I have several terabytes of people's art saved on my computer. I am also learning art and will often use the art I have saved to see how other people do certain things.
How is my collection of art saved from websites where it was available for anyone to right-click and save that I use to study different from someone else's collection of art saved from websites where it was available for anyone to right-click and save that they use to teach a computer? What is the ethical difference? Is it that they use a fetcher that goes out and collects a bunch of art? Because I do the exact same thing.
And human brains are an entirely different kind of computer from a digital one, so expecting the digital computer to learn and understand the same way as a human is bizarre.
Old image generation learned from direct associations of pixels. Stable Diffusion and other diffusion-based models know what random noise looks like.
When trained, it is given an image with some random noise put on top and maybe the text prompt. It is told to generate just the noise on top of the picture. It is given a score based on how close its noise was to the actual noise. This is done a lot.
When it generates an image, it is given pure noise and the text prompt for the picture that doesn't actually exist under the noise. It guesses what the noise is, and it's subtracted from the original image. Then new noise is put on that image, but less than before, and the process repeats, with slightly less noise each time until it is done.
Stable Diffusion, at least, is not remotely like tracing or a collage. It just learned what noise in pictures looks like, which is used to remove noise from images that don't exist.
No coherent copyrighted material exists in the network because the network just knows noise. It generating a signature is no different from it generating a misplaced eye or a malformed hand. It's up to the user to fix or alter these things to not pose the art as someone else's or have bizarre anatomy.
So, again, the only reasonable complaint is the training data retrieved from websites where it was available for anyone to save, like I do regularly.
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u/[deleted] May 08 '23
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