Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 390 posts

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

#251

Post by not2b »

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…

For case 2, translating a novel from, say, English to Japanese, still requires permission of the holder of the copyright to the English version, even though the resulting novel "does not contain a single line ... identical to the original".

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

#252

Post by not2b »

nneonneo wrote: post #136
ar-nelson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Yes, I expect that if you ask the model for "Getty images photo of [famous person] doing [thing Getty Images has only one photo of that person doing]" you might well get the original photo out.

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

#253

Post by paulryanrogers »

Filligree wrote: post #47
paulryanrogers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans don't usually do stroke for stroke copies of paintings. Or pixel for pixel sampling of photos, unless they get rights to the sources.

Neither does the AI, so what’s the point? Yes, if you look hard enough you’ll find some. But that’s true on either side.

When humans copy verbatim, even only partially, there are consequences unless it's fair use.

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

#254

Post by sdenton4 »

snovv_crash wrote: post #229
sdenton4 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can train it but not for commercial purposes. Nobody cares what you do at home, but if you want to use someone else's work to make money they will come knocking for their cut.

Does O'Reilly ask for a percentage of a software engineer's income after they've read their book of perl recipes?

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

#255

Post by ROTMetro »

shadowgovt wrote: post #233
ROTMetro wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

But the photographer took the picture, determined the framing and composition. A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image.

Their pulling it from a pile is not an act of creation, and therefore does not qualify. You have to CREATE a work, not critique/currate it.

At best you have an 'anonymous work' by Title 17.

An “anonymous work” is a work on the copies or phonorecords of which no natural person is identified as author.

The fact that it is a curated 'anonymous work' does not make it somehow more copyrightable.

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

#256

Post by ROTMetro »

mring33621 wrote: post #108
ROTMetro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Also there was no need to call bullshit. You're the reason the internet sucks now.

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

#257

Post by PeterisP »

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…

Noone is contesting the fact that images where copyright is owned by Getty were used the model.

The contested issue is whether training a model requires permission from the copyright holder, because for most ways of using a copyrighted work - all uses except those where copyright law explicitly asserts that copyright holders have exclusive rights - no permission is needed.

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

#258

Post by PeterisP »

wnevets wrote: post #190
sdenton4 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have legally obtained copies of the relevant novels, according to the first sale doctrine you should be allowed to cut them up, staple first chapter of one novel to the second chapter of another and third chapter of the next, and then sell the result.

But the authors have the exclusive right to making more copies of their work, so if you'd want to make a thousand of these frankensteinbooks, you would need to get a thousand copies of the original books.

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

#259

Post by indymike »

ummonk wrote: post #200
indymike wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! Regardless of the copyright of the training data which really is unresolved, the copyright…

AI-produced art is still human-made, as a person does the job of engineering a prompt and selecting from the generated images. The copyrightability of such work is unlikely to ever seriously be in question.

This is what I would like to believe… but needs to be proven before I stake my business on it.

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

#260

Post by ar-nelson »

Beldin wrote: post #241
ar-nelson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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! To be clear, there's no law banning training an AI. There are laws for what you can do with other people's stuff. In short, maybe the AI field would indeed be crippled if they no longer freely take input from others without asking permission and/or offering compe…

That's true, but AI models trained on copyrighted images already exist and can't just be removed from the internet, and their output will often be indistinguishable from that of "clean" models. What I fear is a kind of legal hazard that would make even the possibility that AI had been used anywhere in a work radioactive.

Imagine another hypothetical: I create a derivative work by running img2img on another artist's painting without their permission. Whether the AI model in question contains copyrighted content or not, this is probably infringement.

Now suppose that, instead, I create an original work, without using img2img on someone else's art. But, as part of my process, I use AI inpainting, with a clean AI model, so that the work has telltale signs of AI generation in it.

And then suppose an artist I've never heard of notices that my painting is superficially similar to theirs--not enough to be infringement on its own, even with a subconscious infringement argument. But they sue me, claiming that my image was an img2img AI-generated derivative of theirs, and the AI artifacts in the image are proof.

With enough scaremongering about AI infringement, it might be possible for a plaintiff to win a frivolous lawsuit like this. After all, courts are unlikely to understand the technology well enough to make fine distinctions, and there's no way for me to prove the provenance of my image! If it becomes common knowledge that AI models can easily launder copyrighted images, and assumed that this is the primary reason people use AI, then the existence of any AI artifacts in a work could become grounds for a copyright lawsuit.

Post reply on HN