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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

#331

Post by iroh2727 »

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…

> because it would cripple the field of AI text and image generation

I don't disagree with this statement. But arguably, it's becoming clear that these fields exist, on an economic level, as a means for already powerful corporations and technocrats to gain ownership over and repurpose the labor of previous generations for profitable automation (not simply to create C-3PO or something).

Not unlike all those other non-digital areas of the economy (e.g. railroads were built on the blood, sweat, and tears of previous generations and they are now owned by a small few, likely unrelated to the descendants of the laborers who built them).

For some ML-related commentary on this subject, see e.g. https://nathanieltravis.com/2022/08/01/ai-research-the-corpo...

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

#332

Post by b800h »

anigbrowl wrote: post #182
b800h wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so there's a sense in which AI essentially destroys knowledge culture by performing a reductio-ad-absurdam on it. Examples: 1) Social content. We start with friend feeds (FB), they become algorithmic, and eventually are replaced entirely with algorithmic recommendations (Tiktok), which escalate in an AI-fuelled arms race creating increasingly compulsive generated content (or an AI manipulates people into genera…

> We become puppets driven by intelligences orders of magnitude more sophisticated than us to mine resources in order to keep them running What do you think corporations are

Well, typically not cleverer than most people, until you combine them with AI.

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

#333

Post by ROTMetro »

shadowgovt wrote: post #286
ROTMetro wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe. Everything from back when I was a real person and dealt with copyright, patent, and trademark lawyers tells me otherwise, but I know this from the tech industry side/tech industry lawyers and not art specifically. My reading of Title 17 tells me otherwise. But maybe you are right. And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain.

In your case, you would not be able to copyright that piece of art. You can't own colors or dimensions. You could copyright an installation of the art piece, so that no one else could display a [200,10,10] colored piece of art with the same dimensions you used and call their installation 'Ruddy Square', but that is the only copy protection you would be given.

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

#334

Post by zarzavat »

sojournerc wrote: post #324
Morgawr wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's more like two paintings sharing the same color scheme or using the same brand+color of paint but still being unique. The performance of those melodies and structures is what makes a song unique and creative.

Adam Neely the YouTuber has produced several videos about recent legal cases where musicians sue because of some superficial similarities. In most cases the higher courts in the US recognize that copying is part of the normal creative process and is not infringement unless it is a blatant rip-off.

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

#335

Post by cheald »

shagie wrote: post #280
cheald wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alas no. And I haven't been able to tickle it again in the right way to get those images out. The invocation of that run is still in my scroll back: (venv) shagie@MacM1 stable-diffusion % python scripts/txt2img.py --prompt "wolf with bling walking down a street" --n_samples 6 --n_iter 1 --plms Global seed set to 42 Loading model from models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/model.ckpt Global Step: 470000 LatentDiffusion: Runni…

I'm thus far unable to reproduce it.

Given:

Rick Astley Never Gonna Give You Up Steps: 20, Sampler: PLMS, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 4231695436, Size: 512x512, Batch size: 2, Batch pos: 0

I ran a couple of batches of 32 (64 images total): https://imgur.com/a/74IbCuD

(The images with the nonsensical but obvious Impact font that was learned from memes are quite funny, though)

If you can get a full set of parameters (size, sampler, seed, prompt, cfg scale) then I should hopefully be able to reproduce your results, though.

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

#336

Post by brobinson »

nomel wrote: post #228
strangescript wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it copyright infringement to experience copyrighted material and make new art based on those experiences? Of course not. The end here is inevitable. Even if some really backward thinking judgements go through, eventually it will wash out. In 20 years AI will be generating absurd amounts of original content.

> Is it copyright infringement to experience copyrighted material and make new art based on those experiences? Yes, covered under "derivative work": https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf > A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works. Common derivative works include translations, ..., art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works. Another common…

So by this logic, Deadly Premonition and Mizzurna Falls are derivative works of Twin Peaks?

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

#338

Post by chii »

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…

> Blurring a work but incorporating it would nonetheless still be derivative, I think.

you have to show that the derivative work is a substantial part of the new work.

If your background is a small portion of the new image, and the blue makes it difficult to see that it was the original, and that any other blurred image would've done the same job, then i would argue that the final new painting does not constitute a derivative work.

A similar argument could be made for AI models. The model consists of billions of training images. None of these images are individually substantial in the final output, despite that on some part of the output, you can trace a derivative work. For example, if an author used 1 million books, and copied every nth word from each book and merged it, to produce a final book (which happens to produce a coherent book), i would argue that the author did not infringe copyright on any of the original 1million source books.

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

#339

Post by andybak »

not2b wrote: post #252
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…

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.

Should be easy to try. My guess is that it most likely won't.

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

#340

Post by drusepth »

spoonjim wrote: post #86
hospadar wrote: post #48

It does seem like much of Getty's business is redundant if you can trivially generate "photograph of person laughing while eating a bowl of salad" Maybe the new business is "reasonably high degree of trust that if it's a Getty image it's not an AI fake" for news outlets and the like who want to sell trustworthiness

But if OpenAI's ability to create a photograph of a person laughing while eating a bowl of salad is due to mashing up these photos that were mainly from Getty Images, then Getty and its photographers would have a reasonable claim.

There are a lot of things (animals, buildings, locations, etc) that I'd bet I've only ever seen in (copyrighted) Getty images, but I could probably also paint new representations of from memory.

Would Getty also have a claim against me?

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