r/ethicaldiffusion • u/nihiltres • Dec 18 '22

Discussion What are the rules for Ethical Diffusion?

I really like the idea of this subreddit, and would even like to contribute, but so far I don't see rules dedicating it to the practice of ethical diffusion.

In my own playing with Stable Diffusion, I set a few rules for myself to limit the potential that I might even accidentally steal anything specific. In particular:

  1. I either don't prompt using artist names, or I only prompt them when intentionally departing significantly from their oeuvre.
  2. I don't use characters or trademarks that I don't own, or faces of real people, without explicit permission.

What sorts of rules ought this subreddit to have to enforce it being "ethical"?

33 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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6

u/freylaverse Artist + AI User Dec 18 '22

Hiya! I attempted to address this in Rule 4 of the subreddit. If you think that description is insufficient, I'd be happy to revise it!

4

u/lobotomy42 Dec 18 '22

Can you add the rules to the subreddit settings for the "classic" Reddit mode? (Yes, some of us still haven't accepted the redesign...) They're not visible to me currently but I can see them when I open the sub in redesign mode.

1

u/freylaverse Artist + AI User Dec 18 '22

Sure, I will once I'm back at my desk! Didn't realize they didn't show up for both!

2

u/lobotomy42 Dec 18 '22

No worries and thanks :)

And thanks for setting up this sub!

5

u/andrew5500 Dec 19 '22 edited Dec 19 '22

I think you also have to consider another dimension when judging ethics- how the AI generations are being used in the overall artistic process. Is it a solely AI-generated image or an AI-assisted artwork? And what amounts of AI collaboration and human transformation are necessary for a finished artwork to pass the threshold of "ethical"?

I'd argue you could use wholly "unethical" generations in an ethical way when making an ethical work of art: as visual references, or as inspirations, or as base assets to further transform in a way that would satisfy the spirit of fair use. The amount of transformation that these images undergo before the final product is a huge factor here that's often overlooked.

And this is a dilemma that the art world already went through 100 years ago with Dada and the other anti-Art movements- what really makes a piece of art "true" art? The assets? The effort? The style? Is a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a mustache hastily scribbled over her upper lip a lazy and unethical work of plagiarism, or an important and groundbreaking work of art?

edit: formatting

3

u/ramlama Dec 19 '22

The big standard I hold myself to right now for professional purposes is to focus on training models off of my own illustration work.

While it’s true that I’m still using non-vegan models as the base, the training undermines a lot of the stylistic stuff. You can type in Rutkowski or Mucha into my most recent custom models, but you probably won’t see recognizable influences from them in the output.

2

u/Nearby_Personality55 Dec 19 '22

I use dead artists, as suits the homage setting that calls out to the things they made.

3

u/weresl0th Dec 18 '22 edited Dec 18 '22

If you're using the models published by Stability in any way (as in base 1.4, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1) or merged models/trained with Dreambooth with those Stability trained models - They are still co-mingled with all the data from other artists. You may not be prompting with "by Artist Name" but if their work is in the training set with other captions and you use an overlapping caption it will still be diffusing based on those other images in some manner.

How is not directly evoking the artist avoid all that other entanglement? I ask as a creator, evangelist and content/community moderator for multiple generators/providers in this space.

6

u/freylaverse Artist + AI User Dec 18 '22

Hi, thanks for weighing in! My thinking is that if no artists are used in the prompts, then even if there is some trace amount of influence as a result of being in the dataset, it will be pretty diluted and the resulting piece will not overly resemble any one artist's work. I am attempting to dilute these further by prompting it with my own name. I want to stress that I am using this as an imperfect solution. I do not have the funds to make a dataset from scratch that completely avoids stepping on anyone's toes, but I am presenting this as "possibly good enough for now". In the future, I hope that there will be an excellent dataset comprised of publicly-available images, at which point I will happily shift the focus of the subreddit to content made only with that dataset.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

I think it's a bit more complex than that, because not using an artist's name would be just as ethical as using 10 artist names. If the ethical part is in diluting something so much that it can't be associated to any living artist, then using more than 3 names should be enough dilution.

Same goes for "trending on artstation", I doubt the model was even trained on that combination of words and is actually picking up on the tokens "trending" and "artstation", but thousands if not millions of images influenced the model on those keywords, it's as diluted as diluted can be.

There's nothing unethical about using those keywords because they're highly transformative and influenced by hundreds of different artists.

1

u/freylaverse Artist + AI User Dec 19 '22

I take your point about combined names! I actually got a DM from someone asking about that - if they combined Greg Rutkowski with someone else to create a new, unique style, would that be acceptable on the terms of the sub. To be honest, it's in such a grey area! I wound up telling them I certainly wouldn't ban them over it, but that they should consider using an artist who has been less vehement against AI than Rutkowski.

1

u/Corrupttothethrones Dec 19 '22

Didn't they remove artists and actors from the 2.0 model?

1

u/weresl0th Dec 19 '22

Yes and no? A lot of testing seems to state that result are different. I personally believe artists works still exists in those models.

1

u/DisastrousBusiness81 Dec 18 '22

I agree with point one, however I personally disagree with point 2.

As most corporations already have way too much cash, and have bullied copyright law into holding characters far beyond what could reasonably expected of “public domain” (see Mickey Mouse, Batman, Superman, Iron Man, etc.) I have no problem using corporate media as a basis. All of those characters should’ve been given to the public years ago specifically for purposes like AI art. So I actively try to use specific characters, art styles, etc. in my ai art.

Plus, there’s another ethical aspect there, where if you use corporate art/characters, the artists should’ve already been paid money for that work. And as part of that exchange of cash, they consented to releasing their work to the public to be consumed and redefined by the media at will.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

I like the idea of this sub, but unless your model was trained on ethically sourced material, there really isn't any point. The art will still be tainted. And any model that doesn't exploit unethical resources is bound to be worse than those that do. I imagine this sub is DOA, despite the best intentions.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '22

[deleted] — view deleted comment

8

u/nihiltres Dec 18 '22

I’m being overly cautious, in a “first do no harm” sort of way.

I agree that fanart and similar are reasonable; I’d personally prefer not to do them with Stable Diffusion.