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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

#261

Post by pbhjpbhj »

strangescript wrote: post #232
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if you can create the array without using the image then you're golden; but if you're not using the image then you're not training on the image. If you are using the image, then you're deriving (at least) a representation from the image.

IME, limited as it is, courts don't take kindly to overly clever attempts to differentiate things from what everyone agrees they are; like 'the file isn't the image, so I can copy that', judges aren't stupid.

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

#262

Post by PeterisP »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #196
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 believe the more important issue is that material generated through AI is not copyrightable by the author of such images. If you are an artist you can't claim any copyright on what you're generating. If you're not the copyrighted holder it follows that you can't sell it or that you can't complain if someone else copy it (verbatim) and sells it.

The criteria for a work being copyrightable literally is the slightest touch of creativity, and I'm quite certain that writing a prompt and selecting a result out of a bunch of random seeds would qualify for that.

Fully automated mass creation would get excluded, as would be any attempts to assert that copyright to a non-human entity, but all the artwork I've seen generated by people should be copyrightable - the main debatable question is whether they're infringing on copyright of the training data.

On a different note, I'd argue that the models themselves (the large model parameters, as opposed to the source code of the system) are not copyrightable works, being the result of a mechanistic transformation, as pure 'sweat of the brow' (i.e. time, effort and cost of training them) does not suffice for copyright protection, no matter how large.

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

#263

Post by pbhjpbhj »

deltasevennine wrote: post #181
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yeah, the law isn't morality.

>Why should we ban that. //

Well, we have copyright law, so I was starting there, though I'd be personally pretty interested in a state that made copyright very minimal. The question is what type of encouragement do we want in law for the creative arts; I doubt any individual would create the copyright law that lobbying has left us with, but equally I think most people would want to protect human artists somewhat when AIs come to eat their lunch and want to make a plate out of the human artists previous work [it's like a whole sector is getting used to train their replacement, but they're not even being paid whilst they do that].

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

#264

Post by cheald »

kranke155 wrote: post #250
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 completely ridiculous to believe that copyright claims are unenforceable because you ran it through an ML transformation engine. I hope Getty sues and wins. Train your datasets on your own data! This is mass IP theft.

Nonsense. Observations about certain characteristics of a copyrighted work are not covered under that work's copyright. If I take a copyrighted book and produce a table of word frequencies in that book, no serious person would claim that the author's copyright domain extends to my table.

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

#265

Post by cheald »

shagie wrote: post #245
plussed_reader wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes... ish. On one hand, if you do a "this is the size of the net" and then divide it by the number of training images, its rather small amount of storage per image. On the other hand, when I was playing with stable diffusion on the command line following the instructions of https://replicate.com/blog/run-stable-diffusion-on-m1-mac python scripts/txt2img.py --prompt "wolf with bling walking down a street" --n_samples…

That's a very interesting result. Did you happen to capture the seed for either of those first two images? It would be interesting to try to reproduce.

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

#266

Post by petercooper »

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 first thought that if Getty were to sue anyone, it would be those actually publishing and distributing works derived from copyright material (i.e. end users) rather than the providers of mere tools.

But I wonder if they could make the argument that the ML model itself is a "derivative work" (I don't agree that it is, but I can see the case being made). That would be a heck of a court case and resurface a lot of the "illegal number" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number) stuff again.

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

#267

Post by bergenty »

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…

Getty already ruined Google images by not letting them link directly to the image, I’m going to be massively pissed off if they try and ruin this ecosystem as well.

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

#268

Post by unity1001 »

pessimizer wrote: post #204
unity1001 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can this be in actuality prevented? By abolishing copyright and making crediting the author a habit. There is no way copyrights can survive the AI. There is no way human civilization will let 200 year old legal practices hold back technological advancement.

> There is no way human civilization will let 200 year old legal practices hold back technological advancement. Human civilization has kings and queens, and laws based on the sayings of ancient prophets. Instead of trying to figure out what "human civilization" will accept, figuring out what current wealthy capital-owners will accept will be more predictive.

Even if wealthy-capital owners get the AI banned where they can, the countries where they don't hold the power will get ahead by not banning the AI/

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

#269

Post by bergenty »

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.

So what, me drawing the exact same image based on a Getty image doesn’t violate anything and everything the AI is doing is massively derivative so I don’t see how they could possibly have a case.

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

#270

Post by Gigachad »

systemvoltage wrote: post #223
ciberado wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They realized immediately that AI has reached a disruptive point for the stock photography industry, just like the digital composition changed the rules years ago. Probably their value in the advertisment production chain is going to become close to zero in a few years, and they will try to stop or at least slow it down. But once we have open source models released to the public I cannot see how a local legislation c…

I’m going against the grain but we should also recognize that it takes real effort and time to professionally take stock photographs and Getty has a lot of consignments. They travel, they go to junkyards, they search for subjects to take photos of. Catalog them. All this isn’t free and these people would need to put food on the table. This isn’t similar to “Elevator operators were obsolete after they had a control pa…

I don't think most stock image users really care all that much. They just want a picture of someone pointing at a whiteboard which AI will generate pretty well. And then people with a little more talent will use AI plus their knowledge of good photography to tweak and tune the output to generate high quality stuff at a fraction of the cost of going out and taking real photos.
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