AI Image Generators Can Exactly Replicate Copyrighted Photos
As the debate swirls around image synthesizer models and lawsuits are brought against Stable Diffusion, researchers from Google have shown that diffusion models can memorize specific images and then recreate them.
Supporters of artificial intelligence (AI) believe that machines work just like human photographers, inspired by the works of other artists the machine learning models use training data sets as inspiration to generate pictures form.
But in their paper, Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models, the researchers recreate faithful versions of original, copyrighted photos using both Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen.
“We study if diffusion models ‘memorize’ training examples, which we define as generating a near-identical copy of any image. We propose to extract memorized images by generating many times with the same prompt and flagging cases where many of the generations are the same.” writes Eric Wallace, a Ph.D. student from Berkeley AI research who worked on the paper.
“Applying our method to Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen, we extract hundreds of images, and do so with high precision. Many of these images are copyright or licensed, and some are photos of individuals.”
