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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

#351

Post by mring33621 »

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 someone asks me to make/paint/draw a picture of a 'frog holding an umbrella under a rainbow', I would be basing my new work on all the 'art' and images that I have seen in the past. I might even search for related content on the internet for inspiration!

So long as I don't copy a previous, copyrighted image 'too much' (this is fuzzy and maybe should be quantified legally in our bright, digital future), I can claim copyright on the new image.

Since, so far, non-human things are not allowed to hold copyright, a human can claim copyright over works created by non-human things, that the human owns or controls. It's even easier to reason about if the human and non-human thing 'collaborate' on the final creative product. So, if I fiddle around with my inputs (prompts) into Super Diffusion Power Plus Gold Edition, then we (the software and I) collaborated. And I own the output that I chose (curated) as the best one.

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

#352

Post by adamsmith143 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #187
adamsmith143 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stable Diffusion is already out in the world. The cat is out of the bag.

Yah, but think of Napster getting eventually usurped by Spotify. The danger is that it's legally no longer possible to update the models (which are very expensive to train), and we end up with only Disney with the copyright horde large enough to train decent models, let alone good ones...

They are indeed hard to train but groups like EleutherAI have already basically crowdsourced training LLM's successfully so it's absolutely doable by non Corporate/Academic/Government entities to train high end models like this.

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

#353

Post by Xelynega »

beiller wrote: post #281
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?

It's my understanding that a lot of branded material(like "sonic the hedgehog") was filtered out of training data so that the copyright challenges were limited to small holders that can't fight back instead of large holders like Sega and Disney.

So any prompts expecting copyright characters is going to end up wierd because of lack of training data.

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

#354

Post by snovv_crash »

sdenton4 wrote: post #254
snovv_crash wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can train it but not for commercial purposes. Nobody cares what you do at home, but if you want to use someone else's work to make money they will come knocking for their cut.

Does O'Reilly ask for a percentage of a software engineer's income after they've read their book of perl recipes?

O'Reilly sells their books to software engineers with the intent for them to use the information to further their knowledge and apply it in a commercial setting.

The images in Getty are provided with the intent to be used only as a catalogue for purchasing corresponding images without watermarks.

The difference in intent is very clear, and a judge would make a distinction between these.

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

#355

Post by Xelynega »

LanceH wrote: post #152
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…

Is there a difference here? With code, you literally copy it and put it in a device and fail to provide the source, breaking the GPL. With a copyrighted set of images, you scan those and break them down into some set of data and then never need to actually copy the images themselves -- my understanding anyway. Does that set of data contain copied works? Or is it just a set of notes about the works that have been view…

The difference seems like semantics. You're taking compyrighted data, encoding it, then deriving a work from the output of that encoded data.

If I compress copyrighted works and redistribute them as my own I'm technically breaking them down into some set of data and never actually distributing copyrighted work, right?

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

#356

Post by Xelynega »

cheald wrote: post #172
toomanydoubts wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that's an issue. Using photoshop doesn't automatically allow you to post the images. You can post the images IF it was not made/edited by an AI model, regardless of if photoshop was used. If you use the Stable Diffusion plugin, then you're using stable diffusion, and therefore can't post the image. It doesn't matter at all that you used the photoshop plugin.

A lot of Photoshop's built-in tools could arguably qualify as "AI models" (think things like content-aware fill!) - I don't think Getty would say that using them would disqualify your image, but isn't that essentially the same thing, except that this version is ultra high-powered version?

Except they're not. Content aware fill uses only your image as the input and runs space-time video completion. Since it doesn't have to train on datasets, it's not part of the conversation.

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

#357

Post by ummonk »

sacado2 wrote: post #348
ummonk wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

The court didn't rule on the monkey selfies copyright claim. The copyright owner just ran out of money to pay for a lawyer and gave up fighting against Wikimedia.

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

#358

Post by ummonk »

salawat wrote: post #290
ska wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vector art is just math, yet you can get copyright on it.

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

#359

Post by not2b »

andybak wrote: post #339
not2b wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You won't get the exact image, because the model doesn't perfectly memorize all inputs, but you'll likely get something so close that everyone would consider it a derivative work.

This is very similar to getting Copilot to spit out Carnack's fast inverse square root code with the right prompt.

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

#360

Post by andybak »

not2b wrote: post #359
andybak wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You won't get the exact image, because the model doesn't perfectly memorize all inputs, but you'll likely get something so close that everyone would consider it a derivative work. This is very similar to getting Copilot to spit out Carnack's fast inverse square root code with the right prompt.

There's some interesting thought experiments around this:

1. You do the same thing but don't use "getty" in the prompt.

2. You do the same thing with "getty" in the prompt on a model NOT trained with Getty images

3. You ask a human photographer to do the same thing and you show him a Getty image

4. You ask a human photographer to do the same thing but without showing him a Getty image (but he's presumably seen many in the past).

If 1 and 2 produce images that are also similar to a Getty image, where do we stand? I imagine it's likely that a trained model can learn "getty-like" without any actual Getty images to make 2 happen.

And currently IP law treats humans and AIs the same (in the sense that infringment rules don't distinguish between them) so would you consider 3 and 4 to be similar to 1 and 2?

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