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.
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?
Yes, it was.
One human artist can, over a life time, learn from a few artists to inform their style.
These AI setups are telling ALL the art from ALL the artists and using them as part of a for profit business.
There is no ethical stance for letting billion dollar tech firms hoover up all the art ever created to the try and remix it for profit.
No, it wasn’t. Theft is a well-defined word. When you steal something you take it away from them so that they don’t have it any more.
It wasn’t even a case of copyright violation, because no copies of any of Rutkowski’s art were made. The model does not contain a copy of any of the training data (with an asterisk for the case of overfitting, which is very rare and which trainers do their best to avoid). The art it produces in Rutkowski’s style is also not a copyright violation because you can’t copyright a style.
So how about the open-source models? Or in this specific instance, the guy who made a LoRA for mimicking Rutkowski’s style, since he did it free of charge and released it for anyone to use?
Yes copies were made. The files were downloaded, one way or another (even as a hash, or whatever digital asset they claim to translate them into) then fed to their machines.
If I go into a Ford plant, take pictures of their equipment, then use those to make my own machines, it’s still IP theft, even if I didn’t walk out with the machine.
Make all the excuses you want, you’re supporting the theft of other people’s life’s work then trying to claim it’s ethical.
They were put on the Internet for that very purpose. When you visit a website and view an image there a copy of it is made in your computer’s memory. If that’s a copyright violation then everyone’s equally boned. When you click this link you’re doing exactly the same thing.
Here is where a rhethorical sleight of hand is used by AI proponents.
It’s displayed for people’s appreciation. AI is not people, it is a tool. It’s not entitled to the same rights as people, and the model it creates based on artists works is itself a derivative work.
Even among AI proponents, few believe that the AI itself is an autonomous being who ought to have rights over their own artworks, least of all the AI creators.
I use tools such as web browsers to view art. AI is a tool too. There’s no sleight of hand, AI doesn’t have to be an “autonomous being.” Training is just a mechanism for analyzing art. If I wrote a program that analyzed pictures to determine what the predominant colour in them was that’d be much the same, there’d be no problem with me running it on every image I came across on a public gallery.
You wouldn’t even be able to point a camera to works in public galleries without permission. Free for viewing doesn’t mean free to do whatever you want with them, and many artists have made clear they never gave permission that their works would be used to train AIs.
Once you display an idea in public, it belongs to anyone who sees it.
For disclosure I am a former member of the American Photographic Artists/Advertising Photographers of America, and I have works registered at the United States Copyright Office.
When we put works in our online portfolio, send mailers or physical copies of our portfolios we’re doing it as promotional works. There is no usage license attached to it. If loaded into memory for personal viewing, that’s fine since its not a commercial application nor violating the intent of that specific release: viewing for promotion.
Let’s break down your example to help you understand what is actually going on. When we upload our works to third party galleries there is often a clause in the terms of service which states the artist uploading to the site grants a usage license for distribution and displaying of the image. Let’s look at Section 17 of ArtStation’s Terms of Service:
This is in conjunction with Section 16’s opening line:
So when I click your link, I’m not engaging in a copyright violation. I’m making use of ArtStation’s/Epic’s license to distribute the original artist’s works. When I save images from ArtStation that license does not transfer to me. Meaning if I were to repurpose that work it could be a copyright violation depending on the usage the artist agrees to. Established law states that I hold onto the rights of my work and any usage depends on what I explicitly state and agree to; emphasis on explicitly because the law will respect my terms and compensation first, and your intentions second. For example, if a magazine uses my images for several months without a license, I can document the usage time frame, send them an invoice, and begin negotiating because their legal team will realize that without a license they have no footing.
I know this seems strange given how the internet freely transformed works for decades without repercussions. But as you know from sites like YouTube copyright holders are not a fan of people repurposing their works without a mutually agreed upon terms in the form of a license. If you remember the old show Mystery Science Theater 3000, they operated in the proper form: get license, transform work, commercialize. In the case of ArtStation, the site agrees to provide free hosting in compensation for the artist providing a license to distribute the work without terms for monetization unless agreed upon through ArtStation’s marketplace. At every step, the artist’s rights to their work is respected and compensated when the law is applied.
If all this makes sense and we look back at AI art, well…
Training an AI doesn’t “repurpose” that work, though. The AI learns concepts from it and then the work is discarded. No copyrighted part of the work remains in the AI’s model. All that verbiage doesn’t really apply to what’s being done with the images when an AI trains on them, they are no longer being “used” for anything at all after training is done. Just like when a human artist looks at some reference images and then creates his own original work based on what he’s learned from them.
By that logic I can sell anything I download from the web while also claiming credit for it, right?
Downloading to view != downloading to fuel my business.
No, and that’s such a ridiculous leap of logic that I can’t come up with anything else to say except no. Just no. What gave you that idea?
Because this thread was about the companies taking art feeding it into their machine a D claiming not to have stolen it.
Then you compared that to clicking a link.
Yes, because it’s comparable to clicking a link.
You said:
And that’s the logic I can’t follow. Who’s downloading and selling Rutkowski’s work? Who’s claiming credit for it? None of that is being done in the first place, let alone being claimed to be “ok.”
No, but you can download Rutkovski’s art, learn from it how to paint in his exact style and create art in that style.
Which is exactly what the image generation AIs do. They’re perhaps just a bit too good at it, certainly way better than an average human.
Which makes it complicated and morally questionable depending on how exactly you arrive at the model and what you do with it, but you can’t definitively say it’s copyright infringement.
You keep comparing what one person, given MONTHS or YEARS of their life could do with one artists work to a machine doing NOT THE SAME THING can do with thousands of artists work.
The machine is not learning their style, it’s taking pieces of the work and dropping it in with other people’s work then trying to blend it into a cohesive whole.
The analogy fails all over the place.
And I don’t care about copyright, I’m not an artist or an IP lawyer, or whatever. I can just look at a company stealing the labor of an entire industry and see it as bad.
The speed doesn’t factor into it. Modern machines can stamp out metal parts vastly faster than blacksmiths with a hammer and anvil can, are those machines doing something wrong?
Speed aside, machines don’t have the same rights as humans do, so the idea that they are “learning like a person so it’s fine” is like saying a photocopier machine’s output ought to be treated as an independent work because it replicated some other work, and it’s just so good and fast at it. AI’s may not output identical work, but they still rely on taking an artist’s work as input, something the creator ought to have a say over.
What makes it even trickier is that taking AI generated art and using it however you want definitively isn’t copyright infringement because only works by humans can be protected by copyright.
But that’s not what they did, converting it into a set of instructions a computer can use to recreate it is just adding steps.
And, yes, that’s what they’ve done else we wouldn’t find pieces of others works mixed in.
Also, even if that was how it worked, it’s still theft of someone’s else’s labor to feed your business.
If it wasn’t, they would have asked for permission first.
Copies that were freely shared for the purpose of letting anyone look at them.
Do you think it’s copyright infringement to go to a website?
Typically, ephemeral copies that aren’t kept for a substantial period of time aren’t considered copyright violations, otherwise viewing a website would be a copyright violation for every image appearing on that site.
Downloading a freely published image to run an algorithm on it and then deleting it without distribution is basically the canonical example of ephemeral.
Its what you do with the copies thats the problem, not the physical act of copying.
So humans are slow and inefficient, what’s new?
First the machines replaced hand weavers, then ice sellers went bust, all the calculators got sacked, now it’s time for the artists.
We stand on the shoulders of generations of unethical stances.
“other people were bad so I should be bad to.”
Cool.
Yes, which is why we should try to do better.
I don’t like when people say “AI just traces/photobashes art.” Because that simply isn’t what happens.
But I do very much wish there was some sort of opt-out process, but ultimately any attempt at that just wouldn’t work
People that say that have never used AI art generation apps and are only regurgitating what they hear from other people who are doing the same. The amount of arm chair AI denialists is astronomical.
There’s nothing stopping someone from licensing their art in a fashion that prohibits their use in that fashion.
No one has created that license that I know of, but there are software licenses that do similar things, so it’s hardly an unprecedented notion.
The fact of the matter is that before people didn’t think it was necessary to have specific usage licenses attached to art because no one got funny feelings from people creating derivative works from them.
pirating photoshop is a well-understood part of many peoples’ workflows. that doesn’t make it legal or condoned by adobe
I don’t know what this has to do with anything. Nothing was “pirated”, either.
Not at the point of generation, but at the point of training it was. One of the sticking points of AI for artists is that their developers didn’t even bother to seek permission. They simply said it was too much work and crawled artists’ galleries.
Even publicly displayed art can only be used for certain previously-established purposes. By default you can’t use them for derivative works.
At the point of training it was viewing images that the artists had published in a public gallery. Nothing pirated at that point either. They don’t need “permission” to do that, the images are on display.
Learning from art is one of the previously-established purposes you speak of. No “derivative work” is made when an AI trains a model, the model does not contain any copyrightable part of the imagery it is trained on.
Of course they need permission to process images. No computer system can merely “view” an image without at least creating a copy for temporary use, and the purposes for which that can be done are strictly defined. Doing whatever you want just because you have access to the image is often copyright infringement.
People have the right to learn from images available publicly for personal viewing. AI is not yet people. Your whole argument relies on anthropomorphizing a tool, but it wouldn’t even be able to select images to train its model without human intervention, which is done with the intent to replicate the artist’s work.
I’m not one to usually bat for copyright but the disregard AI proponents have for artists’ rights and their livelihood has gone long past what’s acceptable, like the article shows.
If I run an image from the web through a program that generates a histogram of how bright its pixels are, am I suddenly a dirty pirate?
If you run someone’s artwork through a filter is it completely fine and new just because the output is not exactly like the input and it deletes the input after it’s done processing?
There is a discussion to be made, in good faith, of where the line lies, what ought to be the rights of the audience and what ought to be the rights of the artists, and what ought to be the rights of platforms, and what ought to be the limits of AI. To be fair, that’s a difficult situation to determine, because in many aspects copyright is already too overbearing. Legally, many pieces of fan art and even memes are copyright infringement. But on the flipside automating art away is too far to the other side. The reason why Copyright even exists, at least ideally, is so that the rights and livelihood of artists is protected and they are incentivized to continue creating.
Lets not pretend that is just analysis for the sake of academic understanding, there is a large amount of people who are feeding artists’ works into AI with the express purpose of getting artworks in their style without compensating them, something many artists made clear they are not okay with. While they can’t tell people not to practice styles like theirs, they can definitely tell people not to use their works in ways they do not allow.
No, that’s a derivative work. An analysis of the brightness of the pixels is not a derivative work.
Sure, but the people crying “You’re stealing art!” are not making a good faith argument. They’re using an inaccurate, prejudicial word for the purpose of riling up an emotional response. Or perhaps they just don’t understand what copyright is and why it is, which also puts their argument in a bad state.
Case in point. That’s not why copyright exists. The reason for the American version of copyright is established right in the constitution: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts”. If you want to go more fundamental than just what the US is up to, the original Statute of Anne was titled “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning”.
The purpose of copyright is not to protect the rights or livelihood of artists. The protection of the rights and livelihood of artist is a means to the actual purpose of copyright, which is to enrich the public domain by prompting artists to be productive and to publish their works.
An artist that opposes AIs like these is now actively hindering the enrichment of the public domain.
Bring publicly viewable doesn’t make them public domain. Bring able to see something doesn’t give you the right to use it for literally any other reason.
Full stop.
My gods, you’re such an insufferable bootlicking fanboy of bullshit code jockies. Make a good faith effort to actually understand why people dislike these exploitative assholes who are looking to make a buck off of other people’s work for once, instead of just reflexively calling them all phillistines who “just don’t understand”.
Some of us work on machine learning systems for a living. We know what they are and how they work, and they’re fucking regurgitation machines. And people deserve to have control over whether we use their works in our regurgitation machines.
They were not used for derivative works. The AI’s model produced by the training does not contain any copyrighted material.
If you click this link and view the images there then you are just as much a “pirate” as the AI trainers.
The models themselves are the derivative works. Those artists’ works were copied and processed to create that model. There is a difference between a person viewing a piece of work and putting that work to be processed through a system. The way copyright works as defined, being allowed to view a work is not the same as being allowed to use it in any way you see fit. It’s also innacurate to speak of AIs as if they have the same abilities and rights as people.
i’m not making a moral comment on anything, including piracy. i’m saying “but it’s part of my established workflow” is not an excuse for something morally wrong.
only click here if you understand analogy and hyperbole
if i say “i can’t write without kicking a few babies first”, it’s not an excuse to keep kicking babies. i just have to stop writing, or maybe find another workflow
The difference is that kicking babies is illegal whereas training and running an AI is not. Kind of a big difference.
did you click the thing saying that you understand analogies?
You’re using an analogy as the basis for an argument. That’s not what analogies are for. Analogies are useful explanatory tools, but only within a limited domain. Kicking a baby is not the same as creating an artwork, so there are areas in which they don’t map to each other.
You can’t dodge flaws in your argument by adding a “don’t respond unless you agree with me” clause on your comment.
actually that’s exactly what i was using it for.
if you read carefully, you’ll see that writing is analogous to creating an artwork, and kicking a baby is analogous to doing something that someone has asked you not to, and you’re continuing anyways. if you read even more carefully, you’ll see that i implied i wasn’t making a moral comment on ai, piracy, or even kicking babies
i didn’t intend to. i did it so i wouldn’t have to waste my time arguing with those who don’t understand analogies. however i seem to be doing that anyways, so if you’ll excuse me, i’m going to stop
edit: okay, i’ve been reading the rest of this thread, and you clearly don’t understand analogy. i have no idea why you clicked on my comment
yes. analogous doesn’t mean “the same”. it means "able to draw demonstrative parallels between ↩︎
Was he paid for his art to be included?
His work was used in a publicly available product without license or compensation. Including his work in the training dataset was, to the online vernacular use of the word, piracy.
They violated his copyright when they used his work to make their shit.
The product does not contain his work. So no copying was done, therefore no “piracy.”