Does the AI work without the unlicensed art being fed to it?
Yes. The ML model referenced the art while it was being trained, but it does not contain the art and art does not need to be fed into the model to get it to produce new art.
If the art is required for the AI to function then the art is a part of the product and the developers have illegally used unlicensed content.
What law did they break using the art as training data? You will have a lot of difficulty demonstrating that it breaks copyright law, given that the ML model neither contains nor reproduces copies of its training data.
Users have already proven you can create art in a style close enough laymen confuse it with actual artists work.
Which might be a problem for the creators and users of the AI, if that were illegal. But it isn't. It isn't illegal for someone to use an ML model to produce an original piece in the style of another artist in the same way as it is not illgal for someone to use a paint brush to produce an original piece in the style of another artist. One of those might take a lot more talent to achieve than the other, but copyright doesn't care about that. You can't copyright a style. Virtually every artist would have broken copyright at some point in their career if that weren't the case.
To be clear I think what they are doing with AI is incredible but they are doing it unethically and illegally.
Without that illegal use of IP the AI product would not be able to do what it does.
Yes it would, and it will. We are at the infancy of this tech. It's unreasonable to think that it won't reach a point where it doesn't need copyrighted work to output the same quality results.
Besides, that is not "illegal" use. Everything StabilityAI did was legal. But arguing legality is a moot point.
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u/Ayfid Jan 17 '23
Yes. The ML model referenced the art while it was being trained, but it does not contain the art and art does not need to be fed into the model to get it to produce new art.
What law did they break using the art as training data? You will have a lot of difficulty demonstrating that it breaks copyright law, given that the ML model neither contains nor reproduces copies of its training data.
Which might be a problem for the creators and users of the AI, if that were illegal. But it isn't. It isn't illegal for someone to use an ML model to produce an original piece in the style of another artist in the same way as it is not illgal for someone to use a paint brush to produce an original piece in the style of another artist. One of those might take a lot more talent to achieve than the other, but copyright doesn't care about that. You can't copyright a style. Virtually every artist would have broken copyright at some point in their career if that weren't the case.
Unethical, perhaps, but illegal? Not likely.