A really fun side effect of stuff like this is when you generate something that looks like a pencil sketch or something, you’ll often get partial pencils in the middle or upper corner of the image because they are quite often photod with pencils on them to indicate the medium.
So even something that simple is sort of poisoning the models. And if they all have that obnoxious signature or QR code, the generators are going to start including those and that’s just gold.
I find this wholly unsurprising.
All ai projects should be forced to show the entirety of their training data. I don’t give a flying fuck if they want to call it proprietary, they don’t own most of the data in the first place. Even if they bought it, it doesn’t belong to them, just like we don’t own digital movies we buy.
And if even a single piece of that training data doesn’t have proper licensing for that specific use for that specific model, or they are ever found to have withheld any of the data, the model as a whole should be immediately scrapped, along with everything even tangentially derived from it, and the company should be fined fully double whatever amount of money that model generated or one years revenue for the company as a whole, whichever is more (no I don’t care if this leads to bankruptcy, should have thought about that before you stole data), and like use if for affordable housing programs or public schools or something, whatever.
They can try again with clean data, also subject to review. One time. Second time they do the same shady shit, permanently banned from the entire sector.
But regardless, we need to stop rewarding them for this behavior. And we need the consequences to actually hurt or we can expect it to get worse, not better.