Fans of Studio Ghibli, the famed Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and other beloved movies, were delighted this week when a new version of ChatGPT let them transform popular internet memes or personal photos into the distinct style of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.
Stable Diffusion was trained on the LIAON-5B image dataset, which as the name implies has around 5 billion images in it. The resulting model was around 3 gigabytes. If this is indeed a “compression” algorithm then it’s the most magical and physics-defying ever, as it manages to compress images to less than one byte each.
That is a completely separate issue. You can sue them for copyright violation regarding the actual acts of copyright violation. If an artist steals a bunch of art books to study then sue him for stealing the art books, but you can’t extend that to say that anything he drew based on that learning is also a copyright violation or that the knowledge inside his head is a copyright violation.
There’s a difference between lossy and lossless. You can compress anything down to a single bit if you so wish, just don’t expect to get everything back. That’s how lossy compression works.
It’s perfectly legal to compress something to a single bit and publish it.
Hell, if I take and publish the average color of any copyrighted image that is at least 24 bits. That’s lossy compression yet legal.