| The level of cleanliness you talk about matters for FOSS people like us. The kinds of risks Adobe's Firefly customers might care about might be lower. They probably don't care that the model knows what the text string "C3-PO" means, but absolutely don't want it drawing random bits and pieces of other copyrighted images without being prompted for them. My understanding was that CLIP handled prompt comprehension - like, there's a set of vectors in CLIP space for "gold humanoid robot" that "C3-PO" would map to from the small language model, and pictures of C3-PO would map to from the image model in CLIP. But the U-net doing the actual image diffusion wouldn't know how to fill that part of CLIP space with the specific copyrightable representation of the Star Wars character unless it'd been trained on the same set of images. It might generalize how to draw a gold robot, which is not a copyrightable image feature, but not C3-PO specifically. It's entirely plausible that a court might say training CLIP on copyrighted material is OK, but training the VAE or U-net layers is not, based on the technical capability of each layer to reproduce trained-on material. The moral arguments being bandied about by artists are broader than copyright. Firefly - or even a fully public-domain-trained model - cannot satisfy them. Being trained on is a moral insult, but they would still be insulted by AI bros and corporate stooges boasting about how AI can eliminate entire classes of artistic work. To be clear, the AI models we currently have - as well as those we will have in the future - are not useful tools for artists. The problem is not a lack of training data or the provenance of said data, it's the fact that text is not a good interface for visual artists. It is, however, a very good interface for people who want artists to go away. What AI art is doing in 2024 is satisficing - i.e. providing viewers and users of art with a good-enough market substitute. The bigger questions you raise about ownership are orthogonal to the questions of who gets to own the model. The artists opposing AI rightfully want to see tech companies bleed, because tech companies are the same companies who sold their bosses on the tools that steal their wages - e.g. streaming services that pay fractions of a cent if you're lucky. If AI were to prevail the alternative would then be to engage in copyright laundry in protest. e.g. "If you won't protect us against AI, then we'll weaponize it against the media conglomerates who want to use it to fire us with." |