[olaulaja]

The thing is, most styles don't have names, only artists using them. If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles, including as combinations (so you can't even do "influenced by rutkowski" styles). This obviously sucks for the user, and I don't think artists should be able to deny control over style just because it makes imitation easy.

In this context, putting an artist back in the model is a pretty sensible form of disagreement/protest. I admit the "I'll take this down if they ask me to" is strange, but mostly because its too weak; the LoRA should just stay up, not demand another no from someone who already made their opinion clear.

[caconym_]

> most styles don't have names

If you want to educate yourself on how to refer to different art styles you can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_art_movements

> If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles

It's almost as if artists develop their own styles that are just as uniquely theirs as any one work produced by them in that style, if not more so! When people put "by Greg Rutkowski" in their AI art prompts, they are not asking for results in a style that exists independently of Greg Rutkowski despite his name somehow being the only way to identify it. They are, in fact, asking for results in the style of Greg Rutkowski in the sense that works by Greg Rutkowski were labeled as such and fed into the training process, programmatically creating a digest of works by (at least) Greg Rutkowski that we call a "model", and that model is as a result capable of mimicking the style of Greg Rutkowski specifically. They are asking for results that look like they were painted by Greg Rutkowski, and they care enough to ask for Greg Rutkowski specifically because Greg Rutkowski is a highly skilled artist who developed his own distinctive style which is the central pillar of his intellectual property as an artist, and his competitive advantage.

Intellectual property law as it stands today obviously couldn't have anticipated this technology, and didn't. However, if this kind of thing is still legal in ten years, that will represent a major systemic failure of copyright and trade secrets law to protect the core intellectual property of artists in the same spirit as it currently protects intellectual property in other domains.

[olaulaja]

That list is only really useful for major styles that are well known/tagged, early SD versions knew a list of artists _much_ longer and more relevant than that. (some of the styles on that list are not related to 2d images). If you consider the list a reasonable substitute for artist names, I'd ask you for a prompt that replicates the common Rutkowski + Mucha style using just the styles listed.

>> It's almost as if artists develop their own styles that are just as uniquely theirs

Hard disagree on this. Styles do not and should not have ownership, legally or otherwise. Not in painting, music, film, games, or any other kind of art. Anything else kneecaps derivative styles and erects a massive barrier to the advancement of culture. Straight copies are mostly avoided because they add nothing over the original.

You're also misunderstanding the typical use of Rutkowski and other names. Most prompts I've seen and used use multiple artists for a unique blend of styles (including the much maligned and overused Rutkowski + Mucha), not just straight copies. While asking for Rutkowski indeed asks for a very specific style (as well as any themes etc common to his work), its usually in combination with other equally specific and somewhat contradictory styles, each guiding the result in some direction and adding elements but none of them being exactly the desired end result. Just asking for straight up Rutkowski was a short lived cargo cult and is now more of a meme than anything else.

[dale_glass]

> They are asking for results that look like they were painted by Greg Rutkowski, and they care enough to ask for Greg Rutkowski specifically because Greg Rutkowski is a highly skilled artist who developed his own distinctive style

Sometimes, but not always.

Lots of people prompt by cargo cult -- you find lots and lots of images generated by peppering the list with stuff like "masterpiece, best quality, 8k, award-winning".

Are all of those found in the training set? Do they actually have the right result?

It's statistics, not magic. The machine doesn't know what you mean, it only knows what's in the dataset. Some tags are not well represented enough to have the result you'd expect from the name.

Googling around suggests "masterpiece" mostly translates to higher contrast and saturation.

> they are not asking for results in a style that exists independently of Greg Rutkowski despite his name somehow being the only way to identify it.

Some might be. There's not always a tag for every kind of aesthetic, so one possible solution is to find an artist that uses it.

> which is the central pillar of his intellectual property as an artist, and his competitive advantage.

And which copyright law says he doesn't have. Style isn't copyrightable.

[dragonwriter]

> If you remove artist names from the training data, you lose the ability to describe those styles

Do you?

With base SD1.5, “by greg rutkowski” produces extremely similar results to “detailed realistic muted fantasy”. Except for the case where what you are actually trying to do is directly mimic the work of an artist with a strong unique style that is very heavily represented in the source data (Rutkowski, IIRC, has extremely little representation in the SD training data, leaving aside question of whether the other parts of that description apply), I don’t think you are losing the ability to refer to styles without artist names.