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.
Copies that were freely shared for the purpose of letting anyone look at them.
Do you think it’s copyright infringement to go to a website?
Typically, ephemeral copies that aren’t kept for a substantial period of time aren’t considered copyright violations, otherwise viewing a website would be a copyright violation for every image appearing on that site.
Downloading a freely published image to run an algorithm on it and then deleting it without distribution is basically the canonical example of ephemeral.
Its what you do with the copies thats the problem, not the physical act of copying.