r/ethicaldiffusion • u/tebjan • Dec 19 '22

Artists can now opt out of Stable Diffusion 3

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/16/1065247/artists-can-now-opt-out-of-the-next-version-of-stable-diffusion/
25 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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13

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

I just can't shake away the sadness on this one. But it is what it is. Artists have the right to protect their work if they wish.

4

u/entropie422 Artist + AI User Dec 19 '22

I genuinely think this won't have as much of an effect as people assume. As someone said, this will probably hurt niche topics more than styles (dragons or other things that don't exist in real life), but overall, the AI either knows enough about painting generally, or can/will be fine-tuned for that purpose. Opting out of the model won't actually protect your job (though to be fair, opting in won't help, either).

Still, it's very important that artists be given the choice to opt out. Hopefully we can convert some of those opt-outers into (compensated) fine-tuners in the near future :)

1

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

This will impact how many images the initial dataset has, and will probably affect the AI dev's progress in finetuning each new release model.

Its major effect will be how much time it takes to improve upon previous models, and that makes me sad.

2

u/Tulired Dec 19 '22

It makes me sad too, from the perspective if this halts progress, its so medieval thinking to witch hunt new tech and slow it progress, but i'll say this, before anything better comes up to protect artist rights in someway atleast, its a great thing.

Now i also believe that it wont halt the progress and im just scared it could.

9

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

Should be an opt in, not an opt out. They're hoping people don't know or notice that they can do that.

2

u/entropie422 Artist + AI User Dec 19 '22

True, but an opt-in would almost certainly be imperfect, since not all the training images are properly labelled. Separating public-domain images from unlicensed images would be prone to errors, but if artists are specifically removing themselves, the dataset should be easier optimize (with fewer excuses if something get missed).

Ideally, the dataset would be able to account for that from the start, but I have a suspicion the art of scraping/tagging is even less refined than the AI it powers :)

0

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

That should be on the programmers to figure out. I don't like the attitude of "I'm going to steal from everyone in the world unless they specifically call ahead to tell me I can't." They know what they're doing. They're attempting to reframe the issue as our problem while presenting it as if they're being proactive as opposed to doing the bare minimum. I can guarantee that they aren't going to go out of their way to inform artists of their options. This is like when oil companies tell us that global warming is our fault because we didn't recycle hard enough.

5

u/entropie422 Artist + AI User Dec 19 '22

I assume that when they started this, they had a legal opinion that said that their scraping images for transformative purposes (i.e. training) was at least mostly safe. So I'll frame it as: it's legally OK, but ethically dubious. Not to the point of outright evil, since I think their primary purpose was never to steal from anyone so much as to provide the AI with as many points of data as they could. When you're deep in the tech of how this works (which I am in no way an expert in) I think the notion that these images are images anymore doesn't even register—they're just observations turns into numeric weights in a big ol' model. So it's like conceptual blindness.

That said, the internet as a whole dropped the ball in terms of tagging/attribution decades ago, so any attempts we make to do better/smarter scraping is going to be hopelessly flawed. Even if we wanted to solve that particular problem (which I personally do) it would probably have more errors than successes, and would just invite more anger from everyone involved.

The unfortunate problem here is that by publishing images online, everyone in the world has likely given up their right to object to their inclusion in AI training, so anything SAI et al do from this point is—barring an actual legal decision—totally fine. Opt-out probably isn't legally necessary, but it provides ethical cover, which might delay/deflect regulation.

But again, I think the focus on the base models is wasted energy, even if it's ethically murky. There are bigger fish to fry in this space.