Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style against his wishes using a LoRA model. While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski’s art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5. The debate highlights the blurry line between innovation and infringement in the emerging field of AI art.
They can’t, and “intact” watermarks don’t show up. You’re the one who is misunderstanding how this works.
When a pattern is present very frequently the AI can learn to imitate it, resulting in things that closely resemble known watermarks. This is called “overfitting” and is avoided as much as possible. But even in those cases, if you examine the watermark-like pattern closely you’ll see that it’s usually quite badly distorted and only vaguely watermark-like.
Yes, because “imitate” and “copy” are different things when stealing from someone.
I do understand how it works, the “overfitting” was just laying clear what it does. It copies but tries to sample things in a way that won’t look like clear copies. It had no creativity, it is trying to find new ways of making copies.
If any of this was ethical, the companies doing it would have just asked for permission. That they didn’t says a everything you need to know.
I don’t usually have these kinds discussions anymore, I got tired of conversations like this back in 2016, when it became clear that people will go to the ends of the earth to justify unethical behavior as long as the people being hurt by it are people they don’t care about.
And we’re back to you calling it “stealing”, which it certainly is not. Even if it was copyright violation, copyright violation is not stealing.
You should try to get the basic terminology right, at the very least.
Just because you’ve redefined theft in a way that makes you feel okay about it doesn’t change what they did.
They took someone else’s work product, fed it into their machine then used that to make money.
They stole someone’s labor.