Question about Fast Sketch tool

[GalaxyGyro]

Hello! I have a question about the new Fast Sketch tool. In the official forum post about the quick sketch tool, it says “All artworks will come from artists fully aware what it’s going to be used for.”

By “fully aware” Does that mean these artists intentionally opted into a beta, and in plain language told that their art would be used to train the program & given the option to opt out? Or is there a clause hidden in the TOS that says along the lines of “Krita has the right to use your artwork for any purpose” but in convoluted legalese. What I want to know is whether or not Krita silently harvests user data for AI generative purposes. Thanks.

[Michelist]

Hello @GalaxyGyro, and welcome to the forum!

These users did it because they knew what for it was and did it absolutely aware as a deliberate act of helping the Krita devs developing this tool. They wanted to support the development of it, nothing more.

There is no hidden clause that allowed the devs to take pics they found useful to train this tool.

Michelist

[Takiro]

Krita has no rights to anyone’s artwork and and the forum is also not the same as the painting software. The artist’s voluntarily send in their own images to make the tool happen. Like pretty much anything else in Krita’s development, this is done voluntarily. You can even still find the topic about this in this forum, if you want to.

[sooz]

@GalaxyGyro

By “fully aware” Does that mean these artists intentionally opted into a beta, and in plain language told that their art would be used to train the program & given the option to opt out?

Artwork was requested in this forum and volunteers who were interested in contributing submitted their artwork to the project via email. Please read this call for donations:

Call for donation of artworks for the Fast Line Art project

Why do we need artworks? Fast Line Art is using neural networks. They differ from the classical algorithms that use human-defined rules to do the task - they make up the rules themselves based on data, so they need data to train on. In the case of this particular network, it will need both sketches and line art – sketches as an example input, and line art as expected output. It needs quite a big amount of data – thankfully not as much as generative AI, but still, let’s say, several dozens. The …

There is more information available on this new tool in the forum. Use the search function at the top of the page.

[tiar]

@GalaxyGyro

In the official forum post about the quick sketch tool, it says “All artworks will come from artists fully aware what it’s going to be used for.”

By “fully aware” Does that mean these artists intentionally opted into a beta, and in plain language told that their art would be used to train the program & given the option to opt out?

Yes, exactly that. All and every picture I used for training was provided by the artist themselves personally, not harvested by any automatic means. A few were submitted in the KA thread linked above, some by email, and for two specific pictures I asked the artist, and they specifically agreed to that license. All those pictures were licensed to Krita with a CC-BY-KRITA-FLA license (which in very plain language talks about it being used for training by Krita Foundation and its sister company) and the information about it was submitted together with the picture. You can download the dataset from the blog post, you’ll see there are like nine pictures in there, with information about the artists. The blog post itself also links to artists for every picture possibly except for my own pictures (though I think I linked to my KA account too).

Krita doesn’t silently take anything, in fact the only thing it connect to the internet for is to download the list of News and whether an update is available or not. I think on Android there is also the Donator’s badge but I don’t remember how that works, but in that case it’s only for that purpose, too. Krita doesn’t take any of your information, or your artworks, or anything else.

Krita also doesn’t have any TOS, only the GPL license, which has no restrictions about what happens with artworks you make in it, only the source code for Krita itself. This forum has a TOS, and for details @raghukamath would be a better source of information, but there is certainly no data harvesting involved. The images you upload are used to display the images on the forum for other users, that’s all.

You might be interested in this topic as well, it might answer more questions about the design of the tool and the ethics of it and everything else:

Introducing a New Project: Fast Line Art

Introduction In the coming few months, we will be sharing the progress of developing a new experimental feature we’re working on, let’s call it “Fast Line Art”. It will be a tool that takes in a sketch and generates a basic line art, similar to how a Colorize Mask takes a line art and generates flat colors, which is the base of the coloring process for many artists. The project is sponsored by Intel. They’ve sponsored several features in the past, most notably multi-threaded (faster) brushes an…

[GalaxyGyro]

Thank you for the clarification, and I am happy to hear you source your dataset ethically.
I hope my abundance of caution wasn’t offensive to the developers. So many apps harvest your data these days. “If it is free, your the product” as they say. Not to mention that Neural Network/AI technology has garnered a terrible reputation thanks to the AI bros & big tech using it wildly unethically. It has gotten to the point that my mind automatically attaches a negative connotation to anything that involves this sort of technology. I am glad to hear that the Krita developers trained the Neural Network with art sourced from artists who willingly & intentionally consented to its usage.