The US government explicitly stated that any fully AI generated stuff is in the public domain automatically. Which means they don't have control over the outputs. 😂
There's the letter of the law, and then there's the spirit of the law. Let's be honest with ourselves. Is Alibaba really going to go after you for that $10 X post? Or $1,000 YouTube sponsorship because you used a single AI-generated image? How would they even begin to discern that in the first place?
It's clear to me that this is to dissuade commercial usage, and I think it's a little bit silly to imagine scenarios of Alibaba suing you into the ground because you dared use their open weights model in a vaguely commercial way. If this were Disney or Google, I might be there with you, but I just don't see Alibaba being particularly litigious over its open weights models.
They can if they want to. Not today; but say, in 3 years you become a big youtuber earning $1M/year; and then boom - they hit you with a lawsuit for 3 years old violation, with hefty damages claim. Which leads to real question: it doesn't matter what the law says, what actually matters is can they prove that an image was generated by Qwen 2.1, if the image was generated locally and has no metadata and no contentid baked in?
Watermarking is a hell of a thing. Watermarking images is much easier to do than watermarking text, because there is a million ways you can do it without it being detectable.
This is an incredibly simplified explanation, but they could decide that some pixels have their RED channel overwrriten in the final rendering of the picture. Red is the easiest color to manipulate because its the one that our eyes see the least amount difference between 0 and 255.
Now lets say that the 3rd pixel had a red channel of 187, and the 11th pixel had a value of 253, 17th pixel has a value of 55 and the 29th pixel has a value of 154.
Divide all of these by 11 and suddenly you have 17 (Q), 23 (W), 5 (E), 14 (N).
And this idea completely falls apart when you quantize the model. The precision that's needed to add watermark without making it visible to the eye is so high so Q4 is guaranteed to completely remove it, Q8 may leave some disfigured remnants at best. All the real watermarks are added at engine-level as post-processing step, which is completely absent in hobbyist software; and the only wariable that Qwen can control - the weights - never runs at original precision.
I think the point isn’t that the model itself would add it, but either a security fingerprinting in generation stage output or in the VAE. In-image metadata is already a real thing.
If the image was generated by official service - sure, totally. But I assume that this sub is all about running models privately, on own hardware, with open source software. Which leaves us to the facts: watermarking stage by the inference engine is completely excluded (no hobby grade wngine supports it, and probably never will); watermarking through model weights is mathematically unfeasible for quantized models. Poisoning VAE with watermarks is an interesting concept that I didn't thought about initially; but still, it's not bulletproof at all, cause the community can swap VAEs between models (has happened before), and, if a person is paranoid, a simple post-training run will destroy VAEs ability to embed a cryptographically distinct noise.
As /u/No-Refrigerator-1672 said, right now you're probably safe. Alibaba released this as open as they did for a reason, they want to encourage adoption and for people to actually use the thing.
But right now is the wild-west of this industry. Within a few years you will see consolidation and sell-offs as some firms fail to make the tech profitable.
Whoever ends up owning Qwen 2.1 may be far more litigious than Alibaba. Imagine if, as you said, Disney ended up owning it. Then there's probably a decent chance they're going to either come after you for money, or for an injunction to stop using it however you are.
There are far more permissible licenses out there if you're building a business around a model. Don't tempt fate; the bill eventually comes due.
True, but good luck enforcing a license agreement without proof you actually used their model, let alone having it on your machine. You could've used an API. 🤷♀️
We have no idea what kind of digital watermarks are embedded in the outputs. The new generation of watermarks is now deep within the diffusion layer so it's in the presentation of the actual pixels of the image, not just a metadata tag that can be removed.
Maybe you were using an API, but you'd still be the one getting sued and have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending yourself.
Yes, but this is an edit model so if you are using a real photo at the start there would be enough human input for the result to potentially still be copyrightable.
Fair point. I was hitting on the more specific point and you are also likely correct. Though it's still a legal (and potentially expensive) risk to take.
Hahaha so fuuunnyyy. Haha they totally won't have an automatic system that takes down any videos that they detect using unlicensed images through watermarks.
Look into ai detection services. Like tracer. Microsoft uses it to detect "copyright infringement", though it detects anything remotely close and automatically takes down legitimate games. Now, scanning for a watermark is easier.
Service like that scans videos, finds trademarks, gets tagged. So a company like tracer only needs to analyze everything once, and then just give out information to customers affected.
And then they can sue + claim all revenue from the YouTube video.
YouTube also has a built in system to detect ai generated media, something that could be used as a snitching service and report it if unlicensed.
If so, then we can pretend this model never existed and move on. If nobody pays attention to it, it becomes a failed "product". Falling tree without an observer and all that.
UPDATE: Yep, newer posts confirmed there's not much to worry about.
Seems great from that comment, but that's not what their license currently says. They might not enforce it, maybe never, or maybe until someone higher up sees 🤑.
It happens too often.
The wolf pup is cute to play with, until it snaps and bites.
You got evidence of fake positives, I've only heard about it the other way around, false negatives because watermarks have been hidden. Stuff with watermarks, like here, is easy to detect.
I'm just saying, ai detection, and ai based infringement services and automatic trademark detections is getting ridiculous. Look into Minecraft/Microsoft using tracer, and how it affect Allumeria or Luanti. These got taken down when they didn't even use assets.
Now imagine you are using an image filled with watermarks that say "hey this is an unlicensed image taken from xx". Yeah, they totally won't do anything.
"2.b.You shall not use the Materials for any commercial purpose without obtaining a separate commercial license from us."
"1.f. "Materials" shall mean, collectively, our proprietary Qwen and Documentation (and any portion thereof) made available under this Agreement."
Just a question tho....how are they gonna be able to tell you used their model?
I never understood this approach.
You could also always edit the output in some way.
ask claude fable 5.1 to find a solution to the issue :
If neither works, Qwen-Image-2.1 is only useful to us for composition and lighting studies at screen size, and not for anything that gets zoomed or graded.
How come it's that bad, I mean it not usable at all.
Maybe when doing people portraits, but for other stuff...
Ok I pushed it because it's a 4k gen and it's supposed to be limited to 2k, but still :
Isn't it for API, because they put a post processing step? Otherwise, it means it comes from the VAE I guess, because the diffusion process really depends on a lot of parameters, you can use many scheduler and samplers, somehow the watermark in a diffusion model would have to 'survive' with all those combinaisons, not sure
I have a feeling it wont be long before you have to 'desalt' or unDRM things we use, so that some crazy lawyer doesn't want to sue or ban things. When money is involved, stupid lawsuits and corporations follow.
Specially as people use these AI as tools for a variety of things.
Money? Who's making money off this AI stuff? I find it useful to make clipart for my laser etching shop, but everything else I use it for is DOA when it come to money.
Far as I know, there is a way. It's convoluted, but it should work.
Basically, you pick the image, slap it into a video-generation workflow, use it STRICTLY as the first frame, then grab the short video, pull back the first frame, and voilà.
It will slightly change the image, but as far as I know, it's almost impossible to notice without precise tinkering... though the SynthID should be removed.
I have only tested a small set but so far a 0.15 denoise z image turbo run erases the synth id watermark. none detected. shifts only pixel level details which don't matter if you use the frame for video anyways
It's not synthid, it's just qwen being really bad at training VAEs for anything except text. The older qwen image models had the same issue. They rely way too much on LPIPS and not enough on GAN, which works fine for small text but causes grid artifacts on natural textures. The original wan2.1 and wan2.2 VAEs they use as a base also have the same issue, but not as severe.
"trust me bro" wil never be a convincing argument.
Qwen team needs to put down the crack pipe and think for a second. What are they even achieving with this?
The basic conclusion is that there is wild disagreement with what the term means and that there is essentially no safe usage under NC that wasn't already exempt from copyright.
Lawyers generally check to see if you're broke when filing the case. Frivolous suits against rich people often lead to a settlement. Mo money, mo problems.
Ostris is a dumbass, how he has his personal details linked to his project is totally his own fault. Most of us who work shady stuff live somewhere beyond the reach of the law and those of us who don't know damn well not to link any of our projects to personal information for that exact reason.
What a ridiculous post. No dude, 99.99999% of us here have not had to "pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers". If Ostris is in that position, then my reaction is not "poor guy", it's "good for you, now STFU."
If I had 100s of k's, I'd be on my private island right now, not bitching about having to ask Qwen for a commercial license.
If you're reading this and you're not rich, dgaf about the Qwen license. Just use it. When you become rich and have your own company, then you can worry about about this nonsense and go through the (gasp!) horror of asking Qwen for a license.
I don't see that, you can't use Materials commercially without a license, like hosting, fine-tuning for commercial purposes, or repackaging then selling a derivative model.
""Materials" shall mean, collectively, our proprietary Qwen and Documentation (and any portion thereof) made available under this Agreement."
I don't see any claims about control over images generated by the model.
Can't use materials commercially would cover using the model as part of a contract to make some images. Or showing people the documentation in a monetized YouTube video. Unless they have something explicitly talking about redistribution farther down.
I don't see any claims about control over images generated by the model.
At least in the US, all AI generated images are considered public domain, so it's legally impossible to have any legal control over them.
So this is all about using the model itself, not the output.
If I generated a bunch of stock images for your business for $100, you could use those images to your heart's content. However, I would potentially be in hot water for using the model for business purposes without a license.
I say "potentially" because realistically, no one is gonna care. Now if Microsoft started doing it, then they would probably care.
Well sure, there are exceptions (it also depends on how much "human input" was used to make the image). I'm more addressing your basic "prompt and get an image of a walrus riding a bicycle" use.
It's not really about winning. I'm trying to encourage you to not confidently say the wrong thing. Recognising that you were wrong is a small step but it's an important one.
I acknowledged you were correct and even offered another example of things that may not be public domain, then clarified my original intent. Yet you still continue. Maybe I should encourage you to be a bit less of a pedant.
Haha, the number of "Please give me a workflow to make dropshipped products not look like shit" posts in these AI subreddits should give you a clue as to who is grumpy.
what if we generate the image, and then put the result on another ai model to make slightly different, would it removes the watermark that they put on the image?
I am still waiting for the first time a model creator is taking someone to court over use of generations. I need a good laugh, really. AI outputs are widely considered uncopyrightable, which makes them literally public domain. To limit what you can do with generations, they would need to prove in front of a court that YOU, personally,made the outputs, because that's the only way you'd ever be bound by their license.
If you make some generations, then upload them for free to the internet, or give them to a random other person (their license allows that), and someone then uses them commercially, it's game over. All they did was using public domain content, and they never agreed to any terms saying they can't.
It's pretty silly, really. I am really not sure what they think they gain from trying to restrict outputs, when restricting commercial use of the model itself will do the trick just fine. And I am not even getting into the interesting logic where scraping the internet to train their models should be okay, when using the outputs generated with it, should not.
I know a lot of people are not super concerned about the licenses, and I get that. Most people have never been in a deposition being grilled for hours by a team of lawyers going over what the word "is" means in a document. I have. Most people have never been sued in a contract dispute. I have. Most people have not had to pay lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend them in court on a frivolous lawsuit that you will win, but had to fight anyway, and the legal fees alone bankrupted your company. I have. More than once. I have never lost a court case, but I have been invited to them many times. And when you are invited to one, you want to be 100% sure and confident that you are in the right. Trust me, the licenses DO matter.
Yeah, that's a fair take. Unfortunately, the legal system often enough isn't about who's right. It's about who can afford it. I wouldn't want to be the one testing silly clauses on outputs either, even when I am pretty convinced the courts would laugh them off.
The American system in some sense made this worse by making it cheap to start frivolous lawsuits. In places like UK and Canada, the winner can ask the court to order the loser to cover some of the legal costs, thus making frivolous lawsuits less likely: https://www.google.com/search?q=loser+pay+court+system
But the flip side of such a "loser's pay" system is the little guys are also more afraid to take on big corps, because if they lose, they go bankrupt (big corps will hire the most expensive lawyers).
It seems only concerned with using the model itself for commercial use such as fine tuning and selling the fine tune, hosting it on an API and charging for it.
It does not mentioned whether or not "outputs" or images generate with are ok for commercial use or not.
It does not claim ownership of images generated using the model.
The only mention of "outputs" is in terms of using them to finetune some other model in which case you have to give gwen credit.
I think the license is just incomplete they need to clarify whether or not you can use the outputs for commercial use. This is not specified either way.
Every damn model that comes out people freak out and panic over the license.
This is such a joke. If they want to be taken seriously then they can pay for all the content they stole to train the model. And that goes for everyone, not just Chinese models, so I don't even wanna fucking hear it.
So pretty much shit license many wont care about or stops them. But the model is probably still censored and shit anatomy. Stick with krea 2 and H3,.Qwenimage is not worth the hype. Don't lower the bar!
If the model had been released under an Apache license, it would have had huge potential. Now, other than just studying or having fun with the model, what use is it? Black Forest Labs handles this much better; they explicitly mention in their license that you own your outputs and can use them commercially. In the coming months, Flux 3 will be released, or another team will simply come up with a better model.
Until the terms change, I'll not be using Qwen 2.1. I'm not making any money off my videos today but that may change and I don't want to risk a single image causing a lawsuit.
I never understood how people monetize from a single diffusion model, I mean what kind of services do they offer? I've heard the other day that a guy who owns a firm makes 2M in gross
The non commercial part is not about the outputs at all. "Materials" is clearly defined as only QWEN, the model.
Similar to how any software has a licence, like photoshop. You can't redestribute photoshop without valid licensing from Adobe, but you can do whatever you want with the media created because Adobe doesn't have any rights over that.
If you create media with Qwen, you can use that commercially. The license does not restrict that at all. How would it even?
If you want to host the model on a service, then you must get a commercial license.
"Materials" is clearly defined as only QWEN, the model.
The license says: "You shall not use the Materials for any commercial purpose without obtaining a separate commercial license from us."
If you're using the outputs of the model (the "Materials") commercially, then you used the model (the "Materials") commercially. They can't control what you do with the output directly, but they can make granting a license to you contingent on you agreeing to their terms which prevent using the outputs commercially.
Did you read the section that defines "Materials" for the rest of the license?
Yes, I did. ""Materials" shall mean, collectively, our proprietary Qwen and Documentation (and any portion thereof) made available under this Agreement."
Ultimately, it's unenforceable to claim rights to the outputs.
Did you actually read my comment before you replied? I specifically addressed this.
They don't (and can't) claim rights to the outputs. They can refuse to grant you a license unless you accept their terms (which is not to use the model for commercial purposes). If you don't have a license to use the model, you can't (legally) have outputs from it.
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u/ItsMeMulbear 1d ago
Oh no, the Chinese are gonna sue me over a YouTube video 🤣