.

Also I wonder where you get the view that future ML systems will not require large amounts of learning? I don't see any development in current systems that would allow that, or do you mean you have a network trained on large amounts of data which can then adjust to a style from a single image? If that's the case we are still at the same question, how was the original model trained.

No one knows why we are conscious. We have sliced the brain up a thousand ways and we will slice it up a million more and will never find consciousness because it is an emergent property of healthy brain, just like light is an emergent property of a working light bulb. No matter how you disassemble a light bulb, you will never find the light, though I grant you'll eventually figure out how light is produced, the assumption that a light bulb contains light is wrong headed. It's just a metaphor.

There is no worse slander than the truth: Strong AI can not be achieved, not with digital computers and programming and machine learning, and most likely by no other method either. Please, please grow up, and set aside your childish beliefs, because we need you now more than ever, here, in the real world.

The model behind Stable Diffusion (or Dall-E) is not infringing itself. It has the latent images it, but there is nothing that you can point to that says "that number there is infringing."

It takes a human action to pull together the parts of the model and select what is right and craft the prompt. Asking for "a picture of Mickey Mouse in the style of Pixar" is all sorts of infringing - by the person asking for that.

By itself, that image isn't a problem any more than the doodle in my notebook is. The question is what the human does with the image. If they publish it or try to sell it - yes, that's a problem. If they hang it in their kids room, yes, its infringing but unless you invite a Disney lawyer over for a play date no one is going to care (this also applies to if you drew it yourself rather than instructing a program to generate it).

My (I am not a lawyer) take is that the model isn't infringing. Use of the model may be infringing, and issues of infringements should be taken up with the human who created and published it them just as if it was done by a painter drawing heavy inspiration from a style or a photographer with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower at night.

So I’ve used Stable Diffusion and I’m “literally” stealing from every artist. Prove it. Get a warrant to search my premises for signs of illegal language model use. How do you get a warrant with an image that has no visual evidence of being a copy?

The burden is on the accuser but the accuser has been 'shredded' and that makes them all but anonymous. So if you dilute inputs enough then you can ignore the rights? There is a close equivalent to this in music sampling. The rule there is that if you want to remix someone else's production that you will have to ask for their permission, which, crucially, they are not required to give.

https://www.romanolaw.com/2022/10/14/music-sampling-rights-w...

This seems to me to be a reasonable middle ground. Once you start breaking things down further it gets harder and harder to nail down where the limit lies. In music you probably won't find any useful samples shorter than 1/32th of a beat and even that would be pushing the limits. But the rules don't say anything about how long those samples are: even the tiniest sliver would have to be accounted for: you would need permission. And yes the burden is on the accuser. But it would make sense from an ethical point of view and as an artist to just play by the rules, rather than to see what you can get away with and so even for short samples that might never be detected by that particular accuser as a rule permission is obtained.

> You’re right, I can’t make the same art with Stable Diffusion as without. The same holds for the art I can make with DAW software like Logic Pro and without. Or my guitar and without. Basically you’re leaving me with nothing but my voice, and personally, I’m in luck because I do sing and have already put effort into getting better.

That's disingeneous and you are likely well aware of it, but just to spell it out: Logic Pro 'Sample Packs' all have clear attribution and use rights attached, and your guitar is (unless it is some advanced model that I'm not currently aware of) unable to make you play like Al Di Meola without putting in the endless hours of practice. Neither of these contain a combined mountain of copyrighted artists works that you can then re-use at your discretion without attribution and if and when they do those are very carefully sourced and marked as such. So the comparison with SD doesn't hold.

> I can’t see how an image that has never existed before cannot be considered original…

Ok, so I have this little piece of software here, it allows me to extract the notes, durations and volumes of individual notes of a piano piece and then I can re-play those notes using any instrument from an enormous bank of synthesized sounds. Do you feel that this should count as original work because 'it has never existed before' or do you feel that this is a mechanical transformation and that the original creator should be able to sue me for creating a derived work? Does the mechanism of the derivation count?

> it might not have taken much effort, but that’s something else entirely

Agreed, Marc Rebillet comes to mind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vBwRfQbXkg) , but he has 3 decades of experience which allows him to create in a few minutes what would take others weeks (or they might never be able to do anything).

> How is any part of photography even remotely considered original in your theory of art?

Photography is original art when it goes beyond 'just reproduction'. My brother, who is a pretty good photographer has two 'modes' in the first one he is simply registering an event, a wedding or something else that needs to be documented. He most likely would not consider this to be even close to his best work and certainly not in the level of artistry involved. In his other mode he can spend a crazy amount of time arranging the shot, including getting up at odd hours of the night, creating special vantage points, the right time of the year to get an object to catch the light just so. In that mode he is an artist. And I'm sure he has made 1000's (or probably more likely 10's of 1000's) of shots that are somewhere in between.

Regardless of the details of how a brain is a conscious, it can be reduced to its constituent pieces or nuts and bolts, so to speak. Everything from the electrochemical potentials within neurons to the encoded chemical information in the form of DNA and RNA that spontaneously replicates and orchestrates a maddening array of complexities, we can partially explain. Even if our explanation is basically parts in a bucket, that's enough to paint a future where humanity understands enough of those processes to replicate consciousness without actually understanding why it works. Perhaps we don't need to understand the emergent properties, but merely discover them like the standard model in physics. We equally can't explain /why/ the fundamental physics constants are the way they are, but we can use them to do extraordinary things.

It's perfectly acceptable for a human being to drive a a car, but driving one drunk is completely unacceptable. Conversely, there is no rule against creating or consuming art while intoxicated.

So to answer your question, because it is not a matter of life and death. Take your argument and apply it to mass produced goods that were once the realm of only skilled craftsman.

> Is a human sitting on a neighborhood bench in view of your house the same thing as a surveillance camera on a nearby telephone pole?

If a person never leaves and keeps notes, yes, it is exactly the same. I'd call the police for stalking. The issue here is privacy, which is tangential to AI reproducing the styles of known individuals.

> The AI software has only "learned" in the sense that it has operated on the input data such that it can now provide outputs that are of convincingly high quality to make it appear to "know" what it is doing.

Completely disagree with you about the nature of learning here. If a person produces art in the style of an individual, they have no idea the internal machinations of the original artist, they just "appear to 'know' what they are doing".

Also, from my time working in the music industry I know for a fact that kick drums and other sounds are taken from songs and used in other songs without permission or attribution all the time and it is done in a manner that is completely kosher because no artists think their artistry extends to someone trying to make the crack of a snare snappier in a mix. The lawyers think otherwise of course. Recognizable bass line? I mean, I guess pay up, but it’s not like the bass player who wrote that bass line in the session will see a dime. He never even got a publishing credit and why would he?

> This is where transformative allowances come in as well, if not logically because no crime can be committed without any evidence.

I really don't share that particular view. Crimes definitely can occur without evidence, there are plenty of examples. The fact that nobody gets convicted, that possibly the crime goes completely undetected does not mean that no crime occurred.

Let me give you one example of how this could happen: I was in charge of the audit of the 'RSB', a system that controlled a few 100B guilders way back in the day, mainframes were in, the PC/AT was 2 and ran at a whopping 8 Mhz and cost as much as a really good second hand car, Madonna releases 'True Blue'. The bank I worked for had for compliance reasons two physically separate entities, one to produce the code and the data, and another to keep track of it.

Initially I worked on the side that did the daily audits to make sure that everything was good. The process was specified thus: you will receive about 1/8th of a cubic meter of large format (132 column) printout at 7:30 AM. You have 30 minutes to manually review this (feel free to use a pocket calculator that can handle 13 digit numbers if you can find one and be sure to let us know where you found it) and release it, you better have a bloody good reason to not release it because it means that technically there is no opening balance for the day if that should happen. Clearly this is impossible, good luck.

On the first day of my new job, at 7:45 I realized that this is completely impossible so I went to see my boss. He told me that in practice the only known way to make sure that the most horrific of errors are caught is to go to the last page of the report first, check the two number all the way at the bottom of that page and see if they match up, this can be done in less than a minute. And if they match - which they always do - you can safely release the system, it's never been wrong.

So much for the oversight department. About a year later I got accepted as a junior programmer on the other side, and guess what, while there was a formal division between the personal side and the business side of the bank you had access to everything. This was well before ISO27001, security was something someone once may have read something about but we mostly focused on physical security. Once you were 'behind the red rope' you could do just about anything. Sure we had logins and passwords. Three letter login, three letter passwords were pretty common. The three letter logins were typically just the initials of the employee because there wasn't room for much more so those were trivial to guess and there was no upper limit on the number of tries on a password. So you could access pretty much all of the code and while there was a test environment there was no code review worth mentioning. And frankly, with very few exceptions most of the programmers weren't all that good. So it would have been trivial to:

- use someone elses account in the right group

- make a bunch of changes to the RSB system

- ensure that the report that went out to the audit department had matching numbers on the last row of the report

- and finally, to trigger all this say a year after leaving the bank

This likely would never have been discovered because their whole idea of threat modeling did not for one second stop and look at the 'rogue employee' angle, it was strictly a single line of defense: to get on to the 'floor' you had to have a badge that allowed access. The badges were an older Motorola system, brown plastic casing with a sticker on the front with your picture on it. Inside was a beefy pickup coil all the way around the case and a board with a little computer on it that would respond to being powered up by sending out a serial stream ID'ing the badge. That was it. No encryption, no challenge/response. And the ID? It could be set with a nice 8 position dip switch. Guess what ID #001 did?

So all of the requirements for an absolutely perfect crime were there, there would be no evidence and yet a crime would have been committed. There were many other such opportunities, that bank really relied way too much on trust and I would not have been surprised to find out that they had been hacked horribly from the inside without being able to point at the culprit.

The bank was founded in 1918, well before the age of computers and it processed a small mountain of paper every day. On that front their procedures were pretty good. But on the digital side they were - frankly - absolutely hopeless. The gear they used then was old enough that some of it was still labelled 'Sperry Rand' which the company was no longer fielding for about a decade at that time. IT was a cost, security non existent and any half competent coder would have seen 1001 possibilities to defraud that bank, and get away with it cleanly. Maybe some even did.

So at this point have you run out of any ammo other than meaningless nitpicks?