The images on the article clearly show that they’re not storing the data, they’re storing enough information about the data to reconstruct a rough and mostly useless approximation of the data (and they do so in such a way that the information about one piece of data can be combined with the information about another one to produce another rough and mostly useless approximation of a combination of those two pieces of data, which was not in the original dataset).
The legal and ethical failure is in commercially using the artist’s works (as a training model) without permission, not in storing or even reproducing them, since the slop they produce is evidently an approximation and not the real thing.
It’s like playing a telephone game with a description of an image, with the last person drawing the result.
The law disagrees. Compression has never been a valid argument. A crunchy 360p rip of a movie is a mostly useless approximation but sharing it is definitely illegal.
The images on the article clearly show that they’re not storing the data, they’re storing enough information about the data to reconstruct a rough and mostly useless approximation of the data (and they do so in such a way that the information about one piece of data can be combined with the information about another one to produce another rough and mostly useless approximation of a combination of those two pieces of data, which was not in the original dataset).
The legal and ethical failure is in commercially using the artist’s works (as a training model) without permission, not in storing or even reproducing them, since the slop they produce is evidently an approximation and not the real thing.
It’s like playing a telephone game with a description of an image, with the last person drawing the result.
The law disagrees. Compression has never been a valid argument. A crunchy 360p rip of a movie is a mostly useless approximation but sharing it is definitely illegal.