Greg Rutkowski Was Removed From Stable Diffusion, But AI Artists Brought Him Back - Decrypt

His art was not "stolen." That's not an accurate word to describe this process with.

It's not so much that "it was done before so it's fine now" as "it's a well-understood part of many peoples' workflows" that can be used to justify it. As well as the view that there was nothing wrong with doing it the first time, so what's wrong with doing it a second time?

no one's art is being "stolen". you're mistaken.

I don’t disagree but stolen is a bit of a stretch

I don't fully understand how this works, but if they've created a way to replicate his style that doesn't involve using his art in the model, how is it problematic? I understand not wanting models to be trained using his art, but he doesn't have exclusive rights to the art style, and if someone else can replicate it, what's the problem?

This is an honest question, I don't know enough about this topic to make a case for either side.

Nothing was stolen.

Drawing inspiration from someone else by looking at their work has been around for centuries.

Imagine if the Renaissance couldn't happen because artists didn't want their style stolen.

His art was not "stolen."

If I look at someone's paintings, then paint something in a similar style did I steal their work? Or did I take inspiration from it?

Greg wants to get paid, remove the threat of poverty from the loss of control and its a nonissue.

I think people forget the reality when they take their supposedly brave and oh so altruistic stance of "there should be no copyright".

When people already know they won't even have a small chance of getting paid for the art they create, we will run out of artists.

Because most can not afford to learn and practice that craft without getting any form of payment. It will become a very rare hobby of a few decadent rich people who can afford to learn something like illustration in their free time.

If a company stole your art and copyrighted it such that it no longer belonged to everyone, in the same way that a Beatles record cannot be freely and openly shared, would you be fine with that?

You're fine with someone stealing your art and selling it?

A sad fact but undeniable truth. I work in the industry. It’s standard for us to do mood boards. I have a lot hate relationship with them because it can be helpful to hone the design to a client’s liking and get your bearings. But, the fact it’s essentially what AI is doing by “borrowing” existing art as a reference. It’s the exact same thing. And that’s why I hate doing it. Because I don’t want to take someone’s button or background pattern.

Regardless of how I feel, I still can’t recognize AI as being “stealing” but industry accepted practices that do the exact same thing aren’t?

Pretty much. There are ways of using it that most artists would be okay with. Most of the people using it flat out refuse to use it like that though.

Edit: To expand on this:

Most artists would be okay with AI art being used as reference material, inspiration, assisting with fleshing out concepts (though you should use concept artists for that in a big production), rapid prototyping and whatnot. Most only care that the final product is at least mostly human-made.

Artists generally want you to actually put effort into what you're making because, at the end of the day, typing a prompt into stable diffusion has more in common with receiving a free commission from an artist than it has with actually being an artist. If you're going to claim that something AI had a hand in as being your art, then you need to have done the majority of the work on it yourself.

The most frustrating thing to me, however, is that there are places in art that AI could participate in which would send artists over the moon, but it's not flashy so no one seems to be working on making AI in those areas.

Most of what I'm personally familiar with has to do with 3d modeling, and in that discipline, people would go nuts if you released an AI tool that could do the UV work for you. Messing with UVs can be very tedious and annoying, to the point where most artists will just use a tool using conventional algorithms to auto-unwrap and pack UVs, and then call it a day, even if they're not great.

Another area is in rigging and weight painting. In order to animate a model, you have to rig it to a skeleton (unless you're a masochist or trying to make a game accurate to late 90s-early 00s animation), paint the bone weights (which bones affect which polygons, and by how much), add constraints, etc. Most 3d modelers would leap at the prospect of having high-quality rigging and UVs done for them at the touch of a button. However, again, because it's not flashy to the general public, no one's put any effort into making an AI that can do that (afaik at least).

Finally, even if you do use an AI in ways that most artists would accept as valid, you'll still have to prove it because there are so many people who put a prompt into stable diffusion, do some minor edits to fix hands (in older version), and then try to pass it off as their own work.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the silicon valley tech era! Everything must be profitable at all costs! Everything must steal every tiny fact about you! Everything must include ! Everything must go through enshittification!

Personally, as an artist who spends the vast majority of their time on private projects that aren't paid, I feel like it's put power in my hands. It's best at sprucing up existing work and saving huge amounts of time detailing. Because of stable diffusion I'll be able to add those nice little touches and flashy bits to my work that a large corporation with no real vision has at their disposal.

To me it makes it much easier for smaller artists to compete, leveling the playing field a bit between those with massive resources and those with modest resources. That can only be a good thing in the long run.

But I also feel like copyright more often than not rewards the greedy and stifles the creative.

But that's sort of the nature of the beast when you put your content up for free on a public website. Does Kbin or Beehaw owe us money for our comments on this thread? What about everyone currently reading? At least KBin and Beehaw are making profit off of this.

The argument is not as clear cut as people are making it sound and it has potential to up-end some fundamental expectations around free websites and user-generated content. It's going to affect far more than just AI.

Copyright law as interpreted judges is still being worked out on AI. Stay tuned if it’s defined as stolen or not.

You just contradicted yourself in two sentences. Copyright and theft are not the same thing. They are unrelated to each other. When you violate copyright you are not "stealing" anything. This art is not "stolen", full stop.

It doesn't change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not "a virtual brain" that creates "art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it." What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.

Today's large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don't make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers -- they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They're not striving to make the correct answer. They're just producing the most statistically average output given the input.

Current-gen AI isn't just viewing art, it's storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn't create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person't style, it must make a copy of that person's work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.

None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.

Current AI models do not learn the way human brains do. And the way current models learn how do "make art" is very different from how human artists do it. To repeatedly try and recreate the work of other artists is something beginners do. And posting these works online was always shunned in artist communities. You also don't learn to draw a hand by remembering where a thousand different artists put the lines so it looks like a hand.

@fwygon all questions of how AI learns aside, it's not legally theft but philosophically the topic is debatable and very hot button.

I can however comment pretty well on your copyright comments which are halfway there, but have a lot of popular inaccuracies.

Fair use is a very vague topic, and they explicitly chose to not make explicit terms on what is allowed but rather the intents of what is to be allowed. We've got some firm ones not because of specific laws but from abundance of case evidence.

* Educational; so long as it is taught as a part of a recognized class and within curriculum.
* Informational; so long as it is being distributed to inform the public about valid, reasonable public interests. This is far broader than some would like; but it is legal.
* Narrative or Commentary purposes; so long as you're not copying a significant amount of the whole content and passing it off as your own. Short clips with narration and lots of commentary interwoven between them is typically protected. Copyright is not intended to be used to silence free speech. This also tends to include satire; as long as it doesn't tread into defamation territory.

These are basically all the same category and includes some misinformation about what it does and does not cover. It's permitted to make copies for purely informational, public interest (ie. journalistic) purposes. This would include things like showing a clip of a movie or a trailer to make commentary on it.

Education doesn't get any special treatment here, but research might (ie. making copies that are kept to a restricted environment, and only used for research purposes, this is largely the protection that AI models currently fall under because the training data uses copyrighted data but the resulting model does not).

* Transformative; so long as the content is being modified in a substantial enough manner that it is an entirely new work that is not easily confused for the original. This too, is far broader than some would like; but it still is legal.

"Easily confused" is a rule from Trademark Law, not copyright. Copyright doesn't care about consumer confusion, but does care about substitution. That is, if the content could be a substitute for the original (ie. copying someone else's specific painting is going to be a violation up until the point where it can only be described as "inspired by" the painting)

* Reasonable, 'Non-Profit Seeking or Motivated' Personal Use; People are generally allowed to share things amongst themselves and their friends and other acquaintances. Reasonable backup copies, loaning of copies, and even reproduction and presentation of things are generally considered fair use.

This is a very very common myth that gets a lot of people in trouble. Copyright doesn't care about whether you profit from it, more about potential lost profits.

Loaning is completely disconnected from copyright because no copies are being made ("digital loaning" is a nonsense attempt to claiming loaning, but is just "temporary" copying which is a violation).

Personal copies are permitted so long as you keep the original copy (or the original copy is explicitly irrecoverably lost or destroyed) as you already acquired it and multiple copies largely are just backups or conversions to different formats. The basic gist is that you are free to make copies so long as you don't give any of them to anyone else (if you copy a DVD and give either the original or copy to a friend, even as a loan, it's illegal).

It's not good to rely on it being "non-profit" as a copyright excuse, as that's more just an area of leniency than a hard line. People far too often thing that allows them to get away with copying things, it's really just for topics like making backups of your movies or copying your CDs to mp3s.

... All that said, fun fact: AI works are not covered by copyright law.

To be copyrighted a human being must actively create the work. You can copyright things made with AI art, but not the AI art itself (ie. a comic book made with AI art is copyrighted, but the AI art in the panels is not, functioning much like if you made a comic book out of public domain images). Prompts and set up are not considered enough to allow for copyright (example case was a monkey picking up a camera and taking pictures, those pictures were deemed unable to be copyrighted because despite the photographer placing the camera... it was the monkey taking the photos).

This is a very nice and thorough comment! Can you provide a reputable source for these points? (no criticism intended: as you seem knowledgeable, I'd trust you could have such reputable sources already selected and at hand, that's why I'm asking).

It doesn't say anywhere they used copyrighted art though?

Seems the new model might use art inspired by him, not his art itself.

It's a moral gray zone. If you add enough freely available works inspired by someone, the model can produce a similar style without using any original works.

Is it still copyright infringement at that point?

Artists don't own their styles, so it's interesting to see them fight to protect them.

The only thing that makes anything valuable is that someone wants it, or at least wants it to exist. Nothing has intrinsic value because value itself is a human construction. This necessarily includes art.

It doesn't matter how you recreate an image, if you recreate someone else's work that is a violation of copyright.

Stealing someone's style is a different matter.

What the hell are people supposed to do?

Eat the rich :)

More concretely, there are a number of smaller and larger sociopolitical changes that can be fought for. On the smaller side, there's rethinking the way our society values people and pushing for some kind of UBI, on the larger side there's shifting to postcapitalist economics and organisation to various degrees ^.)

The rich and powerful must go away, or everyone else will suffer.

Soon enough they will succeed in eliminating most jobs, and the moment will come where action must be taken. Them or us.

This person has no idea what machine learning actually is. And they hate such a generic concept on a "gut feeling" and come up with the reasons later?

If you want good reasons to hate AI generated art you won't find them in this shitty blogpost.

as a counterpoint, when the use-case for the tool is specifically "I want a picture that looks like it was painted by Greg Rutkowski, but I don't want to pay Greg Rutkowski to paint it for me" that sounds like the sort of scenario that copyright was specifically envisioned to protect against -- and if it doesn't protect against that, it's arguably an oversight in need of correction. It's in AI makers and users' interest to proactively self-regulate on this front, because if they don't somebody like Disney is going to wade into this at some point with expensive lobbyists, and dictate the law to their own benefit.

That said, it's working artists like Rutkowski, or friends of mine who scrape together a living off commissioned pieces, that I am most concerned for. Fantasy art like Greg makes, or personal character portraits of the sort you find on character sheets of long-running DnD games or as avatar images on forums like this one, make up the bread and butter of many small-time artists' work, and those commissions are the ones most endangered by the current state of the art in generative AI. It's great for would-be patrons that the cost of commissioning a mood piece for a campaign setting or a portrait of their fursona has suddenly dropped to basically zero, but it sucks for artists that their lunch is being eaten by an AI algorithm that was trained by slurping up all their work without compensation or even credit. For as long as artists need to get paid for their work in order to live, that's inherently anti-worker.

This is NOT how you use text-shadow! 🤮