Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by 3000000001 » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #163

nneonneo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about reconstruction, it’s about the notion of a “derivative work”. Translating a work would absolutely be derivative (consider the case of translating a literary work between languages: this is a classic example of a derivative work). Blurring a work but incorporating it would nonetheless still be derivative, I think. The challenge with these models is that they’ve clearly been trained on (exposed to) copyr…

> If they were humans, a court could deem the outputs copyright infringement I'm not sure I understand how this is self-evident. The closest equivalent I can see would be a human who looks at many pieces of art to understand: - What is art and what is just scribbles or splatter? - What is good and what isn't? - What different styles are possible? Then the human goes and creates their own piece. It turns out, the lega…

This is exactly my thinking. If the court finds somebody guilty of infringing on a human-made piece of digital art the response is to punish the human, not to ban or impose limits on photoshop.

At risk of stretching the analogy, you don’t charge the gun with murder…

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

#232

Post by strangescript » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #141

anigbrowl wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

It seems clear that such training of AIs requires copying an image onto a computer system in which the training algorithms are performed. Maybe that fits in Fair Use (I doubt it: it's commercial and harms the original creators) but it certainly doesn't fit in Fair Dealing (in UK). I certainly, personally, approve of weak copyright laws that allows for things like training AIs without getting permission; neither USA,…

The AI doesn't actually need the image. It needs a two dimensional array that represents the pixel values. I am sure there are some very clever ways to get around that hurdle if that is where the bar is set.

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

#233

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 8:56 PM UTC

ROTMetro wrote: post #219

mring33621 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. I made a new image using a computer program that I was legally licensed to use. The program might be Corel Draw. It might be Blah Blah Diffusion Pro Plus. Either way, I made the image and I own the copyright, unless some other contract was made between myself and the program's owner or my employer.

A machine operator does not own the copyright on the parts his machine stamps out even though he puts in inputs. GM's engineers can own the copyright on a car they design in CAD. If you put in creative inputs using a tool, it is copyrightable (a car's design). If all you did was say, give my XYZ widget (in this case 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow') you only gave instructions for gene…

Do you have citations for a ruling that AI generated art is not copyrightable? To my knowledge, such a ruling has not been made, so we can at best make wild guesses at what the courts will find.

I don't think this particular wild guess is on the right track; the creative input given to the AI generator was the prompt. There is also an argument to be made that, in the same sense a photograph can be copyrighted even though it's just a single still image from a moment that occurred around it, an Ai-generated artwork can be copyrighted because the artist performed the creative act of retaining it. In essence, they pulled it from the soup of possible outputs and held it up as one worth noting, as a photographer pulls an image from the soup of possible moments and framings.

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

#234

Post by notahacker » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #168

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.

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…

I think you'd struggle to argue that the Getty watermark was a general style and composition principle and not a distinct motif unique to Getty (and in music copyright cases, the defence of plagiarising motifs inadvertently frequently fails).

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

#235

Post by romwell » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #163

nneonneo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about reconstruction, it’s about the notion of a “derivative work”. Translating a work would absolutely be derivative (consider the case of translating a literary work between languages: this is a classic example of a derivative work). Blurring a work but incorporating it would nonetheless still be derivative, I think. The challenge with these models is that they’ve clearly been trained on (exposed to) copyr…

> If they were humans, a court could deem the outputs copyright infringement I'm not sure I understand how this is self-evident. The closest equivalent I can see would be a human who looks at many pieces of art to understand: - What is art and what is just scribbles or splatter? - What is good and what isn't? - What different styles are possible? Then the human goes and creates their own piece. It turns out, the lega…

>I'm not sure I understand how this is self-evident. The closest equivalent I can see would be a human who looks at many pieces of art

...and then gets told "Hey, go and paint me a copy of that Andy Warhol piece from memory".

The model might not violate the copyright, but its output is derivative work if the copyrighted works are included in the training set.

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

#236

Post by plussed_reader » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #132

plussed_reader wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The "free samples" are still copyrighted by the artist. Adding a watermark to it doesn't remove the copyright and arguably, adding the copyright doesn't even create a new work. Their business is hosting, indexing, and managing the licensing for art that has been submitted to them and licensed to another party.

And they're available for public consumption at the website, albeit at reduced quality.

Are the images part of the distributed data set? I thought it was values/coefficients that manifest from the algorithmic analysis of the source image?

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

#237

Post by notahacker » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 9:16 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #185

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…

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.

Because the copyright holder has granted you the right to look at paintings and hasn't granted you the right to store them on your server to perform the mathematical transformations necessary to facilitate an adaptation-on-demand service.

Even if it was plausible to believe the mechanics of how human brains process art was particularly similar to a diffusion model or GAN, I don't see "but human brains are deterministic functions of their inputs too" as being a successful legal argument any time soon. You'd have to throw out rather more of the legal system than just copyright if those arguments start to prevail...

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

#238

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

filoleg wrote: post #222

joe_the_user wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a student studied an older master in school and produced a painting inspired by that old master that included a copy of the signature of the old master, this would be more indication of intent to fraud than if they didn't include the signature. Copyright can be fairly flexible in interpreting what constitutes a derivative work. The Getty water is evidence that an image belongs to Getty. If someone produces an imag…

What if it was not the copied signature of the old master, but a new one with a similar style and placed in a similar spot on the painting, but with the name of the student instead and looking blurry/a bit different? Because that's what's happening here, and that doesn't sound quite like fraud. Another scenario, what if i create a painting of a river by hand in acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-looking thing on…

My argument isn't really whether this is morally fraud. Maybe the device is really being "creative" or maybe it's copying. The question is whether the things supposed originality can be defend in court.

What if i create a painting of a river by hand in acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-looking thing on top using acrylic? As for why, i would put it there as an integral part of the piece, to allude to the fact of how corporations got their hands over even the purest things that have nothing to do with them, with the fake watermark in acrylic symbolizing it.

A human artist might well do that and make that defense in court. For all anyone knows, some GPT-3-derived-thing might go through such a thought process also (though it seems unlikely). However, the GPT-3-derived-thing can't testify in court concerning it's intent and that produces problems. And it's difficult for anyone to make this claim for it.

Edit: Also, if instead of a single work (of parody), you produced a series of your own stock photos, used the Getty Watermark and invited people to use them for stock photo purposes, then your use of the copyrighted Getty Watermark would no longer fall under the parody exception for fair use.

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

#239

Post by samstave » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #94

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

So funny how ppl are defending Getty when they don’t know their history…

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

#240

Post by cheald » Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #234

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…

I think you'd struggle to argue that the Getty watermark was a general style and composition principle and not a distinct motif unique to Getty (and in music copyright cases, the defence of plagiarising motifs inadvertently frequently fails).

From the model's perspective, it's not a distinct motif, that's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any concept of what a "watermark" is. As far as it's concerned, it's just a compositional element that happens to be in some images. Most "watermarks" Stable Diffusion produces are jumbles of colorized pixels which we can recognize as being evocative of a watermark, but which isn't the actual mark.

A quick demo: I fed in the prompts "a getty watermark", "an image with a getty watermark", and "getty", and it spat out these: https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG - not a watermark to be seen (though lots of water).

I was then able to generate an obviously-not-a-stock photo containing something approximating a Getty watermark, with the prompt "++++(stock photo) of a sea monster, art": https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ - the heavily forced attention on the "stock photo" forces the model to say "okay, fine, what's something that means stock photo? I'll add this splorch of white that's kinda like what I've seen in a lot of things tagged as stock photos" and it incorporates that into the image as a to satisfy the prompt.

We can easily recognize that as attempting to mimic the Getty watermark, but it's not clearly recognizable as the mark itself, nor is the image likely to resemble much of anything in Getty's library.