Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by LtWorf » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 7:31 AM UTC

kmeisthax wrote: post #242

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…

Both hypotheticals are likely infringement. The first example may be considered de minimus, but the courts hate using those words, so they might just argue that you didn't blur it enough to be unrecognizable or that it could be unblurred. However, the thing that makes AI training different is that: 1. In the US, it was ruled that scraping an entire corpus of books for the purpose of providing a search index of them i…

Searching books is different than generating books and selling them.

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

#342

Post by drusepth » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 7:36 AM UTC

ROTMetro wrote: post #219

mring33621 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

>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 generating a widget, you did not create art.

Does this still hold true if you worked through hundreds of variants of 'give me a picture of a frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow', generating dozens or hundreds of images for each version of your prompt, ultimately putting in hours or days (or weeks) of work to produce a single image depicting the perfect umbrella-wielding frog you were originally envisioning? This isn't even considering inpainting, masking, and other image-in-image manipulations these models can also do to get you closer to the results you're trying to create.

For artists using AI, this seems to be the more common case and is a far cry from the idealistic one-prompt-and-done that usually gets used for an example in these conversations.

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

#343

Post by isaacfrond » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 8:00 AM UTC

I read a paper some time ago, where somebody ran a facial recognition algorithm on the output of a GAN face generator. It found lots of images in the training data that looked strikingly similar.

In other words, one reason AI images look so good, is that look a lot like actual images.

Thing, is for the love of me, I can't find the paper anymore? Who knows it?

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

#344

Post by kiicia » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:40 AM UTC

chlorion wrote: post #321

cheald wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wouldn't extend to your table, but if you used that table to generate a book of your own, it's very possible a serious person would claim the author's copyright extends to the generated book.

there is only one way frequency tables would return original work, all other versions would be gibberish, its like when using Huffman tables for compression where table itself is not equal to original data

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

#345

Post by shadowgovt » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 11:50 AM UTC

ROTMetro wrote: post #333

shadowgovt wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 general, not if those prompts were given to a human who does the actual work. Unless that human was contracted under a work-for-hire agreement, in which case absolutely yes.

> You can't own colors or dimensions

Interesting. I was mistaken and in the specific case of a square of a particular color, you are quite right. https://www.owe.com/resources/legalities/legalities-15-is-a-...

This surprises me because I've observed you can own zero volume for a duration in the music space. I'm not sure why the visual space would differ, but the interpretation of copyright is extremely path-dependent law so I shuldn't be surprised if they do.

https://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/

That having been said, I suspect that while simple shapes are not copyrightable because they fail a uniqueness and common-usage test, the output of a stable diffusion run does not fail such a test, being a unique artifact that has never been seen before.

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

#346

Post by pbhjpbhj » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:07 PM UTC

deltasevennine wrote: post #282

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I look at something I create an image of it on my retina. When a computer "looks" it creates an image somewhere. The former is allowed, the latter comes against copyright scrutiny, things like caching images to show you a webpage have been addressed by copyright law--through precedent--and this will be similarly addressed.

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

#347

Post by noduerme » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:12 PM UTC

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…

>> 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)

True for literature, which can be copyrighted. Not true for logic. Code that performs the same function but is written independently can't, by definition, violate copyright. It could violate a patent, but it's much harder to patent code.

However, in the AI case, the models themselves do nothing even approaching such translation. They fully incorporate what are essentially just compressed representations of existing works into their weights.

I'd guess if any single copyright holder could show that their work could be substantially retrieved from the model with the right query string, they'd have a reasonable claim on royalties from the entire model, or else the whole model would have to be thrown out.

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

#348

Post by sacado2 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:38 PM UTC

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 not as obvious as you may think. This is closely related to the "monkey selfies" copyright claim issues. The court didn't seem to agree with the photographer who said "I own the copyright of those pictures because I configured the camera by myself and put it there, the monkey only pushed the button."

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

#349

Post by sacado2 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 12:49 PM UTC

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.

The fact watermarked images are available for free doesn't necessarily mean you can do whatever you want with them. It depends on what the getty licence on watermarked images says exactly. I'm pretty sure they don't include something like "you can use these picture as data in automated processes". They are (I guess) available "for your eyes only".

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

#350

Post by Xelynega » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #264

kranke155 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the copyright still not applicable if your encoding table has rules to reconstruct text from? No serious person would argue that copyright doesn't extend to the encoded version of the book and prevent me from profiting off it.

I believe the same applies to AI generation of text/images. Just because you're encoding the data in statistical models doesn't mean that it's not encoded.