A human artist is, however, not a machine built and owned by a corporation, who will draw anything you tell them to.
A human artist has been trained in the ethics and laws of their craft along with the skills required to make images.
A human artist, asked to clone Starry Night, will ask you what you are doing, and knows where the lines are between "a tribute", "plagiarism", and "outright forgery".
A human artist, asked to do work in the style of another artist, will have a certain respect for the other artist's ownership of their style. This is not a thing that is at all protected by intellectual property law but it is still a thing artists are trained to respect. There are exceptions - drawing just like your boss may be your job, drawing just like a living artist for a couple pieces is a useful way to break down their style and take a few parts of it to influence later work without going over the "style swipe" line, building your own work on the obvious foundation of an influential, dead artist's style is fine - but there are lines professionals will be very reluctant to cross.
For a relatively recent example of what happens if you break these unwritten laws, check out what happened when the American cartoonist Steve Giffen started doing a wholesale style swipe from the Argentinean cartoonist Muñoz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
Neural networks know none of these unwritten rules. Neither do the people who are training them. Feed it a bunch of work generated by a living artist and start making a profit off of that? Sure, no problem! Bonus points if your response to them getting pissed off about this is to call them a luddite who is resisting the inevitable, and should throw away a lifetime of passionate training and go get a new job.
Well we’re in luck! The human artist is the person who is coming up with the prompt and then deciding what to do with the resulting image based on their own ethics. Stable Diffusion is just a tool for artists, not a “computer artist”.
Funny enough, this notion in terms of liability pairs very well with our legal system!
Even funnier, this notion in terms of authorship pairs very well with modern and contemporary art theory!
And here’s some very relevant precedent in both a legal and artistic sense:
Richard Prince is a very rich jerkass who can afford to hire some very high-priced lawyers to argue that his work is right over the line of "sufficiently transformative" in the eyes of the law. He's well over the lines of the unwritten rules of professional artists that I'm talking about.
The corporations engaging in massive abuse of the grey areas of fair use to build these systems are, functionally, also very rich jerkasses who can afford to hire some very high-priced lawyers to make similar arguments.
The human giving the prompt is shopping, not creating. The only way a computer can compute an image is by copying the vectors of imagery made by humans and then labeled and plotted and fed to said computer. Humans paint, draw, do physical things to make art. Computers are fed plotline statistics that they can pull up to fullfil a shopping list. Humans generated the imagery, uploaded the imagery,labeled the imagery and wrote the code to manipulate the imagery. Now, I'm not a big proponent of copyright. If someone can paint just like Rembrant, then I applaud their skill. At the end of the day, 'AI' is not 'learning' ,it is replicating input data by filtering a large amount of data sets with appropriate labels ( affixed by humans) and using a statistical algorithm to approximate somebody's shopping list of art they wish they had the skill to create. I'll take the Rembrant forgery, thank you.
Sure, I guess we can make the argument that someone who makes music out of samples or loops is just shopping as well. How about programming a drum machine? Aren't they just shopping for snare hits and quantization patterns?
So fine, whatever, call it all shopping! Dr. Dre is just out there shopping. I don't think he minds if that's what you call it.
So here's the thing. Using a drum machine and sampling old funk songs from the 70s doesn't mean you end up with The Chronic. It's more likely that the average person ends up making something pretty mediocre. Hey, it would sure have sounded really impressive if it had been released in the 1940s, but with mass produced commercial music hardware a funky drum beat is just not that special any more.
The same applies to any kind of commodity tool. It's what the artist does with the tool in the context of a world filled with an audience and other artists.
Ok, time for my opinions! I think that DeviantArt style digital paintings are total trash. I don't care about the skill in rendering cliches hanging off of comically large breasts. Oh, it took a long time? I'm sure it would take a long time to dig a 10 foot deep hole in your backyard and then fill it up again as well, something I'd much rather experience as art than some video game hallucination... but you know what? Just because I don't like it doesn't mean that it isn't art, that it wasn't made by a "real" artist or that there isn't some audience that appreciates it (even if they're only two more YouTube videos away from becoming a full blown incels and driving a trucks through high school track meets).
Richard Prince speaks to me about authorship and what it means to make art in a world completely saturated with commercial imagery and part of that meaning comes from the fact that he had one of his assistants draw on top of someone else's photograph.
Listen, I have my issues with the world of fine art, the market manipulation, collusion, and the general fact that the art is primarily being made for the people who could afford it and not like, my neighbor. Regardless, I've found a lot of intellectual stimulation and new ways of appreciating aesthetic beauty through the works of 20th century modernists and postmodernists. Deeper meaning as opposed to a big shiny sword and a short skirt.
My favorite form of visual art is the watercolor, done quickly and out in public, capturing what the artist sees in the moment. It's the visual equivalent of the folk song played on an acoustic guitar. I like when the artist is a friend. I don't care if it isn't Rembrandt. I care that it moves me.
Stable Diffusion can easily render cliches hanging off of comically large breasts. In fact, I think that's what 90% of SD GPU cycles are currently working on. So to me Stable Diffusion is good at the part of the art that I'm not really that interested in. I'm interested in why the person chose the image that they did given these tools. That's where the meaning comes from! I mean, these tools run the same problems as drum machines and samplers... pretty soon their mediocre outputs become trite and unexpressive. I would imagine that artists that use SD do so in ways and using techniques that are not just the click of a button.
A human artist has been trained in the ethics and laws of their craft along with the skills required to make images.
A human artist, asked to clone Starry Night, will ask you what you are doing, and knows where the lines are between "a tribute", "plagiarism", and "outright forgery".
A human artist, asked to do work in the style of another artist, will have a certain respect for the other artist's ownership of their style. This is not a thing that is at all protected by intellectual property law but it is still a thing artists are trained to respect. There are exceptions - drawing just like your boss may be your job, drawing just like a living artist for a couple pieces is a useful way to break down their style and take a few parts of it to influence later work without going over the "style swipe" line, building your own work on the obvious foundation of an influential, dead artist's style is fine - but there are lines professionals will be very reluctant to cross.
For a relatively recent example of what happens if you break these unwritten laws, check out what happened when the American cartoonist Steve Giffen started doing a wholesale style swipe from the Argentinean cartoonist Muñoz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
Neural networks know none of these unwritten rules. Neither do the people who are training them. Feed it a bunch of work generated by a living artist and start making a profit off of that? Sure, no problem! Bonus points if your response to them getting pissed off about this is to call them a luddite who is resisting the inevitable, and should throw away a lifetime of passionate training and go get a new job.