Reasonable points, all! I agree that the conflation of legality and morality has warped the discourse around this; in particular the idea of Stable Diffusion and such regurgitating copyrighted imagery strikes me as a red herring, since the ability to do this is as old as the photocopier and legally quite well-understood.
It actually does seem to me, then, that style copying is a bigger problem than straightforward regurgitation, since new images in a style are the thing that you would ordinarily need to go to an artist for; but the biggest problem of all is that fundamentally all art styles are imperfect but pretty good substitutes in the market for all other art styles.
(Most popular of all the art styles—to judge by a sampling of images online—is hyperrealism, which is obviously a style that nobody can lay either legal OR moral claim to.)
So i think that if Stability tomorrow came out with a totally unimpeachable version of SD with no copyrighted data of any kind (but with a similarly high quality of output) we would have, essentially, the same set of problems for artists.
I’m confused about how style copying is a new problem. You can trivially find people willing a capable of drawing convincing Disney or specific-anime-studio art, and there’s an entire town in China dedicated to making paintings in famous styles. This has existed for a long time and the moral panic is just because now scary computers are doing it.
So i think that if Stability tomorrow came out with a totally unimpeachable version of SD with no copyrighted data of any kind (but with a similarly high quality of output) we would have, essentially, the same set of problems for artists.
I don’t think this is true in the short term. Artists are currently dealing with issues like scam social media accounts which copy their style and claim to be the artist. (Not sure how big this is, I only heard about this as a rumor—but it’s something that is now possible, where before you’d only be able to do something like this by re-posting existing works.)
Reasonable points, all! I agree that the conflation of legality and morality has warped the discourse around this; in particular the idea of Stable Diffusion and such regurgitating copyrighted imagery strikes me as a red herring, since the ability to do this is as old as the photocopier and legally quite well-understood.
It actually does seem to me, then, that style copying is a bigger problem than straightforward regurgitation, since new images in a style are the thing that you would ordinarily need to go to an artist for; but the biggest problem of all is that fundamentally all art styles are imperfect but pretty good substitutes in the market for all other art styles.
(Most popular of all the art styles—to judge by a sampling of images online—is hyperrealism, which is obviously a style that nobody can lay either legal OR moral claim to.)
So i think that if Stability tomorrow came out with a totally unimpeachable version of SD with no copyrighted data of any kind (but with a similarly high quality of output) we would have, essentially, the same set of problems for artists.
I’m confused about how style copying is a new problem. You can trivially find people willing a capable of drawing convincing Disney or specific-anime-studio art, and there’s an entire town in China dedicated to making paintings in famous styles. This has existed for a long time and the moral panic is just because now scary computers are doing it.
I don’t think this is true in the short term. Artists are currently dealing with issues like scam social media accounts which copy their style and claim to be the artist. (Not sure how big this is, I only heard about this as a rumor—but it’s something that is now possible, where before you’d only be able to do something like this by re-posting existing works.)