According to a recent tweet shared by AI enthusiast Nick St. Pierre, the alleged theft occurred last Saturday. It is claimed that employees from Stability AI infiltrated Midjourney’s database and stole all prompt and image pairs, an action that also caused a 24-hour outage. In response, MJ reportedly banned all Stable Diffusion developers from its services, a move supposedly disclosed internally within the company on Wednesday.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
AI generated images are not, and should not be considered copyright able, and they don’t own the right to the image they generated, as I understand it.
Otherwise, Midjourney are certainly very welcome to start paying royalties to certain popular celebrities whose images they are profiting off of. You can’t have it both ways.
Iirc the only precedent we have is that the AI algorithm itself cannot hold the copyright to what it creates, as one artist wanted it to be. Basically the same thing as the famous monkey selfie.
If the copyright of a generated image can be claimed by the creator of the algorithm, or the user who wrote the prompt, and how much human effort is required for it is still unknown.
The image output themselves might not be protected by copyrights. However, that does not mean that there are no rights over the code (or prompts) used to generate those images or over the database compilations themselves (https://www.copyright.gov/reports/appendix.pdf).
The code is obviously protected by copyright. Not sure why anyone would question that?
If the prompt is protected, then the output image will be too (and by the same owner). I suspect it depends on how detailed the prompt is (just like a tweet might not be eligible for copyright, unless it’s a particularly creative joke/haiku/etc).
I agree with you insofar as no image should be copyrightable.
Lol, after both steal every image on the internet.
No wonder the images look similar.
Have you seen those images of a bunch of people overlaid on each other so that shared features become clear and outliers become fuzzy. The result is an average human but it doesn’t actually look like anyone in particular because it’s a human with no striving feature or bold choice. Thats why AI look the same, they all have the same dull parts of real art but none of the interesting bits.
Thats such a good point i hadnt thought about before. Training data helps the ai know what is most common, so its products tend to be tropy, predictable and a bit bland (which is great for some things). They are often lacking that ooomph that makes great works truely unique and fascinating.
Only if your prompts are boring and dull. The more details I add to my prompts, the more unique of a look I can achieve.
Yes, some people don’t notice the creative void in AI because they are themselves hollow humunculuses. They crawl at the edge of the human fire of creation and gather stray embers that hit the dead sands they occupy. Once in a while they find an ember with some faded glow left and they hold it up and say “The more details I add to my prompts, the more unique of a look I can achieve.”
I pity them because they will never understand true warmth.
Agree and disagree. You actually can get proper art out of those systems, also novelty, but it usually involves leading the AI onto a gradient you can’t reach with mere text prompts. It’s kinda like with riding horses: As a beginner, the horse will judge you an idiot and follow the horse in front of it and not your commands. You have to have both the intention and the skill to lead the horse onto an untrodden path.
Or, differently put: If a sketch can be art then so can a piece that the AI generated from it, one that was declared adequate by the sketch maker. “Here, machine”, said the human, “I have done my part, I have infused these bits with life, now you do the boring stuff and polish it”.
I don’t know what part of my answer full of contempt made you think that I am open to the standard tech bro babble?
I think you are disgusting people and charlatans desperately trying to pretend that you know what art is. Is that a clearer response for you. The first response was a bit too creative so I understand why you wouldn’t understand it.
I understood you just fine. What you don’t seem to understand is that art depends not on the medium but the creator. Where do you draw the line? If I throw a sculpt of mine not into SDXL but Cycles to render, does it suddenly become art? Or is it still not art because I’m not using a paintbrush, hell I’m not doing a single bit of shading? Do I need to work with actual clay? That clay also has an undo button (of sorts). Does only marble count? What’s your standard? Can you articulate it?
The vast bulk of AI pictures out there are bland and uninspired because it’s not artists who hit the generate button. It’s as simple as that. There’s also plenty of bland and uninspired oil on canvas out there – not as large a proportion because the craft is not easy to pick up while staying completely artistically illiterate, but it’s still there because artistic expression is not the only reason why people paint. And that’s fine. And so is randos typing “big tiddies” into a prompt box and hitting generate. Noone claims that’s art, but at the utmost that it looks nice.
You are in no way different from the people typing “big tiddies” into a prompt box and hitting generate. You only sound slightly more intelligent to the other cold husks but to us standing by the bonfire, you look exactly the same. I actually respect the titty people more because they know what they are and dont pretend to care.
Quite possibly the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever seen.
Don’t steal my stolen data.
No honor among thieves.
Begun, the AI Wars have
Infiltrating databases is too fancy a description for what was actually happening. Someone was just scraping the gallery website a little too fast, and that caused a mild DoS attack.
As happens to everyone scraping data. Sometimes you forget the delay and then you wonder why the interface is burning.
They care about Ownership of data?
Only when it’s theirs.
Lol its absurd to claim ownership of training data. You didnt create or license it to begin with!
Oh no…anyway.
Ironic
While also being completely predictable.
JFC this time line is stupid
I don’t think they care about the images being used, just the disruption of service. It’s pretty clear that this wasn’t a coordinated thing from Stability and was at most a lone individual acting in bad faith.
It’s pretty ironic though that the company that practices mass scraping has no rate limits to prevent outages due to mass scraping.
