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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

#181

Post by deltasevennine »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #159
deltasevennine wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is different from plagiarism. Because in plagiarism there is an original that can be compared against. There is a specific work/person where a infraction was commit-ed against. In AI produced artwork, the artwork is genuinely original and possibly better then what other humans can produce. No one was actually harmed. Thus in actuality it offers true value if not better value then what a human can produce. It dis…

>No one was actually harmed. // In a couple of years, unchecked, many artists will be out of work and companies like Getty will be making a lot less revenue. That's "harm" in legal terms. On a previous SD story someone noted they create recipe pictures using an AI instead of using a stock service. These sorts of developments are great, IMO, but we have to democratise the benefits.

That's like me creating a car that's faster and better then other cars and more energy efficient.

Would it be legal to ban Tesla because it harms the car industry through disruption? AI generated art is disrupting the art industry by creating original art that's cheaper and in the future possibly better. Why should we ban that.

By harm I mean direct harm. Theft of ideas and direct copying. But harm through creating a better product. Morally I think there is nothing wrong with this.

Practically we may have to do it, but this is like banning marijuana.

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

#182

Post by anigbrowl »

b800h wrote: post #123
Beaver117 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 genera…

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

What do you think corporations are

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

#183

Post by sdenton4 »

wnevets wrote: post #177
cheald wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the watermark is on them per se, but that the model tried to emulate an image it had seen before which had a watermark on it. Imagine showing a child a bunch of pictures with Getty watermarks on them, then they draw their own, with their own emulation of the watermark. They don't know it's a watermark, they don't know what a watermark is, they just see this shape on a lot of pictures and put it on their…

> It's not that the watermark is on them per se, but that the model tried to emulate an image it had seen before which had a watermark on it. Imagine showing a child a bunch of pictures with Getty watermarks on them, then they draw their own, with their own emulation of the watermark. That's essentially what's going on. The blurred watermark is what makes its obvious they used Getty's (copyrighted?) images to train t…

A world where we can't use copyrighted material to update neutral network weights is a world where we can buy books but not read them...

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

#184

Post by autoexec »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #127
thereisnospork wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "inspiration" cannot be taken to court even if you feel like you were stolen from.

Never doubt the ability of people's greed to force someone else into a court room.

Just look at the 'blurred lines' case where someone was inspired by a musical genre to write a song that didn't copy anyone's music but was still ordered to pay millions because he copied the general "feel" or "vibe" of someone else's work. (https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...)

I imagine a lot of AI generated images might copy the "feel" or "vibe" of something in its training data.

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

#185

Post by cheald »

wnevets wrote: post #177
cheald wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the watermark is on them per se, but that the model tried to emulate an image it had seen before which had a watermark on it. Imagine showing a child a bunch of pictures with Getty watermarks on them, then they draw their own, with their own emulation of the watermark. They don't know it's a watermark, they don't know what a watermark is, they just see this shape on a lot of pictures and put it on their…

> It's not that the watermark is on them per se, but that the model tried to emulate an image it had seen before which had a watermark on it. Imagine showing a child a bunch of pictures with Getty watermarks on them, then they draw their own, with their own emulation of the watermark. That's essentially what's going on. The blurred watermark is what makes its obvious they used Getty's (copyrighted?) images to train t…

I understand that, but why is using copyrighted images to train a model be any more illegal than studying copyrighted paintings in art school? Copyright doesn't prevent consumption or interpretation, simply reproduction.

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

#186

Post by stale2002 »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #131

It's always weird to see the contrast between HN's reaction to copyright questions about text/image generation, and HN's reaction when it's code generation. When a model is trained on 'all-rights-reserved' content like most image datasets, the community say it's fair game. But when it's 'just-a-few-rights-reserved' content like GPL code, apparently the community says that crosses a line? Realistically, this tells me…

> You could imagine a GPL-like license being really good for the community/ecosystem: "If you train on this content, you have to release the model."

The issue with that is that it is perfectly legal to ignore the license, if you use the copyrighted work in a transformative way.

It doesn't matter what the license says, if it is legal to ignore the license.

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

#187

Post by sdenton4 »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #176
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this will decide whether it's democratised or locked-up by those who own large bodies of training data.

Stable Diffusion is already out in the world. The cat is out of the bag.

Yah, but think of Napster getting eventually usurped by Spotify. The danger is that it's legally no longer possible to update the models (which are very expensive to train), and we end up with only Disney with the copyright horde large enough to train decent models, let alone good ones...

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

#188

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

autoexec wrote: post #184
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "inspiration" cannot be taken to court even if you feel like you were stolen from. Never doubt the ability of people's greed to force someone else into a court room. Just look at the 'blurred lines' case where someone was inspired by a musical genre to write a song that didn't copy anyone's music but was still ordered to pay millions because he copied the general "feel" or "vibe" of someone else's work. ( https://a…

Ohhh good callout.

I also wonder if getty wins this will spur the creation of a new army of artists to manually create facsimiles of existing art expressly for the purpose of AI training.

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

#189

Post by joe_the_user »

ar-nelson wrote: post #129
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'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.

Indeed and your examples are intended to point to gray areas. But a much more problematic (for the user) example is: some Dall-E-like program spits out seemingly original images but 0.1% are visibly near duplicates of copyrighted images and these form the basis of a lawsuit that costs someone a lot of money. Copyright in general tends to use the concept provenance - knowing the sequence of authors and processes that went into the creation of the object [1] and naturally AI makes this impossible.

The AI training sequence either muddies the waters hopeless or creates a situation where the trainer is liable to everyone who created the data. And I don't think the question will answered just once. The thing to consider is that anyone can just create an "AI" that just spits out stock images (which is obviously a copyright violation) and so the court would have to look at detailed involved and neither the court nor the AI creator would want that at all.

ianal... [1] https://serc.carleton.edu/serc/cms/prov_reuse.html

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

#190

Post by wnevets »

sdenton4 wrote: post #183
wnevets wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not that the watermark is on them per se, but that the model tried to emulate an image it had seen before which had a watermark on it. Imagine showing a child a bunch of pictures with Getty watermarks on them, then they draw their own, with their own emulation of the watermark. That's essentially what's going on. The blurred watermark is what makes its obvious they used Getty's (copyrighted?) images to train t…

A world where we can't use copyrighted material to update neutral network weights is a world where we can buy books but not read them...

It is allowed to sale a book that is collection of pages from copyrighted books? Paragraph 1 is from a Stephen King novel, Paragraph 2 is from A Storm of Swords and so on? I am not a copyright attorney but that sounds like violation to me.
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