NVIDIA Unveils AI That Removes Noise, Grain, and Even Watermarks

AI learns how to clean up. Coming to a Photoshop version near you.

>removes watermarks
O boy this is going to make a bunch of leecher roleplayers happy..

great, now we can remove the artist signature / hompage url before uploading to e621
and we don't even have to crop the pic

Considering how many artsits lately have gotten into this weird habbit of using super-high res images but *adding* noise/grain to them for no discernable reason I'm rather excited for this.

As for the "leecher roleplayers" I've, personally, never really gotten why that's even an issue. Who cares if some rando crops and cuts up an image to use it as a character in some rando yiff rp? I mean how does that hurt anyone? When it's just some rando f-list rper I say it doesn't really matter who made the image or paid for the image. These rpers are just using it in their own little games for their own pleasure. If it's just the rp and the like I say let 'em be. Just let 'em get their rocks off or w/e.

How is this a good thing again? Just opens the door to more plagiarism.

fox_whisper85 said:
How the hell is this a good thing?

The AI it's self is great, it can greatly reduce noise(on say, images of my cat taken with my tablet's low end camera). It can also restore parts of corrupted images.
HOWEVER, removal of watermark isn't something I'd advertise it as.

Chaser said:
HOWEVER, removal of watermark isn't something I'd advertise it as.

We can all agree that removing artist watermarks is bad.
But I don't see anything wrong with removing watermarks added by image hosting or meme websites.

AnotherDay said:
As for the "leecher roleplayers" I've, personally, never really gotten why that's even an issue. Who cares if some rando crops and cuts up an image to use it as a character in some rando yiff rp? I mean how does that hurt anyone? When it's just some rando f-list rper I say it doesn't really matter who made the image or paid for the image. These rpers are just using it in their own little games for their own pleasure. If it's just the rp and the like I say let 'em be. Just let 'em get their rocks off or w/e.

Well, here's an example.

My sister's an artist. Her daughter's 11 and is a little baby furry. She made up a fursona the other day and my sister, being supportive, drew it for her.

My sister doesn't keep an art gallery, but if she'd posted it somewhere... well, no one really wants their daughter's fursona being used as the face of f-list's latest loli. and while we can indeed say that if she didn't want that to happen, she shouldn't post it online, but we shouldn't *have* to do that.

Or to bring it a little more directly: no one wants their fursona--their "this is me" character-- to be used as the mask over a sockpuppet made to get people off.

It's kind of like realizing someone took pictures off your face book and is using them to catfish people or whatever.

Only in this case, it might be to turn your beloved avatar into a scat-whore, or to make them to focus of a snuff-RP, or...?

I guess the best answer is to say that it makes some people extremely uncomfortable, and that should be reason enough to not do it, right?

Munkelzahn said:
We can all agree that removing artist watermarks is bad.
But I don't see anything wrong with removing watermarks added by image hosting or meme websites.

And nVidia didn't think that this could be abused?

fox_whisper85 said:
And nVidia didn't think that this could be abused?

All technology can be abused, that dosn't mean that it should never progress.

Artists are a weird breed.
"I made this beautiful artwork for people to admire. A masterpiece of creativity and craftsmanship. Let me slap an huge, ugly-ass watermark right on top of it."

It should be obvous that whenever someone uses an artwork for anything, they should do their very best to link back to the original source, list the artist(s), clearly state that it's not their own work if that's not already obvious. Anyone on e621 should understand that this is the most normal and reasonable thing to do (because, you know, it's the way this website works), right? RIGHT?

You don't need a watermark which covers a third of the image to do that.
Example: Look at my original character "Donut Steel":
https://puu.sh/AWsp1.png [1]
(unrelated to Aruesso's character "Donut Steel"):
post #231459

Would you rather see all relevant information for looking up more, in a small bar at the bottom, not obscuring and not interfering with the rest of the image at all, easy to remove should you choose to use this as a wallpaper (please do!)?: https://puu.sh/AWsHD.png
Or would you rather see an eye cancer inducing watermark right in the middle of the image, giving you no information except for the artist's name (and you're lucky here because the watermark is actually readable, I've seen some indecipherable watermarks in my days, I mean, are you serious? )?: https://puu.sh/AWspQ.png

Be honest! Nobody wants to see those watermarks. And yeah yeah, I get it, I'm exaggerating. (Or am I ? ? ? ) But it's really frustrating to see great artwork which would be perfect as a wallpaper but has a very noticable watermark in a place where it can't be shopped out easily.
Example:
post #202981
You would have to crop this image in an inefficient way or be very good at photoshop.
Here are some examples of artists getting it right:
post #277093 post #663293 post #808316 post #7065
There is also this:
post #327437
It's not idal but also not too bad because the text is out of the way in an area where nothing else is going on anyways.

If you're going to tell me "but if the watermark is easily removable people are going to steal my art": Read again. It should be the most normal thing in the world to properly give sources. Removing watermarks/signatures from art and repost it as your own is copyright infringement. People who do that are assholes and should be (and can be) dealt with accordingly.
Slapping a watermark on your artwork is only going to stop someone from trying to steal it when the watermark is so huge that working around it is impossible. But at that point the artwork is ruined anyways.

I'd also like to lose a word about roleplaying and similar stuff. Let's do a little thought experiment.
Think of a scenario: A nice beach. A beautiful character is sitting at a beach bar, sipping on a drink. Imagine yourself joining this character to also have a drink (and for the sake of not making this creepy, keeping it at that). I don't pull this from thin air. People do this all the time.
Some inspiration:
post #1521230 post #1428154 post #1329573 post #940686
Let's make that obviously roleplay: Act this situation out with another person on a publicly accessible website. Clearly not OK for some character owners.
Now make it obviously not roleplay: Just think about the scenario in your head. Clearly this could not possibly cause any discomfort for anybody else, let alone the character owner.
So going from "just in your head" to "public", at what point does it become a problem for the character owner? Once you start writing it down on a piece of paper? Once you start talking to a friend about it? Once you save it as a word document it in your DropBox?
I am assuming proper sourcing, of course. And in this case it would be sensible to explain the context: "The character owner, <insert link here>, is not affiliated with this roleplay in any way."
You will find that drawing the line anywhere here is completely arbitrary and barely, if at all, rationally explainable. I get the point SnowWolf is trying to make. Maybe the caracter owner simply doesn't like the thought of their character being used in roleplay by other people. But then, why? I would be honored if somebody wrote a story with Donut Steel (please do!). Maybe that person imagined Donut Steel drinking whiskey in that scenario. I'd say "well, I'm against drinking alcohol so that's not how I see my character", but I'd want you to be able to share that story with others. It's your story. You made it. As long as you don't pretend that it's your character I don't have a problem with that.
But maybe I'm just too much of a programmer to understand how artists think. (I.e. I use other people's programs for free and I let other people use my programs for free.)

[1] If a ≥ Privileged reads this: Would this get approved if I uploaded it? It's technically not a screencap, it's 3D-rendered. You can find some comparable stuff here: https://e621.net/post/index/1/3d_(artwork)%20-animated%20order:score_asc

tl;dr:
distracting_watermarks are annoying. Don't do it.
Fight copyright infringement with law, not by ruining your art.
Always provide sauce.

SnowWolf said:
Well, here's an example.

My sister's an artist. Her daughter's 11 and is a little baby furry. She made up a fursona the other day and my sister, being supportive, drew it for her.

My sister doesn't keep an art gallery, but if she'd posted it somewhere... well, no one really wants their daughter's fursona being used as the face of f-list's latest loli. and while we can indeed say that if she didn't want that to happen, she shouldn't post it online, but we shouldn't *have* to do that.

Or to bring it a little more directly: no one wants their fursona--their "this is me" character-- to be used as the mask over a sockpuppet made to get people off.

It's kind of like realizing someone took pictures off your face book and is using them to catfish people or whatever.

Only in this case, it might be to turn your beloved avatar into a scat-whore, or to make them to focus of a snuff-RP, or...?

I guess the best answer is to say that it makes some people extremely uncomfortable, and that should be reason enough to not do it, right?

I think there's a pretty big difference between private rp and public rp and 'my character is similar to this' vs 'this is my character'. A couple people in a private chat using a images as examples of body type/species/pose is worlds different from someone grabbing another person's ref to use as the face of their rp account on tumblr.

Calimero000 said:
If you're going to tell me "but if the watermark is easily removable people are going to steal my art": Read again. It should be the most normal thing in the world to properly give sources. Removing watermarks/signatures from art and repost it as your own is copyright infringement. People who do that are assholes and should be (and can be) dealt with accordingly.
Slapping a watermark on your artwork is only going to stop someone from trying to steal it when the watermark is so huge that working around it is impossible. But at that point the artwork is ruined anyways.

Heya, I'm speaking as an artist who had his artwork outright stolen a couple of times already, including cases where the pic was cropped in order to remove my signature from the corner and then displayed in a furry rave and another one where the guy just straight up posted a pic of mine behind his patreon paywall

You are too eager to just dismiss people stealing stuff while somehow painting the artist as the bad guy for "ruining the image" with the watermark. While I do agree that putting watermarks on your stuff is not exactly ideal, it is way cheaper than having to constantly contact your lawyer to deal with international copyright issues

Instead of saying that "Artists are a weird breed" how about trying to have a little more empathy with your fellow human beings? Making art is often our livelihood, you'd also think it was a big deal if a random person just came to your office and stole the budgeting spreadsheet you've been working in for the entire week, then presented it to your boss and got paid for that

Watermarks don't have to be visible, FWIW. AnotherDay mentioned 'adding noise/grain for no discernible reason'. That is roughly the effect of Fourier watermarking -- the watermark is distributed throughout the image pixels, and applying an Inverse Fourier Transform shows the watermark. But the grain added is very slight, so you can't determine that there is a watermark (rather than just noise) by simply looking at it. And because it's distributed through the image, it's robust against mere cropping.

This post by the author of GMIC illustrates how it works (this post was written before the dedicated 'Fourier Watermark' filter was added to GMIC).

AFAICS this creates a watermark that is both a) 'huge' / difficult to remove and b) quite non-intrusive.

Calimero000 said:
Example: Look at my original character "Donut Steel":
https://puu.sh/AWsp1.png [1]

[1] If a ≥ Privileged reads this: Would this get approved if I uploaded it? It's technically not a screencap, it's 3D-rendered. You can find some comparable stuff here: https://e621.net/post/index/1/3d_(artwork)%20-animated%20order:score_asc[/quote]
Not sure...
But I'd suggest two things
a) add some background (preferably also rendered, not a photo)
b) add a wolfcock/wolfdildo, standing upright and "penetrating" your character
this will greatly improve your chances of approval

Calimero000 said:
Artists are a weird breed.
"I made this beautiful artwork for people to admire. A masterpiece of creativity and craftsmanship. Let me slap an huge, ugly-ass watermark right on top of it."

It should be obvous that whenever someone uses an artwork for anything, they should do their very best to link back to the original source, list the artist(s), clearly state that it's not their own work if that's not already obvious. Anyone on e621 should understand that this is the most normal and reasonable thing to do (because, you know, it's the way this website works), right? RIGHT?

...

If you're going to tell me "but if the watermark is easily removable people are going to steal my art": Read again. It should be the most normal thing in the world to properly give sources. Removing watermarks/signatures from art and repost it as your own is copyright infringement. People who do that are assholes and should be (and can be) dealt with accordingly.
Slapping a watermark on your artwork is only going to stop someone from trying to steal it when the watermark is so huge that working around it is impossible. But at that point the artwork is ruined anyways.

To add some more to this...

While it SHOULD be second nature to link back, a lot of people don't. A lot of people feel like if you don't want your art stolen, you shouldn't post it on the internet. which is bullshit, but I can't change other people's minds through sheer force of will.

I know of several people who've had art was stolen and SOLD... like... they have to send off multiple "please stop selling these t-shirts, I"m the artist and I did not approve this" requests a week because of the sheer number of people who are trying to make cash off of other people's livelyhood.

Check out this girl who got her art stolen by Old Navy ... not the only case of a large company trying to push around an artist I've heard of.

And it's not even just big companies. It's enterprising individuals who steal and resell art and art prints. An artist I follow apparently has an issue this week with a theater company that commissioned a poster and got a finished piece... that had her stolen artwork front and center.

It happens all the time. A lot of people are totally unscrupulous about it. :/ I'ts not just about roleplayers, y'know?

Almost impressive.

fox_whisper85 said:
And nVidia didn't think that this could be abused?

Ah please, knife was made for cutting food, it doesn't stop people from killing each other with it.
Every tool can be abused, for example you can kill ppl with a spoon, fork, condom, book, toothbrush, tampon, sock...You get the point.

It's all in people's head, fix the people not the tool.

If I ever start uploading artwork, I'll do two things:

1. Never include watermarks
2. License the image under CC0 1.0 Universal or another public domain declaration

Be the change you want to see in the world.

SnowWolf said:
Well, here's an example.

My sister's an artist. Her daughter's 11 and is a little baby furry. She made up a fursona the other day and my sister, being supportive, drew it for her.

My sister doesn't keep an art gallery, but if she'd posted it somewhere... well, no one really wants their daughter's fursona being used as the face of f-list's latest loli. and while we can indeed say that if she didn't want that to happen, she shouldn't post it online, but we shouldn't *have* to do that.

Or to bring it a little more directly: no one wants their fursona--their "this is me" character-- to be used as the mask over a sockpuppet made to get people off.

It's kind of like realizing someone took pictures off your face book and is using them to catfish people or whatever.

Only in this case, it might be to turn your beloved avatar into a scat-whore, or to make them to focus of a snuff-RP, or...?

I guess the best answer is to say that it makes some people extremely uncomfortable, and that should be reason enough to not do it, right?

It's a drawing. Who cares? Like I've already found one rando that uses mine and like a bazillion other pics as their "forms" or w/e. Seriously, no one respects the characters that are made for cartoon shows and the like so why would anyone expect their characters to not get taken and turned into RP fodder by other randoms?

It's really simple. The internet is the world sharing ideas and information. If you don't want to share certain ideas or information you don't put it on the internet. It's like having a big ass cork board everyone in the town pins stuff up on. Sure. You can pin stuff up in a "secure" section that's gated off and that puts stapled pieces of paper over whatever you post so no one else that's a good person can see it. If you're lucky it'll stay that way always but if you're not so lucky someone else is going to have the staple remover for your staples and is going to release your docs *everywhere* after they take off that security paper.

It's not a "shouldn't have to worry" scenario. That's what the internet has always been, what it was conceived to be. A massive platform where people share. How you can reasonably expect your stuff to never get shared when you upload or otherwise put it on the internet I will never know. It's a pipe dream. Completely unrealistic expectations. Naive to the point of being legitimately dangerous to you and others if you think that because you don't get to control who you share to. You can try, you can put locks or guards up but if someone wants badly enough what you're posting they'll get it if you've ever shared it on the internet.

That's how it is. The idea of "share everything with everyone" was something Facebook made popular and it has never been a good idea in the first place. You wouldn't go around posting all of your personal information on every light post and on billboards and the like because you don't want to share that information. So why would you post other things that you don't want to share, that you don't want to be abused, that you don't want taken out of context, etc, etc. So many people don't think before they act these days. That sort of thing gets people fired and ruins lives and then they're surprised and try to play the victim despite the fact, even if they deleted it, their lack of forethought is all over the internet for everyone to see.

SnowWolf said:
Check out this girl who got her art stolen by Old Navy

That sucks. I don't know anything about the status of this case but I would be very surprised if any judge would decide in favour of the company. It looks like a "watertight" case. Same with the theater poster case.
But I can't deny that there are issues here and that watermarks are a way of fighting that.
In the same spirit:

mabit said:
another one where the guy just straight up posted a pic of mine behind his patreon paywall

I would assume that Patreon immediately suspended this person's account and withheld the money.
My point is: There should be other means to fight that. Whether those means are sufficient I don't know, though.

mabit said:
Instead of saying that "Artists are a weird breed" how about trying to have a little more empathy with your fellow human beings?

I did not mean to offend you and I am sorry if I did. My sense of humor is... let's say "not for everyone".
It was just a bit of banter.

savageorange said:
Fourier watermarking

How well does this algorithm cope with JPEG compression? I would assume that re-compressing an image would mess up the outcome of the fourier transform. Or the artefacts introduced by the watermark would have to be much more noticable than the artefacts introduced by the JPEG compression.

Munkelzahn said:
But I'd suggest two things
a) add some background (preferably also rendered, not a photo)
b) add a wolfcock/wolfdildo, standing upright and "penetrating" your character
this will greatly improve your chances of approval

I did some things: https://puu.sh/AX02j.png
I gave Donut Steel a buddy: Jimmy (Get it? He has jimmies on top.)
a) I don't have any good backgrounds aside from the stock photos in SolidWorks. And I don't want to model one because it would look bad. So I chose to have an abstract background.
b) I saw a wooden stand like this for holding pretzels. The german word for stand is "Ständer", which is also an euphemism for "erection". The material is oak. The german name for oak is "Eiche", which is sometimes (maybe intentionally) misspelled as "Eichel", which is a name for the "glans". I don't think I can fit more innuendos for penetration in there. They're even blushing.
I spent way too much time on this :D

AnotherDay said lots of things

I might be reading too much into your comment but it kinda sounds like you are defending people who steal art. Your comment sounds like, for example, mabit "should have expected" that someone was gonna steal their art and sell it on Patreon. But that's not an OK thing to do.

Calimero000 said:
How well does this algorithm cope with JPEG compression? I would assume that re-compressing an image would mess up the outcome of the fourier transform. Or the artefacts introduced by the watermark would have to be much more noticable than the artefacts introduced by the JPEG compression.

Proportional to resolution. More resolution means, in effect, that the same data is spread (semi-redundantly) over more pixels. If you were to, say, save a JPG with quality 30, that might well nuke most of it (with the obvious downside that you've also nuked a lot of what was actually attractive about the image.). Most image editing programs aren't silly enough to select that kind of quality by default, though - my guess at the average setting would be 75 quality, which it should stand up to unless the image is very small (<400x300).

There is no 'simple' answer because the strength of JPGification itself depends on the image resolution. Saving a high res JPG with quality 30 is less damaging to the integrity of the picture[1] than saving a medium res JPG with quality 30.

[1] not just the watermarking, the picture in general.

To be specific, any damage would mean that the watermark would become more faint; this is not the kind of thing where specific individual pixels are crucial to the integrity of the watermark. You have to damage a good number of pixels before there is any risk.

EDIT: The strongest attack against fourier watermarking is probably heavily denoising the image. Supposing someone wanted to rip a section of an image out and use it as an avatar; they could take a high resolution image, crop it, denoise it, sharpen it a bit, and then shrink it by 2x or more. The denoising step introduces blurriness/smudginess, sharpening and shrinking reduce the apparent strength of this blurring.

Calimero000 said:
I might be reading too much into your comment but it kinda sounds like you are defending people who steal art. Your comment sounds like, for example, mabit "should have expected" that someone was gonna steal their art and sell it on Patreon. But that's not an OK thing to do.

Taking art and reselling it through something like Patreon is much different than someone using a picture you drew for furry roleplays.

Calimero000 said:
I would assume that Patreon immediately suspended this person's account and withheld the money.
My point is: There should be other means to fight that. Whether those means are sufficient I don't know, though.

Yeah, I'm lucky enough to have a large enough fanbase so those things get reported to me quickly. I was able to take his page down within the same day he posted it (it also helped that he was doing the same with other artists' pictures)

I completely agree. Watermarks are a less than ideal way of dealing with that kind of situation, unfortunately it seems to be the only real way of guaranteeing that people in the future know who the artist that crafted the image was (and can't be easily erased from the image, at least not in a way that could be easily hidden or that would take a lot of effort)

AnotherDay said:
It's a drawing. Who cares?

Again, the lack of empathy is unreal. Can you honestly still not see that certain people might not view the world the same way as you do?

If you really want to discuss this by making elaborate analogies, we can also see the art site (FA, e621, etc) as a private building that allows certain people to rent rooms to use to host temporary art expositions. Are you saying that everyone should be ok with a random person from the street coming in and stealing a couple of paintings? (this is just an example btw, I'm well aware that it's a massive oversimplification of the reality just to fit my narrative. But you did the same in your post so it should have the same weight)

savageorange said:
Proportional to resolution.

More reason for artists to release high resolution files *rubs hands* :D

Pyke said:
Taking art and reselling it through something like Patreon is much different than someone using a picture you drew for furry roleplays.

Yes, but the examples given by AnotherDay are general enough that they could also include stealing.

CCoyote said:
You clearly aren't an artist.

Look, just because an artist makes something doesn't mean they made it for you to slap up on your desktop. That's your desire.

That is correct. I can't draw for shit. But that doesn't mean that I don't create things I care about.
But my take on it is that if somebody tells me "hey, I found your program and I'd like to use it for X, but detail Y makes it awkward in that regard", then I'd be happy to at least see what I can do and hopefully change that aspect. I wouldn't say "I didn't make this for you to do X with".
So I find it surprising that there is such a big difference in the way I think about my programs vs the way artists think about their art. I understand that not putting a watermark on an artwork puts it at higher risk of being stolen and that there is no direct equivalent for this in programming, but the above is not just in regards to watermarks. For example: In my experience artists don't like their art being edited to change an aspect, even if multiple people would like to see that change. I don't have a problem with people changing my programs at all. Quite the contrary.

So, yeah, I'm having a hard time understanding how artists think.

I would like to use this oppurtunity to direct attention to a question I have asked above

So going from "just in your head" to "public", at what point does it become a problem for the character owner?

IMO the difference is that programs are not exactly 'personal expression', even though they are definitely creative. Its not that complicated to look at a change you've done to my code and see you've added some shitty hack, using systems in a way they were not designed for and is going to break in the future. I can also see if you've fucked up the code style. It's all very discrete and largely functional, like an idealized version of engineering.

By contrast, artists don't necessarily know exactly why a particular part of an artwork is there. It's like, well, I tried a few different things, this is the best one. Why is it best? I don't know. Imagine this: The correct appearance of each part of the picture is dependent on the appearance of each *other* part of the picture. It's something like solving an equation that has 256 variables in it; even if I could hold that in my head, I certainly couldn't explain it to you.

So you could say that my art contains a bunch of abstractions that I don't understand yet, and the process of making art iteratively refines those understandings.

Editing that is something like editing my words in my brain before I actually say them. I don't know what I'm aiming at, but I'm aiming at something. Even in the case of drawing porn, it's definitely not just something as straightforward and obvious as 'sexual gratification' or '$$$'. It's multiple things at once.

Maybe a better analogy would be: imagine you have an acquaintance who tends to interrupt just as you start saying something, and they guess what you're going to say, and they always guess WRONGLY. And they only do so with things that actually have some personal significance to you. Editing is something like that hypothetical aggravation.

To some extent this is involved even when the artist edits their own work to produce variants. It's not that hard, if you have an informed eye, to see which is the original and which are the edits; the design is off balance in the edits, because it has been patched over rather than redesigned. Obviously this is efficient, but equally obviously it compromises the integrity of the picture.

TL;DR: writing bad code is simply offensive (and yeah, clean implementations of inappropriate features also count as bad code). You can individually count each offense against sanity. With art, you are simultaneously juggling so many things that you only partly understand, that you simply know that something is wrong with it. But it's not easy to dismiss, because you don't understand on *exactly what grounds* it is wrong, and it's not necessarily true that your picture was right to begin with.. It's not simply offensive, it's.. something like a spiritual trespass. Both offensive and invasive in a pretty confusing way.

In response to this:

So going from "just in your head" to "public", at what point does it become a problem for the character owner?

Let's assume that the character owner is the same person as the artist, for simplicity. Then, for me, the line is when I hear about or see it.
The former being when it may have invaded my creative process, and the latter being when it almost certainly has invaded my creative process.

CCoyote said:
...

savageorange said:
...

I think I understand what you mean and I think I get it. Thank you for the insight.

CCoyote said:
Dude, you asked a ton of questions in that post. I don't know which one you're referring to, and honestly, it was kind of long and hard to follow for me. If I didn't answer already, clarify which one you mean?

I meant the one I have quoted at the end of https://e621.net/forum/show/259328
So if somebody made roleplay of a character you own, at what point would it be a problem for you? Would it be a problem if they so much as thought about it? Would it be a problem as soon as they write it down? etc.

savageorange said:
In response to this:
[...]
Let's assume that the character owner is the same person as the artist, for simplicity. Then, for me, the line is when I hear about or see it.
The former being when it may have invaded my creative process, and the latter being when it almost certainly has invaded my creative process.

But is it already not OK when people do it and you don't know about it, or does you getting to know it make it not OK? Because in the former case, in theory, everyone in the world except you could know about it and you would be OK with that.

One >little< step closer to AI as kind of 'artists' with the rise of high Q (art) asset reformulation. (think 3D modeling engine only for 2D)

For better or worse.. personally better i think.

Calimero000 said:

But is it already not OK when people do it and you don't know about it, or does you getting to know it make it not OK? Because in the former case, in theory, everyone in the world except you could know about it and you would be OK with that.

Yep. I actually wrote it thinking that you might make that kind of objection, but I totally agree that everyone in the world except me could know and I'd be OK with that (assuming that I wasn't trying to profit from the image, or otherwise need to control it). It's all about how easy it is to derail the artistic process. If your train doesn't bump into my train, no problem.

Of course, if you do it once, you might do it again. So it also has to KEEP not bumping into me, in this scenario. Which I think is fairly unlikely.

savageorange said:
Yep. I actually wrote it thinking that you might make that kind of objection, but I totally agree that everyone in the world except me could know and I'd be OK with that (assuming that I wasn't trying to profit from the image, or otherwise need to control it). It's all about how easy it is to derail the artistic process. If your train doesn't bump into my train, no problem.

Huh. An interesting take on it. I did not expect that.
Thank you for the insight.