Rethinking Artistic Copyright Infringements in the Era of Text-to-Image Generative Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces ArtSavant, a tool that classifies artistic styles to detect copying in generated images, revealing that only 20% of artists' styles are at risk of being copied by current models.

Contribution

The paper reformulates artistic copyright infringement detection as a classification problem and presents ArtSavant, an interpretable tool for style recognition and analysis.

Findings

Only 20% of artists' styles are at risk of copying.

ArtSavant effectively identifies and compares artistic styles.

The approach is practical and accessible for non-technical users.

Abstract

Recent text-to-image generative models such as Stable Diffusion are extremely adept at mimicking and generating copyrighted content, raising concerns amongst artists that their unique styles may be improperly copied. Understanding how generative models copy "artistic style" is more complex than duplicating a single image, as style is comprised by a set of elements (or signature) that frequently co-occurs across a body of work, where each individual work may vary significantly. In our paper, we first reformulate the problem of "artistic copyright infringement" to a classification problem over image sets, instead of probing image-wise similarities. We then introduce ArtSavant, a practical (i.e., efficient and easy to understand) tool to (i) determine the unique style of an artist by comparing it to a reference dataset of works from 372 artists curated from WikiArt, and (ii) recognize if the identified style reappears in generated images. We leverage two complementary methods to perform artistic style classification over image sets, includingTagMatch, which is a novel inherently interpretable and attributable method, making it more suitable for broader use by non-technical stake holders (artists, lawyers, judges, etc). Leveraging ArtSavant, we then perform a large-scale empirical study to provide quantitative insight on the prevalence of artistic style copying across 3 popular text-to-image generative models. Namely, amongst a dataset of prolific artists (including many famous ones), only 20% of them appear to have their styles be at a risk of copying via simple prompting of today's popular text-to-image generative models.