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Comment by srackey | Hacker News Reader

It is too late. Sorry artists but it’s over. These models can be trained cheaply(compared to a model like GPT-3), run on consumer GPUs, and are open source. Even if somehow Stable Diffusion got forced to take it down, it’s already out! Will be available with BitTorrent forever. Stable Diffusion could be stopped by US copyright law, but there will be 100 Chinese and Russian startups, who will develop even better models and not give a fuck.

This is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. Adapt or die!

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This is not mentioned enough and it's hard to think of an outcome to any legal action that would fix the things that traditional artists are asking to be fixed.

And even if there was an effective legal block on allegedly infringing models - an "IP clean" AI model would on the whole be equally disruptive. There's enough material out there in the public domain to create effective image generation models. It might not match the style of living artists very well, but that's not really the thing that's going to be the real problem.

You could say the same about any JPEG on the internet. Yet artists successfully recover licensing fees for those. It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too.

Which would be fine and not an issue. Plagarism is already handled by copyright law.

What won't happen is "x in the style of y" suddenly becoming an enforceable infringement (whether AI produced or not)

>It's not unthinkable that artists will be paid licensing fees for AI-regurgitated copies of their art, too.

Then companies will just clean-room the thing by getting tens of thousands of developing world artists to draw things and generate training data. Combined with all the works out of copyright and those bought from existing licensors will get you probably the same quality models. That costs money but so does GPT-3 and look where we are. There is no getting the cat back in the bag, it's five blocks away with a rocket strapped to it's back.

Clean-room doesn't work for trademarks. No matter how you do it, you're not allowed to sell Mickey Mouse merchandise.

Not only that, but all these naïve restrictions artists want to impose on machine learning would end up being awful for everyone except huge corporations.

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