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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

#241

Post by Beldin »

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!

To be clear, there's no law banning training an AI. There are laws for what you can do with other people's stuff.

In short, maybe the AI field would indeed be crippled if they no longer freely take input from others without asking permission and/or offering compensation. And maybe that's far, far from a bad thing.

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

#242

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

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 is fair use (see Authors Guild v. Google). The logic in that suit would be quite similar to a defense of ML training.

2. In the EU, ML training on copyrighted material is explicitly legal as per the latest EU copyright directive.

Note that neither of these apply to the use of works generated by an AI. If I get GitHub Copilot to regurgitate GPL code, I haven't magically laundered copyrighted source code. I've just copied the GPL code - I had access to it through the AI and the thing I put out is substantially similar to the original. This is likely the reason why Getty Images is worried about AI-generated art, because we don't have adequate controls against training data regurgitation and people might be using it as a way to (insufficiently) launder copyright.

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

#245

Post by shagie »

plussed_reader wrote: post #236
shagie wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 6 --n_iter 1 --plms

I got: https://imgur.com/a/N1OufD1

Now, you tell me if there's a copyrighted image encoded in that data set or not.

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

#246

Post by afro88 »

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…

It might technically be infringement, but the proof is in the pudding. It may be very hard to prove a specific image (or set of millions of images) were used in training.

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

#247

Post by kmeisthax »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #131

It's always weird to see the contrast between HN's reaction to copyright questions about text/image generation, and HN's reaction when it's code generation. When a model is trained on 'all-rights-reserved' content like most image datasets, the community say it's fair game. But when it's 'just-a-few-rights-reserved' content like GPL code, apparently the community says that crosses a line? Realistically, this tells me…

People don't like being told no.

The vast majority of all-rights-reserved content is either not licensable, or not licensable at a price that anyone would be willing to pay or can afford. Ergo we[0] would much rather see more opportunities to use the work without needing permission, because we will never have permission.

When getting permission is reasonable then people are willing to defend the system. And code is much more likely to be licensable than art.

I still think the "Copilot is GPL evasion" argument is bad, though.

[0] As in the average HN user

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

#248

Post by tombert »

egypturnash wrote: post #161
bakugo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was a website for artists instead of programmers you'd see the exact opposite pattern. Unfortunately, people only seem to care when it threatens their own livelihood, not when it threatens that of the people around them.

The average HN denizen gets so pissed off when I ask them to save their comment rejoicing in the inevitability of the elimination of my entire field, and take it out when next year's descendant of CodePilot gives them the same horrible sinking feeling that these things give me.

If Copilot can replace my job, I think that job should be replaced by copilot. I don't think that saving jobs should be a reason to not hinder progress. I hope that what I contribute to my company is more than whatever future version of Copilot can create, but if not I will try and find another career.

Will I be sad if I lose my job to AI/ML? Yeah, probably, but at some fundamental level that's why I've always tried to keep myself up to date with stuff that's harder to automate.

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

#249

Post by gus_massa »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #163
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…

> If they were humans, a court could deem the outputs copyright infringement I'm not sure I understand how this is self-evident. The closest equivalent I can see would be a human who looks at many pieces of art to understand: - What is art and what is just scribbles or splatter? - What is good and what isn't? - What different styles are possible? Then the human goes and creates their own piece. It turns out, the lega…

I think it's more common with music. Some musician goes to a foreign country and heard an obscure local song. 20 years later the musician has forgotten completely about the song and the trip. One day a catchy melody appears in the head of the musician out of the blue, and the musician complete the song and add a lyric. The song get famous, and later reach the foreign country, and everyone acuse the musician of plagiarism.

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

#250

Post by kranke155 »

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…

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.

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