[olaulaja]

That list is only really useful for major styles that are well known/tagged, early SD versions knew a list of artists _much_ longer and more relevant than that. (some of the styles on that list are not related to 2d images). If you consider the list a reasonable substitute for artist names, I'd ask you for a prompt that replicates the common Rutkowski + Mucha style using just the styles listed.

>> It's almost as if artists develop their own styles that are just as uniquely theirs

Hard disagree on this. Styles do not and should not have ownership, legally or otherwise. Not in painting, music, film, games, or any other kind of art. Anything else kneecaps derivative styles and erects a massive barrier to the advancement of culture. Straight copies are mostly avoided because they add nothing over the original.

You're also misunderstanding the typical use of Rutkowski and other names. Most prompts I've seen and used use multiple artists for a unique blend of styles (including the much maligned and overused Rutkowski + Mucha), not just straight copies. While asking for Rutkowski indeed asks for a very specific style (as well as any themes etc common to his work), its usually in combination with other equally specific and somewhat contradictory styles, each guiding the result in some direction and adding elements but none of them being exactly the desired end result. Just asking for straight up Rutkowski was a short lived cargo cult and is now more of a meme than anything else.

[dragonwriter]

> If you consider the list a reasonable substitute for artist names, I’d ask you for a prompt that replicates the common Rutkowski + Mucha style using just the styles listed.

Not looking at the list, but replacing “by Greg Rutkowski” with “detailed realistic muted fantasy” and “by Alphonse Mucha” with “Art Nouveau” seems to work pretty well for reproducing both “by Greg Rutkowski” alone and for the Rutkowski + Mucha combination. (Oddly, replacing either of those, but not the other, does not work as well for reproducing the combination effect as replacing both.)

> Just asking for straight up Rutkowski was a short lived cargo cult and is now more of a meme than anything else.

Rutkowski + Mucha is as much of a cargo cult as Rutkowski alone, even if it is a longer-lived one.

[caconym_]

> If you consider the list a reasonable substitute for artist names

I didn't say or suggest any such thing.

> I'd ask you for a prompt that replicates the common Rutkowski + Mucha style using just the styles listed.

You're completely missing the point, which is that if you want the model to (e.g.) combine the individual styles of two specific artists in its output then you are not just looking for a style, you are looking for mimicries of those specific artists combined and normalized by the model. The model is able to do this because works by these artists were annotated as such and fed verbatim into the training process. Of course it can't mimic a specific artist unless you mention them by name!

> Hard disagree on this. Styles do not and should not have ownership, legally or otherwise. Not in painting, music, film, games, or any other kind of art. Anything else kneecaps derivative styles and erects a massive barrier to the advancement of culture. Straight copies are mostly avoided because they add nothing over the original.

You (the general you, an amalgam of the AI art defenders I've seen) claim the right to create these unauthorized derivative works via an automated process with zero reliance on novel human authorship beyond a short text string, then work backwards from there to rationalize to yourself why what you're doing is okay. Then, when artists who've invested decades of their lives into the development of their technique and process and relationship with art tell you that your rationalization is a facile one and that you are stealing from them, you are so sure you know better than them that you sweep aside their concerns and accuse them of jealousy.

In context, it's an absurd and frankly disgusting level of self-absorption. It's like the way crackpots relate to real working scientists, angrily casting the lack of attention paid to them and their "theories" as jealous conspiracy and gatekeeping rather than considering that maybe they simply have no idea what they're talking about, because why would they? But in this case the big money is unfortunately on the side of the crackpots.

I don't care about the "meta", and I don't care about "memes" or any other specifics of the subculture of AI art tool users. What I care about is that these tools obviously launder the intellectual property of artists into ostensibly non-infringing derivative works. I think the comparison with how human artists develop and apply technique and style is intellectually fascinating and worthy of discussion^[1], but from a legal and moral perspective comparing the two is like comparing a detective listening to a wiretap and taking notes by hand with the NSA's PRISM program or similar. They are superficially the same from a certain narrow perspective (and I believe there has been no end of facile rationalizations deployed to this effect), but broadly they are substantively different, morally and practically and especially in their implications for society. Everybody knows that justifying the latter on the basis of the former is foot-in-the-door bullshit that flies in the face of the spirit of the law.

Where will the law go? Who knows! All I know for sure is which side has the money.

^[1] I think if you go back in my commenting history you'll see me talking about that at length, and even taking what may appear to be the other side of this debate.

[dragonwriter]

> You (the general you, an amalgam of the AI art defenders I’ve seen) claim the right to create these unauthorized derivative works via an automated process with zero reliance on novel human authorship

If they are created “via an automated process with zero reliance on novel human authorship” they, ipso facto, are not “derivative works”, which are original creations of human authorship subject to separate copyright (which, nonetheless, require permission from the copyright holder of the original work to legally create unless an exception to copyright protection, like fair use, applies.)

What you probably want to argue is that they are unauthorized mechanical copies, not unauthorized derivative works.

Of course, if they are unauthorized mechanical copies, it is probably usually a partial copy of the training set, which if it has a copyright it is a compilation copyright owned by whoever assembled the training set, not of any particular work within the training set. Now, whether the training set is an unauthorized derivative work when compiled is another question.

[caconym_]

> What you probably want to argue

I don't really want to argue either because I'm not a lawyer and from a lay perspective AI works don't seem to fit neatly into either category. It's obvious to me that infringement occurs in spirit, which is effectively what i'm arguing; beyond that I really couldn't speculate on the details of how a successful case to that effect would be built, or how new law would be written.