>It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows.
>Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data—in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Nightshade messes with those images.
So, this will not work at all as soon as the vulnerability is patched? Adversarial attacks are super cool, but they flat out do not generalize afaik. If there's been some breakthrough I'd love to hear about it, but the idea doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
It does put these companies in an awkward position though. If you're implementing defenses against this, it's conceding not all your sources of data consented, or at least that you're not 100% on their provenance.
More importantly, you can detect this and filter out those images pretty easily - which means you have implicit consent from the users of all other images because they chose not to protect their images technically.
You can absolutely take things from a house with an unlocked front door, if there's no jail time and the fine is one [insert local unit of currency here] and that theft doesn't hurt your reputation. That's how AI works right now:
"No one sued us before we made it to market with our models trained on stolen property, and now we're entrenched with a billion dollars of legal defense funds and budgeted for the fines in case we end up convicted of robbing you — and now our customers pay us to externalize and disregard the robberies we committed to reduce their effort, so they have the moral high ground and we wallow in our wealth."
>"No one sued us before we made it to market with our models trained on stolen property, and now we're entrenched with a billion dollars of legal defense funds and budgeted for the fines in case we end up convicted of robbing you — and now our customers pay us to externalize and disregard the robberies we committed to reduce their effort, so they have the moral high ground and we wallow in our wealth."
What about "all art is derivative to some extent, and training a machine artist based on existing art is no different than training a machine artist based on existing art"?
Then the Stable Diffusion model should hold the copyright. And using generative models doesn't make you any more of an artist that commissioning a human does.
It can be how the law works; like in Field v. Google Inc. for hosting a cached copy of a site: "Google reasonably interpreted absence of meta-tags as permission to present "Cached" links to the pages of Field's site".
I think Fair Use is the stronger defense for model training, but - for crawlers that obey robots.txt/etc. - implied license isn't totally off the table.
That's a pretty poor analogy. To make it a bit better, it's also like we're figuring out what this whole "house" thing is, and there's lots of differing opinions, and also lots of people who think this whole "house" thing is a fad.
>Being able to prove opt-out using a watermark tech like this one, maybe even encoding provenance, could make for very interesting legal battles.
That's... not how copyright works? If you're infringing on copyright, "the author didn't opt out" isn't a valid defense. The valid defenses like fair use can not be opt out by authors. In other words I don't really see any circumstance where opt outs are a valid factor.
If I never look at your work and make a work that looks like your work I've still violated copyright.
If I look at all your works and make something that looks kinda but not close enough, most likely I've not violated your work. You cannot both put your work in public and then yell at people|things not to look at it.
Sounds like bullshit, to be frank. Training data already goes through a number of "subtle augmentations" and instead of "breaking" the resulting model, the augmentations help the model to generalize better.
No, it isn't if you don't curate meticulously. Perhaps by accident something new could emerge which is worth it to use as input for an advanced model.
But the rule is that new concepts are very hard to produce, although thanks to countless models, stable diffusion is probably the most flexible approach by quite some margin.
My artist cousin uses AI to be able to take more customers. He's very happy with it. Just go back to the 70s and read all the discussions about the jobs killed by computers. Before computers, more artists were needed for the same output, while now artists can do things that could only be dreamed a generation ago.
Also, when artists finally get compensated for training, expect Spotify-style cents. Artists won't be able to stop this, they are just not strong enough as a group, for better or worse.
clearly recall the arts world of the 1970s. Manual arts, manual publishing tasks and the business around that employed many orders of magnitude more people in many large metro areas. Fast Forward to post-Lucasfilm digital era and the size of the largest media companies magnified by 1000x, while sign shops closed and local typesetting and design firms had to go digital or die. Fast forward again to post-covid, and I believe that you would be lucky to find a few of the earlier activities at all, in any city. Meanwhile games employ thousands of anonymous artists remotely, and very, very few individuals run their own business with any stability.
Digital arts has been a magnifier for the largest companies, and the literal death of thousands of stable, small business, in fifty years.
I think artists on the low end might suffer. I have commissioned some images and models for some hobby projects, even while I paint and model myself. Probably would use AI to generate images today.
Innovation tends to wipe out the low end everywhere. At the same time, more people can generate their own images without having to find an artist. In practice, images that wouldn't be created because of costs will now be created.
True. Image generation is a godsend for rapid prototyping. Although with low end I meant a financial sense. Skill is often not enough to be financially successful as an artist, there is luck and opportunity involved. So we could still lose something here.
Also AI is still atrocious to come up with any new concept that wasn't meticulously trained. To me this is still just an algorithm as intelligence would suggest something different. But nonetheless an impressive and mighty tool.
GenAI really is a competitor for a lot of commercial illustration and photography. It isn't a complete substitute, but there are lots of situations where a layman fiddling around with a GenAI will get a perfectly acceptable result in a couple of minutes. If it doesn't already exist, I can easily foresee that online publishing tools will have integrated GenAI features to autogenerate an image from a caption, or an illustration based on the text of an article.
Some artists may well benefit from being able to produce more work more quickly and be able to capitalise on their ability to use GenAI effectively, but I expect that many won't; they are likely to see their incomes decline, or lose their livelihoods altogether.
That isn't an argument for stigmatising or banning GenAI, but we do need to recognise that it's a real problem for the people affected.
This is a very conservative and limiting definition of “artist.” I was always told that anyone can be an artist, even if their work isn’t classically “good.” Now the ladder has been pulled up by formerly inclusive artists. That’s too bad.
It will be a while. There is a large group of people who don’t willingly uses new tools when those tools enable all comers to make better, “competing” work product.
That will progress a funeral at a time until the stigma is gone and you have critical masses of people really pushing the art of the possible. Lots of the SAF-AGRA protest is based on this reasoning.
The SAG and WGA protest have almost nothing to do with this. The AI debacle their worried about is either being replaced by AI versions of their likeliness (without pay) or being paid less and remaining uncredited because AI was used to write/edit (a portion of) a script, respectively.
>Regulate use of artificial intelligence on MBA-covered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI
I agree some aspects are about writers protecting themselves from being replaced by AI, but the outright ban on use of them (ie. "can’t write or rewrite literary material") and prohibiting them from being trained seems consistent with the parent's claim of "There is a large group of people who don’t willingly uses new tools when those tools enable all comers to make better, “competing” work product"
>when will artists accept genai as a tool not a competitor? all artists with genai tools easily outclass a non artist fiddling around
If that AI is being trained to emulate their work , using their work to do so, without asking their permission to use their work.. then it's not unreasonable for them see it as a competitor.
They don't have the same army of lawyers film studios have though, so it looks like SA etc got away with the heist.
And (questions of efficacy aside) they're perfectly within their rights to add hidden data to their images to stop it being scraped and used to train a a competitor.
You will be much happier after you concede the fact that the music you grew up listening to isn’t better, you just grew up listening to it. It is ok to say you got older, stopped trying to discover new music, and would rather listen to the old songs you know you like.
But it is such a tired trope to say all new music is shit. Especially when Spotify, Soundcloud, and other services have made it far easier for new artist to get their work out there and to discover them. You also now have access to the entire world of music, and not just music in your own language or from a similar region.
You will also be more pleasant to be around when people think of you as someone with a preference but is open to hearing new things.
Your not wrong. When I say shit, I mean they're all created unnaturally. I am not saying don't let computers aide music design, to really obtain the first sample you need the music instruments.
I have yet to hear an official AI rock band play guitar in quill to the skill that was produced.
Some of the music from other decades is certainly better than some of what's getting put out today. Growing up, I often preferred (much) older artists that were still known to whatever was bubbling up on the Billboard charts.
In this case what is being circumvented is precisely what is defined by CFAA as a malicious code or information transmitted to cause intentional damage to a protected computer system, so I doubt the courts will be too upset about effectively circumventing the mechanisms of a malicious virus.
> 5. (A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
You can file whatever copyright suit you want, you can’t go damage someone else’s data just because you’re mad. Just like a contractor has to get a lien and not just go smash up their work because they didn’t get paid.
>Uh oh, you have a circumvention device right now then.... the print screen but
A lot of the artists in the DA and other places that are annoyed with their work being used to train AI work by taking a commission to create an image and then share it online for everyone to enjoy.
Their objection to it being used to train AI is more nuanced than people think.
Not really. Their argument is "Hey, I looked at everyones art all my life and used that to build my internal model, but it's time for me to pull up the ladder behind me"
Copyright is not about reading your art, it's about the creation of subsequent works that are some arbitrary measure of 'too close' to the work other people already created.
Img2dataset and other tools already handles this through hash verification. But yes kudurru ai is a terrible initiative. I think browsers and search engines should ban any website using it.
I am not sure how how hashing would help here? A hash would only be useful to see if someone tampered with data you already have and tried to swap your stored images for poison images.
Kid named “knowingly causing the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causing damage without authorization, to a protected computer”:
The solution is not publicly sharing your code if you do not want it being used.
Yes, you can spin up a whole debate about monetization etc pp but generative ai is the future of development too and will make it more accessible in a way that we can hardly imagine right now. So just stop with these arbitrary red lines of voluntarily published sources.
Code generators are autoregressive (code->code) not labeled (text->image) so the attack wouldn't work. Also, you can actually tell if a code model works or not while you're training it, by running tests on the output.
You could put up a lot of misleading code where the comments are wrong or there's bugs in it… seems bad for obvious reasons though.
wasn't there an attack a while ago that used hidden characters to break compilers? i'll see if i can dig it up. maybe something like that could be used for github. you'd have to have a pre commit and pull hook that would encode / decode the malicious characters
Hopefully they don't try to sell it to artists, because that would be literally a scam.