I was thinking of a post extending the legal thoughts from last time to talk about this widespread claim (based on the Thaler decisions that I mentioned briefly there) that “Artwork made with an AI can’t be copyrighted”. It’s all over the clickbait-website press, and it’s wrong. The rulings in question said that an AI can’t be the creator-in-fact of a work (in the U.S.) so someone can’t get copyright to a work based on being the “employer” of the creator-in-fact AI. But they say nothing about the obvious alternative that a human can be the creator (simpliciter) of a work make with an AI, just as a human can be the creator of a work made with Photoshop, or a paintbrush.
Heh heh, I guess I’ve already written a bit about that here now, haven’t I? But there are various arguments and counterarguments that one could talk about that I’m not going to.
Then there’s the fact that I’ve been generating So Many Images in Midjourney, which for a while there had pretty much entirely drawn me away from NightCafe. As well as those So Many Images, I’ve started to put a bunch of them together in the GIMP in the form of a sort of amateur manga or graphic story that attempts to have an actual plot and stuff; here’s a pdf of the story (the first 10 pages of it, which is all that currently exists), at considerably reduced resolution so it isn’t like over 30MB. Feedback welcome. :)
But then! By which I mean just today I think! NightCafe has become very interesting again, due to adding the Stable Diffusion engine. Which I have been using extensively, and have noted that:
- It is kind of boring compared to the other engines I’ve used, in that it seems to usually take the simplest and most quotidian interpretation of a prompt, and create the most unremarkable (and, admittedly, sometimes impressively realistic!) image possible from it.
- The right set of adjectives and so on can get more interesting results from it sometimes. The prompt prefix for Yeni Cavan, for instance, produces recognizably Yeni Cavan images, but somewhat less smoky and mysterious ones than Midjourney or the NightCafe Artistic engine do.
- It has some kind of risible post-censorship blurring algorithm, and if a picture looks too naughty to that algorithm, it comes out with a very heavy blur applied. I have (accidentally) gotten one NFSW image that its filter didn’t detect, and on the other hand just including “in the style of Gauguin” in a prompt seems to pretty reliably produce just a blur. (“Well, yeah, he’s in the training set, but his stuff is really too naughty to output.”) I mean, /facepalm and all.
- Update: when I reported a couple of very obvious porn-filter false positives, NightCafe support replied that the filter should be gone / optional in “a few days”. Very gratifyin’!
- I wish NightCafe had an “effectively free, but might be slow” generation mode like Midjourney does. I’m running out of NightCafe credits after playing with Stable Diffusion for hours, and I’m near out of credits, and given the overall experience I will probably just to back to Midjourney now and make more images for the comic. :)
So that’s those things! But mostly it’s been lots of cool pictures. We will close with a recent one from Midjourney:
and something that Stable Diffusion did (rather interestingly) with the same prompt:
Stay surreal! :D
ceoln 