Month: November 2022

The ethics of AI Image is a complex question.  Even without AI generation clouding the issue, there have already been court cases fighting out the ownership of the digital representation of a real person.  

The terms of the Stable Diffusion licence, which is generally permissive, suggest that the user is wholly responsible for the output that they generate: “Licensor claims no rights in the Output You generate using the Model”.

So, there is no copyright claim for the images coming from stable diffusion, but can it be true that the users ‘own’  the copyright of generated images? Consider that when the model is trained on datasets that although freely available undoubtedly have copyright on them and are not owned by Stable Diffusion or by the user. 

Regardless of whether you believe that the source images still exist in an extractable form in the output, we can prove that the concept of individual people still exist in the memory of the AI.  To pull these memories, we need to pick subjects that will exist many thousands of times in the training set and will be tagged and so we need to pick famous people.  Here are a curated set of famous people.  I’ve picked the best and worst as a curated set from a hundred generated for each subject.

Remember, these images are not real: they are not intended to truly represent the beautiful people that are the subjects, but they do represent, in some way, the stable diffusion memory of those people based on public images available of them (and of everybody else!)  The curated images are face only, this is not about generating fake nudes of real people, other tools exist to fill that niche!  The prompt is simple ‘first name last name, photo’. As there are closeup faces, we also use GFPGAN to improve the eyes and some features.

So without further ado, here are the stable diffusion representation of some actors, actresses, sports personalities, singers, billionaires and other people popular in the media etc.

Jodie Foster, photo

This one was tricky, this was almost the only picture that didn’t look at least a little like the text prompt.

Marilyn Monroe, photo

For Marilyn, there is no disaster picture.  All were very similar across the whole set.  Most pictures were head-shot only.

Morgan Freeman, photo

Making up for no bad Marilyn shot, here are two bad Morgan pictures. The second is especially bad and the first just looks nothing like the real actor.  But, by far the majority of the Morgan pictures were passable.

Clint Eastwood, photo

The second is not too bad, but the majority of the Clint images were terrible.

Prince Charles, photo

None of the Charles images were at all flattering, and most are basically crude caricatures

Kylie Minogue, photo

Again, the generator has essentially produced caricatures of the wonderful smile that Kylie has.  Most of the images were torso shots and quite a few had only a dress with head and feet cropped out.  Most Odd!

Nicole Kidman, photo

The first is passable, the second one is not a good look at all!

Elon Musk, photo

Many of the Elon images had cars, rockets or technology in them, so the encoder is remembering a lot of associated details.  

Elvis Presly, photo

The Elvis images are almost universally awful.

Alexandra Daddario, photo

Britney Spears, photo

Barack Obama, photo

The image generator had a big problem with Barack.  My guess is that there are so many caricatures of him already, that these formed a large part of the input data set.

As a bonus thought for those that scrolled through those awful images: there is something else here too, something that you don’t get just from the couple of curated photos that I provide: the dataset also exhibits clothing bias, possibly based on age.  It’s hard to explain but females have a wider range of clothing than the men.  That’s fine, perhaps no surprise in itself, but there are surprising differences between ‘Jodie Foster, photo”, “Alexandra Daddario, photo” and “Britney Spears, photo”. Almost all the Jodie photos are headshot only, wearing a smart business suit or dress. Many of the Alexandra photos are wider shot, in more revealing clothing and almost all of the Britney pictures are wider shots in still more revealing clothing. Some of the Britney pictures don’t have a face in them at all.

King Charles is wearing a suit in 100% of the pictures, Barack in 97 percent & Elon in 85 percent. Elvis only appears in his performing gear, almost always with a shirt, often with a guitar, and 98% of the images are black and white.

Obviously, the AI is not exhibiting bias on its own account, but what it must be doing is making the representations based on the gross average of the pictures in the training set. This suggests that there are a lot of pictures tagged as Britney Spears without even her face in the picture!