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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

#281

Post by beiller »

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…

Most of the usage I've seen or even tried myself is like "Sonic the hedgehog doing a kickflip". It kind of makes it obvious in my opinion that yeah, this is pretty much not right. Even worse I'm seeing things like "Sonic the hedgehog artstation in the style of (artist xyz)". Is it just ripping artists images from art station without explicit permission?

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

#282

Post by deltasevennine »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #263
deltasevennine wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prot…

copyright doesn't apply. Nothing was copied.

The AI was trained in the same way you trained your brain when you look at something. Nothing is copied. Nothing immoral was done. No law was broken.

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

#283

Post by pvaldes »

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.

A better metaphor would be copying and then claiming that you created the original art. Studying can explain but does not replace the subject of study. Producing a painting based in previous paintings can create further problems.

In art is very common that some author review their own work and made several paintings of the same subject. Artists made several attempts to conquer a panting, they draw studios or use different mediums. Photographers reproduce one portrait 20 years later to see how the subject changed. If you insert an IA image in the middle and copyright it, then any posterior painting on the same subject, even by the original author, would became derivative of the IA image that replaced it. This could even go so far as excluding the artists to review their most successful works.

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

#284

Post by CPLX »

judge2020 wrote: post #146
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…

Note that a derivative work doesn't instantly make it 'fair use' for the purposes of copyright. You typically still need 'adaptation' permission from the copyright holder to made a derivative work of it, so you can't make 'Breaking Bad: The Musical' by recreating major scenes in a play format, at least not without substantially changing it[0]. For the purpose of fair use, copyright.gov has an informative section titl…

It’s the opposite of what you’re suggesting in the first sentence. Something being a derivative work is a fairly clear sign that it’s not fair use.

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

#285

Post by beiller »

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…

You have the version which filters out NSFW images based on keywords. The code literally replaces images it thinks are NSFW with Rick Astley. Copyright aside (yes it's probably wrong to hard code an image of Rick Astley in the actual stable diffusion git repository) that image is not contained in the weights of the model.

- edit - please god tell me this is not an elaborate rick roll :)

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

#286

Post by shadowgovt »

ROTMetro wrote: post #255
shadowgovt wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “anony…

The picture was there in electromagnetic flux; the photographer just got in the way of the photons.

I think a similar argument can be made that in the infinite space of stable diffusion solutions, asking for one is just getting in the way of the noise. If a photograph is art, a human saying "this shook noise is worth showing people" is art.

Does the equation of copyright change if the artist says "I want a boat on a calm sea" and starts from a white triangle and blue rectangle? If not, there must be some point of human contribution of information between "words into the stable diffuser" and "using Photoshop on a canvas starting blank" where the work becomes copyrightable. Where is the line?

> A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image.

If I take a blank canvas, set color to [200, 10, 10], and click in the corner with the paint bucket, my contribution is five parcels of information (compressible to one, the color), and I get to claim copyright on the whole ruddy square that results.

Especially if I name it "Ruddy Square" and sell it to the MoMA.

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

#287

Post by unstatusthequo »

ISL wrote: post #83
biggerChris wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny because, I can make an image and they wouldn’t know it’s A.i generated.

They can ask that you assert, under substantial penalty of assuming Getty's potential liabilities, that it was not AI generated.

And force them to prove that you lied AND that it actually infringes copyright AND there are actual damages. GL, brah.

Or we can just not use Getty anymore. GANNY Images is born. Only AI, no artists, and have that entity sue Getty for anything similar under same theory.

There is always a counter-play,

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

#288

Post by schoen »

CPLX wrote: post #284
judge2020 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that a derivative work doesn't instantly make it 'fair use' for the purposes of copyright. You typically still need 'adaptation' permission from the copyright holder to made a derivative work of it, so you can't make 'Breaking Bad: The Musical' by recreating major scenes in a play format, at least not without substantially changing it[0]. For the purpose of fair use, copyright.gov has an informative section titl…

It’s the opposite of what you’re suggesting in the first sentence. Something being a derivative work is a fairly clear sign that it’s not fair use.

It's kind of a combination of these two positions: something being a derivative work means that it requires an excuse under copyright law, whether that be a license, or a fair use defense (which may be fact-specific), or some other justification. Without such a justification, the derivative work is treated as a copyright infringement.

This is a result of 17 USC §106(2), which says that one of the things that "the owner of a copyright [...] has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize" is "to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work", unless an exception (including fair use) applies.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

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

#289

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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…

> 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!

Temporarily, yes. However it wouldn’t be the worst thing if they were forced to work on sample-efficiency. And I maintain that if they want a large dataset of images they can collaborate with Twitter and Instagram to add an image license option to the image uploader, and provide a license option that explicitly allows this kind of use.

AI needs sample efficiency research and if they actually had to get consent for their images there are a lot of artists who wouldn’t feel like their work was being ripped off.

It’s probably better if this kind of use is broadly permitted, but I don’t think it’s the disaster some think it would be if they were forced to get consent. There’s already millions of openly licensed images in several collections online (Creative Commons, Wikimedia Commons) and if they forced people to provide licenses on sites like twitter we could actually have open datasets for this instead of these kind of grey areas of privately scraped datasets.

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

#290

Post by salawat »

ska wrote: post #273
MintsJohn wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's exactly what happens, AI isn't randomness, it's a set of predefined calculations. The randomness is in the seed/starting point. For e.g Stable Diffusion it is given/user input, resulting in perfect reproducibility.

I should have been clearer - that was rhetorical to point out that if you and I use the same prompt and pick the same resultant image, it's harder to claim either of us have copyright. This is a gray area. The tools themselves could introduce some stochastic aspect so that outputs are never identical, also. None of this leads to an obviously clear cut legal position wrt copyright.

Your (and the other person's) set pf inputs drive a mathematical function that derives the same output.

If we were all honest, we'd give up the idea of copyright altogether where ML is concerned. You can't get much closer to "It's just math, man" than what it is currently.

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