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by astrange 1282 days ago
It's always been possible to imitate an artstyle. Nevertheless, they've never gotten IP protection - they're more like trade secrets.

What's notable is "AI users are trying to copy an artist" != "AI has learned from an artist" != "AI has seen the artist's images in the first place". The most popular supposedly stolen-from artist Greg Rutkowski is not in StableDiffusion's training images, even though users are actively trying to copy him, it's a coincidence that it appears to work. Is that unethical?

Also, AI laws (text and data mining exemptions) /have/ been put in place - to make this explicitly legal!

1 comments

Imitate, not duplicate. Hours of work/talent vs. stealing an artist's work (see: unlicensed) and feeding it into a software program to spit out a slightly different version (complete with watermarks and all)...
You don't have much faith in an artist if you think you can "duplicate their style" by looking at 4-5 512x512 images of their work.

> complete with watermarks and all

That's not the AI "copying their watermarks", it's the AI learning "sometimes images have watermarks" and giving them some of its own.