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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

#311

Post by Morgawr »

mr_toad wrote: post #304
Retric wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proving artwork you created is free from all copyright issues is similarly impossible, but in practice isn’t an issue. So, I don’t see any AI specific justification being relevant.

How common is it for an artist to accidentally generate a work that resembles an existing work?

I can't speak for digital art because I'm not an artist but I can say it's extremely common for original music to (often accidentally/subconsciously) include melodies or pieces of melodies from other music.

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

#312

Post by mannykannot »

chakalakasp wrote: post #303
3000000001 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except, of course, the human has very little control over what the AI outputs in TXT2TXT scenarios, at least in terms of whether the output would match the definition of copyright infringement of someone else's work. IMG2TXT is kinda different -- I think you could make a much stronger case for derivative work there. So you have a tool that can randomly create massive liability for you, and you can't know if its done…

The humans are the cause of it happening in the first place. Maybe the gun analogy is not such a stretch: if you pull the trigger, you own the consequences.

Reasonable fair use principles could distinguish personal and R&D use from commercial use.

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

#313

Post by karmasimida »

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…

> If they were humans, a court could deem the outputs copyright infringement

Why? I am a human, I can learn the composition of stock photos and use the idea in my work. There is no copyright infringement, or there is simply no way to prove it.

The connection needs to be really strong to consider something as derivative work.

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

#314

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#315

Post by Jevon23 »

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.

I'm not a lawyer and I can't say how existing copyright law applies to this situation, but, how is taking images and feeding them into an ML model different from taking library code and including it in your software?

In both cases, you take a series of bytes (the image data / the library source code) that is ultimately crucial to the functioning of your software, combine it with your own original code you wrote (training / compilation), and end up with a new output (the trained model / the binary executable) that is distinct from any of the original sources.

If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so you have to obey whatever terms come along with it.

Why is it fine to ignore the licensing terms for image data you incorporate into your software, but not third-party source code that you incorporate?

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

#316

Post by karmasimida »

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).

IMO, it is very difficult to prove

1: If that watermark is recognizable enough to be a getty watermark or something whose shape vaguely looks like a watermark. 2. Where that watermark is coming from.

From how the model is trained, it is possible that the model considers the watermark itself a style of the picture and mimics it. But it would be mission impossible to trace to a particular work that the inspiration is coming from.

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

#317

Post by karmasimida »

Jevon23 wrote: post #315
cheald wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not a lawyer and I can't say how existing copyright law applies to this situation, but, how is taking images and feeding them into an ML model different from taking library code and including it in your software? In both cases, you take a series of bytes (the image data / the library source code) that is ultimately crucial to the functioning of your software, combine it with your own original code you wrote (trai…

> If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so you have to obey whatever terms come along with it.

What if I read the code, understand its concepts, and re-implements another library that provide similar functionality without directly linking to the original repository, that is not an infringement, and actually how open source community has always been operating, like MariaDB to MySQL, or any projects that markets themselves as 'open source alternative' of some commercial software.

I would argue, the diffusion models are really good, it is possible that they capture the essentials of drawing that they learn no different than a human. Put in another way, it masters the imaging process at fundamental level

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

#318

Post by Jevon23 »

karmasimida wrote: post #317
Jevon23 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer and I can't say how existing copyright law applies to this situation, but, how is taking images and feeding them into an ML model different from taking library code and including it in your software? In both cases, you take a series of bytes (the image data / the library source code) that is ultimately crucial to the functioning of your software, combine it with your own original code you wrote (trai…

> If you use a GPL'd library in your software, then it's uncontroversial to say that you have to follow the terms of the GPL. You can't say "well actually, the compiler is just reading your source code and learning what sort of binary it should produce, just like a human learns by studying source code, so I actually don't have to follow your licensing terms". No one would buy that. You clearly used that library, so y…

>What if I read the code, understand its concepts, and re-implements another library that provide similar functionality without directly linking to the original repository, that is not an infringement

I agree, that's fine.

The analogous situation with image generators would be if the companies that trained the models had a human artist look at every image in their dataset, paint a unique but similar image, and then feed all of those images into the model, so that no copyrighted images were used in training without permission. But that's obviously not what they did. They just fed in the images unaltered, without getting permission.

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

#319

Post by karmasimida »

notahacker wrote: post #237
cheald wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 determinist…

> 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.

You just described how modern browser cache images.

The diffusion model is revolutionary at scale, but doesn't mean it is doing anything drastically different than what is allowed right now, e.g. any AI based image beautifying/denoise filter, just the scale changes everything.

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

#320

Post by fomine3 »

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,…

(IANAL) Use of copyrighted materials for AI training is explicitly allowed without permission in Japan law since 2019. https://storialaw.jp/en/service/bigdata/bigdata-12
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