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Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

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Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#121

Post by jffry »

ISL wrote: post #74
wnevets wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open. I'm surprised it has taken this long to be honest. I've seen generated images with the blurred Getty watermark on them.

A little delay at $50k an infringement can go a long, long way. I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is for infringement, but I bet it is two years or more.

In the US it seems to be 5 years for criminal infringement, or 3 years for civil actions, according to Title 17, Chapter 5, Section 507: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#507

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#122

Post by anigbrowl »

jfoster wrote: post #62

Reading between the lines of this, it sounds to me like Getty is preparing a copyright claim against the AI companies: 1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open. 2. Their business stands to lose substantially as a result of such models existing. 3. It would be a bad look for them to make a claim whilst simultaneously accepting works from the models into Getty. 4. At least some of their watermark…

I predict they'll lose because any of the existing contenders floats effortlessly over the 'transformativity' hurdle.

While I'm worried about the impact of widely deployed AI on commercial artists, musicians etc. and don't think many developers have really come to grips with the implications and possibilities for all fields, including their own, I feel nothing but amusement at the grim prospects of commercial image brokers who have spent years collecting rent on the creativity of others.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#123

Post by b800h »

Beaver117 wrote: post #102
b800h wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a strong case for arguing that we may actually completely ban AI and any sufficiently strong ML algorithm. AI hasn't even realised a millionth of its potential yet, and it's already running rings around humans (cf. algorithmic feeds driving political conflicts online). I think potentially it will cease to be tolerated and be treated a bit like WMDs.

First time I've heard that line of thinking. How and when do you think thatl happen?

Okay, so there's a sense in which AI essentially destroys knowledge culture by performing a reductio-ad-absurdam on it.

Examples:

1) Social content. We start with friend feeds (FB), they become algorithmic, and eventually are replaced entirely with algorithmic recommendations (Tiktok), which escalate in an AI-fuelled arms race creating increasingly compulsive generated content (or an AI manipulates people into generating that content for it). Regardless, it becomes apparent that the eventual infinitely engaging result is bad for humans.

2) Social posting. It becomes increasingly impossible to distinguish a bot from a human on Twitter et al. People realise that they're spending their time having passionate debates with machines whose job it is to outrage them. We realise that the chance of someone we meet online being human is 1/1000 and the other 999 are propaganda-advertising machines so sophisticated that we can't actually resist their techniques. [Arguably the world is going so totally nuts right now because this is already happening - the tail is wagging the dog. AI is creating a culture which optimises for AIs; an AI-Corporate Complex?]

3) Art and Music. These become unavoidably engaging. See 1 and 2 above.

This can be applied to any field of the knowledge economy. AI conducts an end-run around human nature - in fact huge networks of interacting AIs and corporations do it, and there are three possible outcomes:

1) We become inured to it, and switch off from the internet.

2) We realise in time how bad it is, but can't trust ourselves, so we ban it.

3) We become puppets driven by intelligences orders of magnitude more sophisticated than us to mine resources in order to keep them running.

History says that it would really be some combination of the above, but AI is self-reinforcing, so I'm not sure that can be relied upon. We may put strong limits on the behaviour and generality of AIs, and how they communicate and interact.

There will definitely be jobs in AI reeducation and inquisition; those are probably already a thing.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#124

Post by can16358p »

ROTMetro wrote: post #73
can16358p wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. AI imagery is here to stay and will get better every day. A service should either embrace it or they will lose a significant portion of their users/customers to another who does support AI content. While most of the AI content is not ready for prime time in terms of coherence and resolution, it's just a matter of time that it reaches (and quickly surpasses) traditional methods.

But it's not copyrightable. I guess you can lie and say you created it, but you didn't, and computer generated. You created it no more than you created your house because you picked the layout and paint colors. There is no money in non-copyrightable generated computer images.

Assume a painter with a good visual memory observed many scenes around the world. They are very intellectual and know pretty much about anything regarding physical objects, shapes, and visual styles. Then they have the ability to draw very realistic scenes of whatever we ask them to do, in whatever style we want. We pay the person (or they might offer this as a courtest too), and they paint and give exactly what we want, with all the rights to sell the image.

It's the same: the "someone" is replaced by a computer software that "learned" in a similar fashion, being able to draw what we ask them to draw. Unless it's directly sampling some copyrighted work as-is, whatever it creates can be copyrightable.

Whether the painter allows this is another story.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#125

Post by plussed_reader »

noobermin wrote: post #104
jfoster wrote: post #62

Reading between the lines of this, it sounds to me like Getty is preparing a copyright claim against the AI companies: 1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open. 2. Their business stands to lose substantially as a result of such models existing. 3. It would be a bad look for them to make a claim whilst simultaneously accepting works from the models into Getty. 4. At least some of their watermark…

5. Getty pictures were trained on likely without permission. So, they definitely might be considering starting a lawsuit. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523

Why would it be illegal to train a model on their free samples? I thought their business was paying to remove the watermark?

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#126

Post by holoduke »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #34
daniel_iversen wrote: post #23

Their legal worry probably makes sense, but my suspicious mind also feels like it's in their long-term interest maybe not to open pandora's box too much on letting AI art in, because wouldn't one of Getty's competitive advantages be the relationships it has with (I imagine) hundreds of thousands of artists? And so if they let AI art in then suddenly the historic artist relationship means less (because a lot more peop…

The US Copyright Office asserts that AI generated images can’t be copyrighted. Getty lives and dies by copyright and artificial scarcity/control of image rights. For stock images and non current/news events, Stable Diffuison and its successors are the future.

You still need computing power to generate those images, so definitely room for commercial activity there. Getty could precompute billions of images and enlarge their inventory.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#127

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

thereisnospork wrote: post #116
spoonjim wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if OpenAI's ability to create a photograph of a person laughing while eating a bowl of salad is due to mashing up these photos that were mainly from Getty Images, then Getty and its photographers would have a reasonable claim.

How different[0] is that from a painter viewing ~half a dozen Getty images, then repainting in combination to not pixel-perfect, but near, detail? Afaik[1] the hypothetical painter has neither committed infringement on the source works and has input sufficient creative effort into the new that it would be copywritable. [0]Granted it differs a little, but not by that much either. [1]IANAL

Morally it seems to basically be the same to me, but in practice it's different. The AI training is done by big corporations that are traceable and have big pockets that can be sued whereas "inspiration" cannot be taken to court even if you feel like you were stolen from.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#128

Post by bee_rider »

visarga wrote: post #105
toomuchtodo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic... > An image generated through artificial intelligence lacked the “human authorship” necessary for protection > Both in its 2019 decision and its decision this February, the USCO found the “human authorship” element was lacking and was wholly necessary to obtain a copyright, Engadget’s K. Holt wrote. Current copyright law only provides protections to “the…

Doesn't seem to apply to Stable Diffusion and Dall-E because there is substantial human work involved - picking and evolving the prompt and selecting the best result. Sometimes it's also collaging and masking. Maybe it could apply to making "variations" where you just have to click a button. But you still have to choose the subject image on which you do variations, and to pick the best one or scrap the lot. It's comp…

What if you were to... I dunno, create a community that lets in any anonymous person and talks about art. Generate Stable Diffusion prompts from their conversations. Then add an upvote system, so that rather than having an individual pick particular results, the best results generally filter to the top. You could even have the "upvotes" be based on dwell-times or something like that.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#129

Post by ar-nelson »

jfoster wrote: post #62

Reading between the lines of this, it sounds to me like Getty is preparing a copyright claim against the AI companies: 1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open. 2. Their business stands to lose substantially as a result of such models existing. 3. It would be a bad look for them to make a claim whilst simultaneously accepting works from the models into Getty. 4. At least some of their watermark…

I've seen a lot of confidence on HN and other tech communities that a court would never rule that training an AI on copyrighted images is infringement, but I'm not so sure. To be clear, I hope that training AI on copyrighted images remains legal, because it would cripple the field of AI text and image generation if it wasn't!

But think about these similar hypotheticals:

1. I take a copyrighted Getty stock image (that I don't own, maybe even watermarked), blur it with a strong Gaussian blur filter until it's unrecognizable, and use it as the background of an otherwise original digital painting.

2. I take a small GPL project on GitHub, manually translate it from C to Python (so that the resulting code does not contain a single line of code identical to the original), then redistribute the translated project under a GPL-incompatible license without acknowledging the original.

Are these infringements?

In both of these cases, a copyrighted original work is transformed and incorporated into a different work in such a way that the original could not be reconstructed. But, intuitively, both cases feel like infringement. I don't know how a court would rule, but there's at least some chance these would be infringements, and they're conceptually not too different from distilling an image into an AI model and generating something new based on it.

Re: Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims

#130

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

thereisnospork wrote: post #116
spoonjim wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if OpenAI's ability to create a photograph of a person laughing while eating a bowl of salad is due to mashing up these photos that were mainly from Getty Images, then Getty and its photographers would have a reasonable claim.

How different[0] is that from a painter viewing ~half a dozen Getty images, then repainting in combination to not pixel-perfect, but near, detail? Afaik[1] the hypothetical painter has neither committed infringement on the source works and has input sufficient creative effort into the new that it would be copywritable. [0]Granted it differs a little, but not by that much either. [1]IANAL

The difference is that it's mechanical. Copyright is intended to protect creators, and it's unclear whether this type of fair use properly balances the original creators' needs against the ML-based creators' needs.
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