I wouldn’t bet on that, up to this point the courts have ruled solidly against AI in terms of IP. There’s quite a few cases going through the courts right now, so that may change, but right now, most people publicly using AI generated stuff are avoiding commercial use for fear of legal repercussions. At least in the game dev community, I’ve seen a lot of experienced developers and indie developers staying away from AI until there’s more laws in place
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Because neural networks are well known to have the ability to memorize and copy the training data, there is a real risk it produces something that is extremely similar to what it has seen during the training. Even though the risk is being minimized by using a ridiculous amount of training data (for which the neural network can’t have the capacity to memorize it), the risk still remains.
On the other hand, I have heard from composers coming up with fantastic new ideas. As they let friends listen to it, they pointed out, it was almost a one to one copy from this and that piece. It is no secret that artists copy (even by accident).
When it comes to those diffusion models, I wonder whether it would legally be sufficient to have an additional component which references the images from the dataset which are most similar to the produced image. Under the assumption that this works reasonably well, humans could judge whether it is different enough.
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welp, someone already did that as an add-on for blender, things are going fast (too fast for my liking), I thing I’ll start looking for some other job already
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Do you have a link for that?
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I wonder what would happen if copyright issues ever got to the point where people can be sued because a piece they made today was somewhat inspired by trademarked work they saw 10 years ago. It would create a situation where the creation of art, animation, games, and so on will simply stop because every possible idea has already been taken and placed under some sort of protection. If it could be determined that the use of AI can mean legal issues simply from the use of ‘imagination’, and it was determined it was sentient enough to allow the extrapolation of the same issues to people, then all of us will probably be doing basket weaving or crocheting in the future because media creation of any kind has become too risky.
We already have issues with companies taking IP defense a bit too far, I recall one article where HBO sued a family because their autistic son drew a work titled ‘Winter is Coming’ (even though he probably had no idea what Game of Thrones was).
In my opinion, when we throw AI into the copyright mix, it doesn’t even make the situation that much worse. It is and will likely always be a gray area where it is difficult or impossible to make clear cut decisions. As it becomes a legal topic, gray areas are a playing field of lawyers and if the laws don’t prevent companies to go nuts, it can easily get uncomfortable for creatives.
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Consider this dilemma:
As it is now, AI is great at copying preexisting styles, but it’s not great at developing new styles. Suppose an artist has a great unique style, and builds up a beautiful portfolio on artstation. As soon as they have enough material and are discoverable enough to get hired, an AI gets it’s weights updated and trains on new images. The artist is now broke, because everyone in the world can rip off their style simply by putting their name in the prompt.
It’s a mutual relationship. Artists can use this powerful tool, but it relies on artists to work in the first place.
There needs to be laws in place to protect artists’ work from being used in training data without consent. Artists deserve small royalties for their original work, and it’s for the good of both the artist and the machine.
Of course, this is an issue that may always stay unresolved.
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The technology and results are incredible from the demo video/samples listed here. Really amazing.
That said… I also see this as a way for business to save money by possibly cutting their design team. I mean why pay a team of 6 when one person can generate the same results, right?
What will humans do when the machines do everything for us? 
Over my 57 years here on earth, I have seen too many loose their livelihoods from automation. And where I think this technology is absolutely incredible, as an older person that may be more traditional… It not true art if not created by the mind and hands of the creator. It will always be cold and impersonal. But that’s just this old birds opinion. 
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The pushback against AI-generated art is growing.
Flooded with AI-generated images, some art communities ban them completely | Ars Technica
Various art sites have started to see their servers inundated with the uploading of imagery created by these generators, and some have now started to ban the use of the software altogether. I can see why some are starting to ban it since having hundreds of new images coming per hour means no more comments or engagements with legitimate artists as they get buried,
So far, a few of the biggest players like Art Station and Deviant Art are still welcoming the flood, so people posting there are still at a huge risk of being buried in a matter of minutes and not having any chance to make a noticeable presence.
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Two things to bear in mind:
- A style is not copyrightable. You can trademark a style, but you can’t copyright it.
- People have been paying artists to ape the style of other artists since, well, forever. The introduction of AI into the mix does nothing to change that.
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I don’t think banning them is the solution here. If there is a demand for it, let people have fun, but I think they need to be put in a different category and the author need to state explicitly that it is made with AI, so the people who don’t want to see those can filter it out.
Artists need not worry for now, many of them are using watermarked stock image samples for training 
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That is too funny.
I just had the same discussion on the ethical standing of these types of software with my wife who is a traditional water color artist. We will have to see where it all ends up at.
Good luck to the team working on the AI program.
In a way, this, like all AI-based tech, will probably be a lot like what we have been seeing with self-driving cars.
In that, getting a plausible result is the easy part. Getting a result that factors in all of the other variables as well as the small things (that need to be in place to get something good) is an order of magnitude more difficult and will likely require many years of research yet. As you can see for instance, not only was the watermark recreated, but the text it has is not readable.
Another case in point, the only reason why AI-based denoising can create excellent results at all is because it is guided by information generated through traditional means (color and normal passes).
No … “AI” did not make all these images, nor come up with these ideas. Artists, and Programmers, and Artistic Programmers came up with them. Then, they used “AI” algorithms as a useful and powerful tool, so that the computer could be made to do more of the dirty-work for them. (Which is precisely a computer’s job.)
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“Misguided charted this nautical numbskull hull, detailed, brighten shadow, by Don Van Vliet”
One of my favorites by LuckyDee.
“Animators argue over penny under a bridge , 18th century , gouache painting”
That wouldn’t work, because if hundreds of millions of artists were able to protect their “style” it would be most likely impossible for anyone to create an artwork without it violating somebody elses copyrighted style by accident. In my opinion such a thing would be akin to copyrighting a chord progression in music or copyrighting an entire musical style just because a single musician copyrighted “funk music” for example.
The training data would have contained millions of copyrighted images. So yes absolutely. And what its doing there with the watermark looking thing is outputting a ballpark representation of many original images from its training data that just so happened to contain a watermark, probably shutterstock or something similar.