skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And my reaction was, is it really so yanky? Maybe it's not yanky enough for me to notice. Except for the handling of long lines, that's really slow. I wish it is just yanky.

However I don't understand one thing. Did the author switch to something else or he's still using emacs after this long and convoluted rant?
There’s a pretty easy answer here actually: if you want to include data in a set of training data for an AI system, you need to have (formal, statutory) permission to use it.
The discussion here has been of a somewhat casual nature:

- expressing personal feelings about the lawsuit

- honestly sharing one's lack of understanding of the legal or technical issues involved

- making brief, unsubstantiated claims about the lawsuit's merits

- discussing HN response to this story (as this comment)

I was really looking forward to educating myself on this topic from the HN comments, but it appears I am out of luck. Why is this (currently #1) story not attracting posts from the many HN users who could offer detailed and insightful analysis? Is it considered a toxic or an overly-politicized topic that most people avoid? Or there's some other explanation I'm not seeing?
The data shows that it’s a recent and fast change from being the worst to being the best.

It will probably take a few years for Safari to lose the “new IE” reputation it got.
> What else would they be trained on?

why does it matter how it was trained? The question is, does the generative AI _output_ copyrighted images?

Training is not a right that the copyright holder owns exclusively. Reproducing the works _is_, but if the AI only reproduces a style, but not a copy, then it isn't breaking any copyright.
An analogy:

root@machine$ echo "jews control the world"
jews control the world

Oh no! A racism! Ban Linux!
A weird UI design bug is, If you type different languages on the phone you have different keyboard layouts for each language. The key to switch language has swapped location with the shift key for the iPad OS compared to iOS. So I am always hitting the wrong key when switching device. Such a weird thing for them not to fix.
This is how the first discussion board on the web was written to work. Search for Matt's script WWWBoard. Perl script added the posted comment with date into the HTML file's insertion point.

At that time in the 90s this was heavily deployed everywhere. This was before PHP-BB and other database based boards got popular.
maybe a fair price to pay for free repo hosting.
wouldn't want my private repos being used for training though
If you train yourself to see a { within an f-string to mean that you should enter a new parsing context stacked upon the previous one, then it's entirely clear.
“Hav­ing copied the five bil­lion images—with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists—Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion relies on a math­e­mat­i­cal process called dif­fu­sion to store com­pressed copies of these train­ing images, which in turn are recom­bined to derive other images.”

This seems like it’s not an accurate description of what diffusion is doing. A diffusion model is not the same as compression. They’re implying that Stable Diffusion is taking the entire dataset and making it smaller then storing it. Instead, it’s just learning patterns about the art and replicating those patterns.

The “compression” they’re referring to is the latent space representation which is how Stable Diffusion avoids having to manipulate large images during computation. I mean you could call it a form of compression, but the actual training images aren’t stored using that latent space in the final model afaik. So it's not compressing every single image and storing it in the model.

This page says there were 5 billion images in the stable diffusion training dataset (albeit that may not be true as I see online it’s closer to the 2 billion mark). A Stable Diffusion model is about 5 gb. 5 gb / 5 billion is 1 byte per image. That’s impossible to fit an image in 1 byte. Obviously the claim about it storing compressed copies of the training data is not true. The size of the file comes from the weights in it, not because it’s storing “compressed copies”. In general, it seems this lawsuit is misrepresenting how Stable Diffusion works on a technical level.
There is a somewhat popular lawsuit right now which argues exactly that (and is reported to go into the next instance): https://petapixel.com/2022/12/08/photographer-loses-plagaris...
I hope the lawyers ask those companies, what process they are using to avoid to have images from Disney movies in the training set.
>spent roughly $350 to acquire every new Apple Card customer
It’s also aggravating if you commonly type across two languages. I sometimes forget to change to thé fr_CA keyboard and type a French word with thé en_CA keyboard and vice versa. But now that word is permanently locked in its respective dictionary forever. This is thé reason typing THE takes about 3 tries now. (As you can see…)

The only option is to nuke all thé auto correct dictionaries in settings. Eye-twitchingly aggravating.
(#inlcude my typical rant about why in the US the consumers are not better protected against such ads, this is completely illegal in Europe)

I used to have an EdgeRouter which was a huge improvement to the ISP-provided crappy box but ultimately the configuration was so complicated and inconsistent that I switched to a small fanless debian box. I put Pi-Hole there, which also covered DHCP and DNS services (synchronized together).

It has been a blast and I have more confidence that I will understand what is happening (vs the ER magic)
Well at least going to court over this should clarify the legal rights of the artists and the position of AI.

I can't see the artists winning.
Just because I look at an image does not mean that I can recreate it. storing it in the training data means the AI can recreate it.

There's a world of difference that you are just writing off.
why should the right to be used as training material be exclusive to the owner of the copyright? That's more rights than initially granted by the laws of copyright.

A student can read/watch many works. Under this ruling, copyrighted works can no longer be learnt from by a student.
if it's sufficiently lossy, yeah. don't know where you draw the line tho. maybe similar to fair use video clips.
I imagine we'll eventually just have to start removing antennas.
> more simply it is monism versus dualism

Monism is doing a awful lot of work in this hand wave. You'd only have to sit in on a college-level Philosophy of Mind course for a single semester to understand how silly your comment is.

The fact of the matter is there is no academic consensus on whether Searle's Chinese Room argument is wrong. But the number of arguments against it is always growing while Searle's responses to these arguments are getting less frequent.
why should a new right (the right to study the works) be granted without some compensation given back to society?

The existing set of rights granted under copyright does not include this.
If they're so confident that copyright wouldn't apply to them, they should train their models using Disney content and set a proper precedent instead of using content from smaller artists.
Happy for them, even though containers were already extant, docker were the ones who came up with the container image format and made it all easy peasy.
> On January 4, 2023, at 6:30 PM PST / January 5, 2023, at 02:30 UTC, we sent disclosure emails, posted a...

Did they? I got an email this morning that pointed to _this_ blog post, but I never received any initial "rotate yo keys" communication from them, on any email address.

If I hadn't read HN, and none of my company had, and our use of CI was running smoothly (they eventually put up a banner in the UI), I would literally have never known until this email.
“Did they have a right to use publicly posted images” is up for the courts to decide
Until all this frenzied generative furore I believed the starving artist meme-trope and had no idea there were so many making a good living (while still alive) by selling art to the general public. Thought the industry such as it is was more of a money laundering angle for very rich tax evaders and a fortunate, well connected few artists with luck, clout and gallery relationships. And most of what seems fashionable in the trad/modern art world bears very little stylistic or textural resemblance to the sorts of AI image synthesis work that people seem to make popular.
Infinity.
One day you're gone. Then what? I've seen man-years spent by multiple developers trying to understand the application of a lone-wolf developer, with the final decision to opt for a complete rewrite.

Companies optimize for planability and mediocrity, even if it comes at a small premium and hurts those of us who are living and breathing code..
I am probably an outlier to the general public, but I am an older gamer interesting in playing mostly old games.

And like you on both Steam and GOG I have a backlog of hundreds of games. Games I mostly acquired through Humble Bundle and GOG sales or giveaways. Nowadays I vastly prefer buying on GOG over Steam, due to feeling I am more in ownership of the games due to no DRM. I can download the games and make back-ups in case GOG ever goes down.

I will probably never be able to play all the games I bought, but even then devs and publishers should have gotten some money from me. Would not happen if it weren’t for Humble Bundle & GOG sales, cause I like to buy cheap.
Any sample photos we can try to reproduce these errors.
With both French and English enabled, it sometimes randomly "corrects" the English word "the" to the French word "thé" (meaning "tea" in English), despite every other word so far being English and despite the fact it would make no grammatical sense.

Most infuriating of all though is when it lets you think you've got through the gauntlet of perfectly valid words being replaced with nonsensical ones, only for it to swap out the last _two words_ you've typed!
That doesn't really work, both of the other systems date back literal decades. F-Strings were implemented in 2015 as a complete new thing, inspired by other languages.

In order to implement F-Stings, and due to limitations in the CPython language parser, F-Strings used to have a separate parser. Because of this there were restriction on what Python expressions could be embedded in an F-String. In 2020 CPython replaced is parser with a much more capable one. Now they are moving the F-String parsing to be part of the CPython parser proper, this is allowing them to lift many of the restrictions within F-Strings.

"Formalising F-Strings" isn't a particularly good title, "Lifting the restrictions in F-String would be better".
It's not hypocrisy, it's diversity.

HN is not a person, it's a forum with lots of people with different opinions. Depending on dozens of factors (time of day, title of the article, who gets in first) different opinions will dominate.

I've seen threads on Copilot that overwhelmingly come down in favor of Microsoft and threads on Stable Diffusion that come down hard against it. Also, even in a thread that has a lot of one opinion, there are always those who express the opposite view.
Hello, interesting model. I’m an indie gamedev and I could be interested for my games.
You can contact me at dam [at] dmayance [dot] com.
I've seen some overtrained models. they keep showing the same face over and over again. surely from the training data. i don't think you can argue against stable diffusion as a whole, but maybe specific models that haven't muddled the data enough to become something unique
My initial impression as I read the story led me to the same confusion.
However, the article soon enough shows the title is correct:

> we’ve filed a class-action law­suit against Sta­bil­ity AI, DeviantArt, and Mid­jour­ney for their use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool that remixes the copy­righted works of mil­lions of artists whose work was used as train­ing data.
Here is the trick with agile. Everyone involved needs to be working that way for it to have any chance of success.

Even the client needs to be agile. Otherwise it is just waterfall with extra-steps
> as a bit of anecdata I made a huge meetup push for two years (I went to meetups 2-3x a week, every week) in order to meet new people and date

Meetups work really well if you're going into one that has a a good ratio of the sex you are interested in.

If you're a single guy, going to Meetups with a Maker theme, or a Star Wars theme, is not going to improve your odds of finding someone - for each girl there, there's 5 guys interested in her.

A good Meetup for single guys to go to is one that is almost completely populated by women (cooking classes used to have a very high ratio of women to men).

Even if these women are attached, they have friends, and IME, attached women are always ready to set up their single friends.
>artists exist for their output for society

People will still be creative and make art even without society consuming their output. But society can create incentives to reward people for making art.
It's not a theory, it's experience - and not just mine.

The situations in the US, especially historically, are very different to those in other parts of the world, especially now.

Yet, even in the US, I see even illegal immigrants right now are being given all manner of bonuses and incentives - free mobile phones, for a recently well-publicised example.

In the UK and Europe immigrants are given free housing and other often monetary benefits not available to ordinary citizens. This, plus their willingness to live in, for example, roach-infested council housing for free or cheap (in the UK), gives them a huge edge in the job market that slowly decimates an area.

There have been very hard times for businesses recently, what do you think they will do when a person turns up offering to do the same job for much less?

Not in my area of work, but in terms of more fundamental employment. All the local faces you see begin changing to those of immigrants, and the entire dynamic and general safety of the small village you once called home shift into something completely alien. Generally, crime goes up, higher-end businesses and talent leave, and the place becomes a ghetto compared to what it was before.

It's not about immigration per se, it's just about the amount of it.

It's accelerated all over Europe recently. It's even headlining the news regularly here as "the migration crisis".

It's not a controversial or unusual thing to think that migrants are causing problems. Historically they're one constant thing that has in Europe.

It's also not at all theoretical - outside perhaps of the safe bubble of comfort those in less volatile situations end up thinking is a universal reality manufacturable by their ideologies.

It's a reality sure, but it's not universal. And not all ideologies work everywhere and when applied to all people.
I've also had a similar one, typing in French. In my case, it's "c'est chiant" (that's shitty / tough / etc). I usually use it at the beginning of a phrase, so the first C is capitalized.

Now the autocorrect learned that, and offers to fix it if I misspell.

But the funny thing is that it doesn't realize that the capital C is not part of the phrase, even though "c'est", by itself, exists and is often used (meaning "it is"). It typically appears because the auto-capitalize is on, I don't voluntarily type uppercase.

So now, if I want to type that in the middle of a sentence, it will helpfully capitalize the C...
> storing it in the training data means the AI can recreate it.

No it doesn't, it means that abstract facts related to this image might be stored.
Storing copies of training data is pretty much the definition of overfitting, right?

The data must be encoded with various levels of feature abstraction for this stuff to work at all. Much like humans learning art, if devoid of the input that makes human art interesting (life experience).

I think a more promising avenue for litigating AI plagiarism is to identify that the model understands some narrow slice of the solution space that contains copyrighted works, but is much weaker when you try to deviate from it. Then you could argue that the model has probably used that distinct work rather than learned a style or a category.
Once Microsoft started putting ads in the Windows start menu all bets were off.
Sansa Clip Zip/Plus + rockbox were trully exceptional for their time. I'm not sure if we'll ever see an open device of such all around quality seeing how things are going these days.
Some companies will just request a ready-made agile process from a certified agile overlord. The process will hinder productivity since only reporting parts and rituals are implemented, and all improvements suggested by individuals participating are dismissed since they are “against the agile process”.

I did leave and the company did crumble shortly afterwards. The main reason wasn’t related to processes, though. It was already too late when the faux-agile was introduced.
Is the .format sublanguage notably stronger than the %-one? I know in c, for example, the printf sublanguage can be used to do turing-complete things, but I didn't think that was possible in either in python.
I went from paying $350/oz to $35/oz after Oregon legalized it. I expect prices have not quite hit bottom, so it’s no surprise that traditional growers cannot make the numbers work anymore. This will be yet another crop where consolidation leads to Big Ag operations dominating the market.
I'm saying it doesn't matter if Tim Cook has a cause, because he's probably not very good at helping that cause.

Which is a direct response to your original point which was an absurd hypothetical about how Tim Cook should be allowed to make as much money as he wants, cause what if he maybe ends up doing some good for society. I agree with the original point that people don't really need much more than a living wage...

I'm saying that it's absurd to pray for Billionaires to do good for the rest of us, when we could just tax them, and make them do it. That's where the gov't comes in.
Of course, this doesn't count the time wasted troubleshooting why your $9/mo piece of garbage doesn't work, or finding out that it never even tried to deliver on its promises. Or the time spent replacing it when you decide to 3x the price out of the blue. Or maybe you just decided to sunset it out of the blue because you got bored?
Nope. Android has this API where an app that is confirming your phone number with an SMS can automatically read it (without having access to the rest of your text messages) , but not all apps implement it (probably the majority though).

This is the type of feature Apple are capable of doing because they own the full stack - phone OS, computer OS, browser. Nobody else has that (well Google do with ChromeOS but i doubt such UX is a part of their focus there).

Of course the problem is that if you want to use a different browser, or Tim Cook forbid, a different mobile OS, you lose of all that because there's no interoperability. A form of vendor lock-in if you will.
This is very much a 'color of your bits' topic, but I'm not sure why the internal representation matters. It's pretty trivial to recreate famous works like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night or Monet's Water Lily Pond. Obviously some representation of the originals exist inside the model+prompt. Why wouldn't that apply to other images in the training sets?
You mean that a cell has a diameter of 24 pixels. “Width” would be measured along one of the (angled) sides of the cell.
I’m not 100% sure what you mean and am wondering wether setting the keyboard layouts to QWERTY in all languages is a solution for you. That’s the way I handle three different languages on iOS but of course long presses are required then to get at characters with diacritics.
Yes, because real artists are also allowed to learn from other paintings. No problem there, unless they recreate the exact work of others.
I just took the first few sentences from Wiki that describe Mona Lisa [1], pasted it on HuggingFace [2] and got pretty similar results [3].

[1] The Mona Lisa (/ˌmoʊnə ˈliːsə/ MOH-nə LEE-sə; Italian: Gioconda [dʒoˈkonda] or Monna Lisa [ˈmɔnna ˈliːza]; French: Joconde [ʒɔkɔ̃d]) is a half-length portrait painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance,[4][5] it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world".

[2] https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion

[3] https://imgur.com/a/L2LDOS4

EDIT: With the Starry Night it worked even better. But it failed to reproduce the Bathing of a Red Horse (that one doesn't have a page on English wiki, so I took the description from elsewhere).
> It is, in short, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool.

Interesting that they mention collages. IANAL but it was my impression that collages are derivative work if they incorporate many different pieces and only small parts of the original. Their compression argument seems more convincing.
ohhhhh, you're just a troll. You're literally making a point and the counterpoint to your own statement.

He's both the right person for the job because he's a billionaire, and the wrong person for the job because he's a billionaire in tech.
Slightly off topic but my pet peeve is most people who call themselves "Software Engineers" are not engineers. They have not studied any engineering at all

There was a fashion for a while to call people "Software Architects". I do not know what happened to it but I fantasise that some architect society got busy and put a stop to it.

I am a computer programmer. I do things that "software engineers" do, but I do not lie about my qualifications, which are all in science and commerce.

Computer programming is a noble craft, we do not have to put on airs.
RM Williams boots. Look good with jeans or suit. Repairable, and built to very high standards. Only need one pair. Highly recommend.
The training data set is indeed mandatory but that doesn't make the resulting model a derivative in itself. In fact the training is specifically made to remove derivatives.
How did the original company "Frank" do what it did? Do they know people at FAFSA?
I find this lawsuit very important both for AI community as well as for artists since it can let everyone know where the boundaries are.

All mentioned models were trained on a large batch of works taken from Internet - no one is going to argue that.

All of those models cannot exists without content created by people.

The models allow to mimic the styles of particular artists making it a perfect tool to kill creativity and artists diversity in the long term.
LazyPPL – Haskell library for probabilistic programming
Laziness enables doing computing/statistics with stochastic processes with infinitely many points.

(e.g. Gaussian process regression)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3571239
Yeah what's considered a copy or not is a grey area. Here's a good example of that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34378300

But artists have been making "in the style of" works for probably millennia. Fan art is a common example.

I suppose the advent of software that makes it easy to make "in the style of" works will force us to get much more clear on what is and isn't a copy. How exciting.

However, I don't see how the software tool is directly at fault, just the person using it.
So what % does?
Only the training set should suffice.