Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style against his wishes using a LoRA model. While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski’s art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5. The debate highlights the blurry line between innovation and infringement in the emerging field of AI art.
That’s really the big thing, not just here but any material that’s been used to train on without permission or compensation. The difference is that most of it is so subtle it can’t be picked out, but an artist style is obviously a huge parameter since his name was being used to call out those particular training aspects during generations. It’s a bit hypocritical to say you aren’t stealing someone’s work when you stick his actual name in the prompt. It doesn’t really matter how many levels the art style has been laundered, it still originated from him.
It is unconditionally impossible to own an artistic style. “Stealing a style” cannot be done.
And yet the artist’s name is used to push the weights towards pictures in their style. I don’t know what the correct semantics are for it, nor the legalities. That’s part of the problem, the tech is ahead of our laws, as is usually the case.
That’s not even vaguely new in the world of art.
Imitating style is the core of what art is. It’s absolutely unconditionally protected by copyright law. It’s not even a .01 out of 10 on the scale of unethical. It’s what’s supposed to happen.
The law might not cover this yet, but any law that restricts the fundamental right to build off of the ideas of others that are the core of the entirety of human civilization is unadulterated evil. There is no part of that that could possibly be acceptable to own.
I totally agree with you on protecting the basics of creativity and growth. I think the core issue is using “imitate” here. Is that what the LLM is doing, or is that an anthropomorphism of some sense that there’s intelligence guiding the process? I know it seems like I’m nitpicking things to further my point, but the fact that this is an issue to many even outside artwork says there is a question here of what is and isn’t okay.
The AI is not intelligent. That doesn’t matter.
Nothing anyone owns is being copied or redistributed. The creator isn’t the tool; it’s the person using the tool.
AI needs two things to work, an algorithm and data. If training is allowed to anyone, anyone can create their own algorithms and use the AI as a tool to create innovative new messages with some ideas borrowed from other work.
If data is proprietary, they cannot. But Disney still can. They’ll just as successfully flood out all the artists who can’t use AI because they don’t have a data set, but now they and the two other companies in the world who own IP are basically a monopoly (or tri- or whatever) and everyone else is screwed.
It’s only using his name because the person who created the LORA trained it with his name. They could have chosen any other word.
True, and then because it’s a black box there wouldn’t be a known issue at all. Or maybe it would be much less of an issue because the words might have blended others into the mix, and his style wouldn’t be as obvious in the outputs, and/or it would be easier to dismiss. Did the training involve actual input of his name, or was that pulled from the source trained on? How much control was in the training?
Just wait until you can copywrite a style. Guess who will end up owning all the styles.
Spoiler, it’s wealthy companies like Disney and Warner. Oh you used cross hatching? Disney owns the style now you theif.
Copyright is fucked. Has been since before the Mickey mouse protection act. Our economic system is fucked. People would rather fight each other and new tools instead of rallying against the actual problem, and it’s getting to me.
You’re right, copyright won’t fix it, copyright will just enable large companies to activate more of their work extract more from the creative space.
But who will benefit the most from AI? The artists seem to be getting screwed right now, and I’m pretty sure that Hasbro and Disney will love to cut costs and lay off artists as soon as this blows over.
Technology is capital, and in a capitalist system, that goes to benefit the holders of that capital. No matter how you cut it, laborers including artists are the ones who will get screwed.
Me, I’ll benefit the most. I’ve been using a locally running instance of the free and open source AI software Stable Diffusion to generate artwork for my D&D campaigns and they’ve never looked more beautiful!
Same here. It’s awesome being able to effectively “commission” art for any random little thing the party might encounter. And sometimes while generating images there’ll be surprising details that give me new ideas, too. It’s like brainstorming with ChatGPT but in visual form.
Is drawing Mickey Mouse in a new pose copying the style or copying Mickey Mouse?
You said it yourself. You’re drawing Micky mouse in a new pose, so you’re copying Mickey mouse.
Drawing a cartoon in the style of Mickey mouse isn’t the same thing.
You can’t have a copyright on “big oversized smile, exaggerated posture, large facial features, oversized feet and hands, rounded contours and a smooth style of motion”.
The second.
I’m not sure how that’s relevant here, though. There is nothing at all being copied but an aesthetic.
Although to me it is interesting that, even without literal copying, a generator might be capable of potentially emulating some key features of a specified source. Can this sometimes arguably extend beyond just “an aesthetic”? We’ve all seen examples similar to this one (from the SD online demo, default setting, with a familiar public-domain source) — https://i.imgur.com/PUJs3RL.png