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.
No, you used it to inform your style.
You didn’t drop his art on to a screenprinter, smash someone else’s art on top, then try to sell t-shirts.
Trying to compare any of this to how one, individual, human learns is such a wildly inaccurate way to justify stealing a someone’s else’s work product.
If it works correctly it’s not a screenprinter, it’s something unique as the output.
The fact that folks can identify the source of various parts of the output, and that intact watermarks have shown up, shows that it doesn’t work like you think it does.
Does that mean the AI is not smart enough to remove watermarks, or that it’s so smart it can reproduce them?
They can’t, and “intact” watermarks don’t show up. You’re the one who is misunderstanding how this works.
When a pattern is present very frequently the AI can learn to imitate it, resulting in things that closely resemble known watermarks. This is called “overfitting” and is avoided as much as possible. But even in those cases, if you examine the watermark-like pattern closely you’ll see that it’s usually quite badly distorted and only vaguely watermark-like.
