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Comment by sebstefan | Hacker News Reader

> Stability AI has already announced that it is removing users’ ability to request images in a particular artist’s style

I hope it returns when they win and get rid of this legal bullying.

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I don't.

Information comes with many different rights: copy-right is the right to make copies; "moral rights" were mentioned in a few of my UK job contracts and that's "the right to be identified as the author of a work"; database rights are for collections of statements of fact that are not eligible for copyright but which were deemed to be worth protecting anyway for much the same reasons.

Even if copyright is totally eliminated from law by the mere existence of these AI[0], we may well retain the aforementioned "moral rights". And even if it is totally legal, there's also a strong possibility of it being considered gauche to use an AI trained on the works of those that don't like this.

[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...

Moral rights is indeed "the right to be identified as the author of a work".

I don't think it means the author has a right to all similar styles. If I can legally ask somebody to paint me something in the style of a famous (living) artist, that person presumably having seen and studied their famous works for a while, why should I not be able to ask the AI to do the same thing?

(I understand there might be people who think even a human person emulating the style of another artist is morally wrong, but at least that's a consistent argument)

Moral arguments aren't very consistent, in my experience — when I first heard someone suggest that people start with feelings and then create a narrative (not necessarily coherent) to fit those feelings, a lot of the weird things started to make a lot more sense.

I'm told that for people who think Rolex watches are important, a fake Rolex is much worse than not having a Rolex at all: the item is a signal much like a peacock tail, the signal is de-valued by making things easy.

it's quite common in UK contracts of employment to try and transfer the moral rights to the Employer

but this isn't enforceable, they cannot be transferred

An artist's style is not copyrightable so I doubt it makes much of a difference. My guess is that showing good faith will make the lawsuit go over easier, because there's nothing illegal about paying someone to copy someone else's style (and not just a replica).

But the artist's work itself is copyrightable.

Any use of that work without permission (and thus attribution/compensation) is the problem.

Fair use is a thing.

Fair use as a legal doctrine has significant practical problems - specifically, it's an open legal question with mind-bogglingly large sums of money at stake until and unless you get sued and spend six-figure sums in court to find out. Prudent risk management will forgo all sorts of activities that are clearly fair use under US law but happen to piss off large companies with expansive legal departments.

But when companies are solely profiting from it then it ceases being fair.

I think this restriction was more about trying to shut up some very vocal people on social media and less about the law.

Copying an artists style is legal in every jurisdiction in which Stability operates.

There's a big difference between 'rework my drawing to look like it was painted by Goya' and 'render this drawing in the style of Lisa Frank' or any living visual artist famed for a specific identifiable style as opposed to a particular image.

Comics are one example of an area where individual artists might develop a large body of work in a very distinctive style. You probably know what a Tintin comic (by Belgian artist Hergé) looks like. And lots of Manga artists have very specific and instantly identifiable styles. Individual artistry is a little less obvious with popular western comics because the best-known titles tend to be superhero franchises where the characters/story world are owned by a corporation and individual artists come and go.

I thought many comics work with a team of artists to create their work. Largely by having 1 person create the style and other's learning to mimic it. Let alone having different people do the line work, shading, coloring, etc.

Right....which involves a fair amount of productive and administrative labor to assemble and operate. If I can take a collection of scans and feed them into my diffusion appliance and have it pop out and endless supply of new panels 24-7, the economics of the handcrafted original artwork factory start to look really bad.

Upside: the brilliant artist Rohan Kishibe falls under a bus, but while his loss is tragic his artistic legacy lives on - hooray!

Downside: up-and-coming artist Rohan Kishibe is on the verge of breaking through commercially, but the publishers of Shonen Lump, who invested heavily in AI, floods the market with work from Kohan Rishibe, and our hero is derided as a mere imitator.

I don't even think it extends to this, it's simply because it's automated. I have no talent in the area, but I know that artists can copy one another's styles. You see it in talented art student master copies, and hell I'd bet most professional cartoonists could draw a page what looks pretty damn close to a series of Tintin panels when you squint.

Well yes, automation makes a massive difference because with a machine you can crank hundreds of panels in a particular style in the time it takes a human artist to do a single one.

In fact, I generated a bunch of Tintin panels between writing my earlier comment and this one, and they're bad but not terrible - mainly because I asked for 'Tintin riding a bicycle [...]' and it's having trouble with things like the bicycle spokes. Two out of the 4 'feel' right in terms of the line drawing style, color palette, foreground-background composition, level of background detail etc.

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