[HN Gopher] Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of...
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Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright
claims
Author : baptiste313
Score : 206 points
Date : 2022-09-21 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| hospadar wrote:
| 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
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| How different[0] is that from a painter viewing ~half a dozen
| Getty images, then repainting in combination to not pixel-
| perfect, but near, detail? Afaik[1] the hypothetical painter
| has neither committed infringement on the source works and
| has input sufficient creative effort into the new that it
| would be copywritable.
|
| [0]Granted it differs a little, but not by that much either.
|
| [1]IANAL
| spoonjim wrote:
| The history of law and courts have decided that "different
| things can be treated differently."
| lbotos wrote:
| Your argument that "painting is transformative enough" and
| I suspect that wouldn't hold up in court.
|
| If you want an example of a painting that _might_ be
| transformative enough, here is Ryder Ripps
| https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ryder-ripps-sup-1 who
| referenced copyrighted photos and recreated them in this
| "wavy style".
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Morally it seems to basically be the same to me, but in
| practice it's different. The AI training is done by big
| corporations that are traceable and have big pockets that
| can be sued whereas "inspiration" cannot be taken to court
| even if you feel like you were stolen from.
| autoexec wrote:
| > "inspiration" cannot be taken to court even if you feel
| like you were stolen from.
|
| Never doubt the ability of people's greed to force
| someone else into a court room.
|
| Just look at the 'blurred lines' case where someone was
| inspired by a musical genre to write a song that didn't
| copy anyone's music but was still ordered to pay millions
| because he copied the general "feel" or "vibe" of someone
| else's work. (https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-
| lines-can-you-copy-a...)
|
| I imagine a lot of AI generated images might copy the
| "feel" or "vibe" of something in its training data.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Ohhh good callout.
|
| I also wonder if getty wins this will spur the creation
| of a new army of artists to manually create facsimiles of
| existing art expressly for the purpose of AI training.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| The difference is that it's mechanical. Copyright is
| intended to protect creators, and it's unclear whether this
| type of fair use properly balances the original creators'
| needs against the ML-based creators' needs.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No they wouldn't. Getty and its ilk would go to court and try
| to argue that they owned the concept of a portrait photograph
| if they could get away with it. They won't be able to produce
| specific images that match generated ones well enough to
| impress a jury at the emotional level. their abstract
| arguments about mdel constructions won't land because they're
| too abstract and frankly, boring; the defense will just bore
| a jury slightly less by putting some neural network nerd on
| the stand to say the opposite and the jury will shrug and go
| with its gut.
| habibur wrote:
| If AI generated Images are of better quality than the
| alternatives, getty or other orgs rejecting AI won't suppress its
| rise.
|
| Rather alternate markets for these images will arise quickly, and
| people will flock there leaving getty behind.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Once copyright rules for AI are ironed out, I imagine Getty
| will join in (or not be able to, if copyright law goes that
| way). Other commenters in this post have made points about the
| courts viewing AI as being non-copyrightable, but prompt-based
| AI works might be considered copyrightable. I think Getty just
| wants someone else to handle that inevitable legal battle
| first.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I'm looking at this too. The kneejerk reaction over the last
| few weeks has been for incumbent communities to start
| discriminating against AI art due to a standard of creative
| merit that they can't articulate. Whereas the AI art
| communities are rapidly iterating with what is a very creative
| process, that is just new and unfamiliar. I fully expect them
| to refine and articulate what that is. Controlling Stable
| Diffusion with variables is honing one's tools, seeding it with
| a sketch is very creative. Having tools for faster processing
| is no different than other content creation and what artists
| do. I think these communities will make their own places very
| quickly. Some people will monetize, others are just more able
| to fulfill their creative vision which I'm more a fan of than
| gatekeeping how much discipline is necessary to do art.
| can16358p wrote:
| So, where is the line?
|
| Diffusion models, Midjourney: not accepted. Okay that was the
| easy part.
|
| What if I use a AI-powered sharpening tool like Sharpen AI?
| Technically it's adding "AI generation" to it. What about
| Photoshop neural filters? What if I just extend/"touch" an image
| using DALL-E or Midjourney and still have the original image but
| with slight additions?
|
| Probably what they mean is "majorly created with AI" but still
| then how is "majorly" defined then?
| adultSwim wrote:
| It's not just splitting hairs either. Training datasets also
| come into play with tools like resolution upscalers.
| lbotos wrote:
| They are hedging their bets. Effectively the only time this
| will get resolved is if someone takes an AI artist to court for
| alleged infringement. Then and only then will the law be
| clarified wrt AI art.
|
| Until then, Getty is betting their business on the parts of
| copyright law they know well to reduce risk.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Yeah I'm curious too. My first thought was the recent post of
| the Blender3d plugin for using StableDiffusion to generate
| textures. If you made an elaborate 3d render, but most of your
| textures were AI generated, is that excluded? The wording
| suggests it would be banned, but it's not detailed enough to be
| sure.
| supergnu wrote:
| This is purely a PR move. They don't ban AI content because of
| fears of legal challenges, but because they see their entire
| business model fall to pieces. Why would anyone license images
| from them when they instead can generate any image for free? They
| only ban AI images in order to make PR with "fears of legal
| challenges" in the hope that the message that AI generated
| content could be a legal risk will stick in the heads of people.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect that Getty makes most of their money from licensing
| current interest photos to news orgs.
|
| I don't think that particular business is going anywhere (I
| hope -the last thing we need, is faked-up news images).
|
| I think ShutterStock may be more threatened.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I don't mean to be dismissive, but there's no doubt there'll be
| plenty of other places to host images like this.
|
| Does Stable Diffusion and the like automatically add some kind of
| steganographic code to images so it can be automatically
| detected, e.g. and not added to future training sets? Obviously
| this could be removed deliberately, but it would prevent the vast
| majority of cases.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| By default, Stable Diffusion watermarks images. However as it's
| open source, it's obviously trivial to remove it.
| lkbm wrote:
| I haven't looked into exactly what it does, but it seems like
| there's a (hidden?) watermark:
| https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/69ae4b35e0a...
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Stable diffusion does: https://github.com/CompVis/stable-
| diffusion#reference-sampli...
|
| Seems like a good idea to me with almost no downsides. If sites
| start discriminating against images based on that watermark
| though that's going to incentivize people to turn it off.
| init2null wrote:
| many people, if not most, use one of the many forks with the
| watermarking and the aggressive nsfw filter removed from the
| code. Graphics card RAM and speed is precious.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Is it a big issue if some AI generated pictures are included in
| training datasets?
|
| They would be cherry picked by humans, we don't share the bad
| pictures, and generated from other/older models.
| legendofbrando wrote:
| This is the pre-news story to the inevitable: "AI generated
| content bans Getty Images by forcing it into early retirement"
| blibble wrote:
| I can't wait until I can sue everyone that's ever used copilot
| because MS trained its corpus on my code
| fl0id wrote:
| It would be easier to use MS probably. Because there you know
| they used your code.
| toss1 wrote:
| I'm not sure how they'd enforce it while they still accept other
| digital art,
|
| But it seems a good decision, both on their stated concern about
| copyright (it's all a synthesis of the training sets, but who
| knows how much?), and also that AI art is effectively an infinite
| output stream that would very rapidly swamp all human output.
| jarrenae wrote:
| I've actually been working on a stock photos site built around
| Stable Diffusion for some of these exact reasons.
| https://ghostlystock.com/ is the first version, but we're adding
| a bunch of useful features to make it more useful for people to
| find legitimately useful stock images.
| hleszek wrote:
| And thus the AI auto filtering arm race has begun.
|
| New filters will appear to detect AI-generated images, then new
| models will be trained to bypass the filter, then upgraded
| filters will detect the images made by the new model, etc...
|
| In the end tough it's likely that we won't be able to distinguish
| between a real image and an AI-generated image, it's only a
| question of time.
| advisedwang wrote:
| So it's just for copyright reasons.
|
| I was wondering whether there were authenticity issues at stake?
| For example you can imagine someone wanting a stock image of "New
| York Skyline" and using an AI generated image that looks right
| but actually contains elements not in the skyline. This could
| undermine trust in Getty, which would be something they'd want to
| avoid.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Getty isn't alone in banning AI art, but they're doing it for
| different reasons than most.
|
| Lots of art sites are currently being flooded by subpar AI
| generated garbage. If humans curate AI output and upload only
| that one-in-a-thousand good looking output, that is fine.
|
| Instead we have bots uploading one image every few minutes,
| auto-generated from some randomly selected tags. Mostly the
| tags are wrong and the art should maybe instead be tagged such
| things as "grotesque" and "body-horror".
| z9znz wrote:
| Haha, Getty images should be planning a big pivot strategy, not
| worrying about AI content. I predict that within 5 years we will
| have this all refined to the point where we can generate almost
| any image we want, to our liking.
|
| If you're shopping for a stock photo, you only have what's
| available. I've looked for things before, and sometimes you have
| lots of options which just aren't quite what you want. So you
| take "good enough". AI can already generate "good enough" with
| some prompt and parameter practice.
| retzkek wrote:
| 1. Train AI model using your massive library of stock images
| and offer image generation to your massive existing customer
| base.
|
| 2. Sue or C&D all other image generation services that can be
| shown to be using models trained in part with your images.
|
| 3. Profit!
|
| It's really not a far step from "search for existing images
| with these keywords" to "generate image from these
| keywords/prompt". There's also the option to start with stock
| images, pick the closest, and have AI refine it to better match
| the user's vision, so now instead of "good enough" you have
| "perfect."
| z9znz wrote:
| > It's really not a far step from "search for existing images
| with these keywords" to "generate image from these
| keywords/prompt". There's also the option to start with stock
| images, pick the closest, and have AI refine it to better
| match the user's vision, so now instead of "good enough" you
| have "perfect."
|
| This is what I expect to see soon, from many competing
| providers. There are more than enough free images to train
| from such that Getty doesn't really have an advantage (imo).
|
| Unfortunately for them, I suspect they will follow the "big
| laggard corporation" playbook and use protectionist
| strategies instead of evolutionary. So they'll be late, and
| they'll lose significance.
| rfrey wrote:
| > Getty images should be planning a big pivot strategy
|
| They very well might be, with step 1 of the plan being "delay".
| mg wrote:
| A visualization of the announcement by a neural network:
|
| https://twitter.com/illubots/status/1572620909885669378
|
| (I'm building an illustration agency for robot brains, aka neural
| networks. So far, I have 3 robots who can consistently draw in
| their unique style. This is by illustration robot Jonas)
| spoonjim wrote:
| These are really cool
| spookie wrote:
| That's a cool idea, wish you luck!
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| Their legal worry probably makes sense, but my suspicious mind
| also feels like it's in their long-term interest maybe not to
| open pandora's box too much on letting AI art in, because
| wouldn't one of Getty's competitive advantages be the
| relationships it has with (I imagine) hundreds of thousands of
| artists? And so if they let AI art in then suddenly the historic
| artist relationship means less (because a lot more people can now
| contribute) and they may end up competing against new and
| emerging low-cost AI art marketplaces? Not sure, just speculating
| future scenarios and not eroding ones own competitive moat.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Any marketplace will eventually deal with low quality at scale
| without serious intervention. Amazon. Github when there's
| financial incentive for commits. eBay. Your local flea market.
| etc
| 7952 wrote:
| My guess is that they will want to exploit their archive to
| train their own commercial model. And to integrate AI into
| their existing product to modify their images.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The US Copyright Office asserts that AI generated images can't
| be copyrighted. Getty lives and dies by copyright and
| artificial scarcity/control of image rights.
|
| For stock images and non current/news events, Stable Diffuison
| and its successors are the future.
| holoduke wrote:
| You still need computing power to generate those images, so
| definitely room for commercial activity there. Getty could
| precompute billions of images and enlarge their inventory.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Sure, bt why should anyone waste time browsing their
| inventory when they can just make up their own?
| freejazz wrote:
| How are you going to sell stock images if you can't copyright
| them??
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| One could sell ML API credits to generate the images. For
| sure, industry revenue volume would decline if once an
| image is generated, you can't lock those specific bits up
| behind copyright.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| No they do not. They assert that the AI can't be the
| "author", it has to be a human.
|
| It's exactly the same as trying to assign copyright to your
| camera. Even though it generated the image from photons, it
| was the human pressing the button that mattered.
| _1 wrote:
| Wasn't there an issue a few years back about a photo taken
| by a monkey was non-copyrightable?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dis
| put...
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Yes and the ruling GP is citing is basically about that
| scenario but with a computer instead of a monkey.
|
| The monkey pressed the buttons on the camera without
| human direction, and so was the "author". Since the
| monkey is not a human, no copyright existed.
|
| In this case, the human claims the computer had no input
| at all, it did it by itself, hence no copyright. However
| we all know that computers can't do things by themselves
| in the same way as a monkey. The USCO accepts whatever
| explanation you give them though, so they had to go by
| the stated facts.
|
| In any case where the human operator of the computer
| actually does want copyright of the images, all they have
| to do is say "I setup the computer to generate the
| images" and they will own the copyright.
| jackblemming wrote:
| "I setup the monkey to take the picture"
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-
| offic...
|
| > An image generated through artificial intelligence lacked
| the "human authorship" necessary for protection
|
| > Both in its 2019 decision and its decision this February,
| the USCO found the "human authorship" element was lacking
| and was wholly necessary to obtain a copyright, Engadget's
| K. Holt wrote. Current copyright law only provides
| protections to "the fruits of intellectual labor" that "are
| founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind," the
| USCO states. In his most recent appeal, Thaler argued this
| "human authorship" requirement was unconstitutional, but
| the USCO has proven unwilling to "depart from a century of
| copyright jurisprudence."
|
| Lots of posts on the topic here:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=copyright+office+ai
| visarga wrote:
| Doesn't seem to apply to Stable Diffusion and Dall-E
| because there is substantial human work involved -
| picking and evolving the prompt and selecting the best
| result. Sometimes it's also collaging and masking. Maybe
| it could apply to making "variations" where you just have
| to click a button. But you still have to choose the
| subject image on which you do variations, and to pick the
| best one or scrap the lot.
|
| It's completely different from a monkey stealing your
| camera and shooting some pictures. AI art depends on the
| intent and taste of the human, except when it's an almost
| copy of a training set example, but that can be filtered
| by software.
|
| And if we look up from art, there are other fields that
| stand to benefit from AI image generation. For example
| illustration for educational contents, or ideas for
| products - shoes, clothes, cars, interior designs, maybe
| even cosplay costume design, it could be used to quickly
| create training data on a very specific topic, or to
| create de-biasing datasets (super balanced and diverse by
| design). A specially tuned version could function as a
| form of mood-inducing therapy - or Rorschach test. As a
| generative model of images it is of interest for AI
| research. So copyright gotta be weighed against all the
| other interests.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > a monkey stealing your camera
|
| It's really not different, because while everyone
| remembers it that way, the photographer went to great
| lengths to facilitate the monkey selfie.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dis
| put...
| bee_rider wrote:
| What if you were to... I dunno, create a community that
| lets in any anonymous person and talks about art.
| Generate Stable Diffusion prompts from their
| conversations. Then add an upvote system, so that rather
| than having an individual pick particular results, the
| best results generally filter to the top. You could even
| have the "upvotes" be based on dwell-times or something
| like that.
| lbotos wrote:
| Advisedwang summarizes it below, but here is the key line
| from the ruling:
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-
| board/docs/...
|
| "the author of the Work was identified as the "Creativity
| Machine," with Thaler listed as the claimant alongside a
| transfer statement: "ownership of the machine."
|
| USCO is maintaining that computers/AI cannot hold
| copyright, only humans can.
|
| If Thaler were to submit again with his own name, I
| wholeheartedly expect that they would accept it as long
| as they have no reason to believe it's been previously
| copyrighted or is not "sufficiently creative". Is that
| copyright legitimate? Someone would have to then
| challenge it in court!
| henryfjordan wrote:
| In that case the human asserted he had absolutely 0
| involvement in the matter, less than even using buttons
| on a camera.
|
| If you say "I directed the computer" or "I gave the AI a
| prompt", that would be enough to support your copyright
| claims.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Take a look at the decision:
| https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-
| board/docs/...
|
| The person was still trying to get the AI marked as the
| owner. In fact in the application "does not assert that
| the Work was created with contribution from a human
| author" which the office acceded to but did not actually
| agree or disagree with.
|
| So it still says nothing about whether a human can have
| copyright over a image they used an AI to make. It is
| another example that the AI itself having copyright is
| rejected.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A distinction without a difference, since this was just
| someone who was hoping to be the beneficial owner of an
| AI with an enforceable copyright interest. Recall the
| failure of the photographer who allowed monkeys to play
| with his camera equipment, leading one of them to take a
| selfie photo that became famous.
|
| The photographer asserted copyright on the basis that he
| had brought his camera there, befriended the monkeys, and
| set his equipment up in such a way that even a monkey
| could use it and get a quality image, but his claim to
| authorship was rejected and so he was unable to realize
| any profit from selling the photo - although I'm sure he
| made it up on speaking tours telling the story of how he
| got it.
|
| To be sure, AI created art is done in response to a
| prompt provided by a human, but unless that human has
| done all the training and calculation of weights, they
| can't claim full ownership on the output from the model.
| There's a stronger case where a human supplies an image
| prompt and the textual input describes stylistic rather
| than structural content.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| "Is an AI-created work copyrighted and owned by the AI?"
| and "Is an AI-created work copyrighted and owned by a
| human?" and " Is an AI-created work copyright
| infringement?" are three separate questions.
|
| Just because the answer is no to the first doesn't mean
| the answer is no to the second, and the third is ever
| more distinct. That's why this is an open question
| educated lawyers make guesses about.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I feel like recent considerations on the need to be
| creative in producing prompts for AIs like Stable
| Diffusion to work on/with promotes the argument that a
| human is sufficiently involved in the process (some
| times!) to warrant a claim to ownership of the copyright.
| If they trained the AI then I think it would be a no-
| brainer in favour of the human being a creative input
| into the creation of the work.
|
| _Just my personal opinion._
| bell-cot wrote:
| > The creators of AI image generators say the technology is
| legal...
|
| I'd bet that said creators are not lawyers, nor (well-)advised by
| lawyers, nor even able to cite substantial law nor case law to
| back up that "say".
|
| And with the extremely low bar for calling something "AI" these
| days - how close to "kinda like Google image search, but with a
| random filter or two applied" might a low-budget "AI" get?
| colordrops wrote:
| What about images that are a hybdrid, i.e. human composed but
| using AI elements? Similar to Worhol and photography. I'd imagine
| a large percentage of artwork will use this approach and Getty
| will have to evolve their stance to stay relevant.
| naillo wrote:
| I wonder if it applies to photoshop neural filters, or any kind
| of ML touchup like an instagram face filter. (Probably not but
| the line seems awfully thin and arbitrary.)
| fl0id wrote:
| one big difference is - what was it trained on? It is
| unlikley a little photoshop filter, whether ML or not was
| trained on billions of images.
| obert wrote:
| Makes sense, like banning electricity in candle stores.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| This question of copyright legalities and AI-generated media
| reminds me of the "Monkey selfie copyright dispute" from a few
| years back:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
| kyriakos wrote:
| Getty at this point should be feeling extremely threatened from
| ai generating images. It may not fully replace Getty but will
| take a large chunk of its business.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Depending on the prompt, it is certainly possible to generate
| images that are watermarked. I got some istock watermarks on a
| couple of images last I tried and I wasn't using istock or
| anything related as part of the prompt.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I'm not a copyright lawyer or anything, but the way I look at it
| is that the big concern is that you can't easily prove that a
| particular AI output is not just a memorized copyrighted training
| example. So even if we assume that it is perfectly allowable to
| train your model on unlicensed images, that doesn't protect you
| if your model spits out a carbon copy (or something close enough
| to be infringing) of a copyrighted image.
|
| A similar concern exists for things like Copilot, but it feels
| even harder to detect in the image domain.
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty easy to get Stable Diffusion to spit out
| images which are blatantly recognizable as slight distortions
| of real photographs or product images. I think "medieval market
| square" was a prompt which got me variations of one photo of a
| European city.
|
| It's sophisticated software, but the analogy with teaching a
| human artist really doesn't hold. Ultimately it's making
| complex mashups, and the copyright law around that is not
| straightforward.
| waffletower wrote:
| It is very easy to see hypocrisy in the FurAffinty statement:
| "Human artists see, analyze and even sample other artists' work
| to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds,
| even thousands of pieces of work from other artists that they
| have consumed in their lifetime to create derivative images," ...
| "Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don't
| believe it's in our community's best interests to allow human
| generated content on the site."
| kradeelav wrote:
| generated images =/= created
|
| AI generated images have the potential to be art in the eyes of
| the beholder, but let's not pretend that generation is the same
| as the mental, physical, and spiritual flow state that goes
| into painting or drawing a piece.
| supergnu wrote:
| why not? human artists do exactly the same thing - combine
| learned patterns into new compositions.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Human artists create with intent. Statistical image
| generation throws paint at a million walls and keeps the
| handful that are statistically close to images tagged with
| words in a prompt.
|
| That's not the same thing, and there's a reason why all of
| those generated images seem... off.
| kradeelav wrote:
| I think we may be talking about two different concepts
| regarding creation of art.
|
| Absolutely humans (and myself, I'm a professional
| illustrator) use a mental patterns to come up with ideas.
|
| The physical difference in AI generation is the lack of
| butt-in-chair time of the flow state.
| Painting/drawing/rendering art is not just mindless time to
| be compressed; it's a mental/physical/emotional/(and some
| would say spiritual) flow state with a lot of "input"
| abstractions beyond the patterns. Things like the
| creative's personal mood, personal past experiences, recent
| discussions with friends, recent texts they read ... those
| all fold into it. I wouldn't trade that flow state for the
| world, and it absolutely leaves fingerprints in my
| creations.
| supergnu wrote:
| so you say what disqualifies AI is that it's a lot faster
| than humans at doing the same task
| Jevon23 wrote:
| That's definitely part of it, yeah. There's other factors
| too, but that's obviously one of the big ones.
|
| So what? FurAffinity's stated goal with the ban is to
| protect human artists. Obviously banning something that
| undermines human artists is a step towards that goal. If
| you want a place to show your AI art, there are plenty of
| other sites that will welcome you.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Humans don't usually do stroke for stroke copies of
| paintings. Or pixel for pixel sampling of photos, unless
| they get rights to the sources.
| supergnu wrote:
| neither does AI. They don't operate in pixel space, but
| in latent space, which is the same as a mental model and
| the neural networks that do this even have a lot in
| common with how our visual cortex works. The conversion
| to pixel only happens in the last step when the concept
| has been generated as mental model (latent
| representation). They're doing the same thing human
| designers do, just orders of magnitude faster.
| Filligree wrote:
| Neither does the AI, so what's the point?
|
| Yes, if you look hard enough you'll find some. But that's
| true on either side.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| When humans copy verbatim, even only partially, there are
| consequences unless it's fair use.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I don't think that's what the parent is doing. They're
| pointing out the hypocrisy of claiming AI art is copying
| copyrighted works because human artists are trained in
| similar ways. That's not making a claim about whether or not
| AI art is "real" art.
| supergnu wrote:
| It's most of all not in the best interest of GI's bank account
| when people learn that they can generate any image they desire
| - for free.
| jfoster wrote:
| 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 watermarked content seems to have been
| included in the training data of the OpenAI model:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523
|
| If I'm correct about that, they will probably not settle, as
| their business was likely worth substantially more than any
| feasible settlement arrangement.
| samstave wrote:
| >> _4. At least some of their watermarked content seems to have
| been included in the training data*
|
| Screw them - GETTY is old media empire and they can suck an
| SSD._
| samstave wrote:
| So funny how ppl are defending Getty when they don't know
| their history...
| ISL wrote:
| In addition, Getty won't want to be liable for hosting
| something on which a third party holds copyright and hasn't
| assigned it to the submitter. They'll have plenty of liability
| and they have deep pockets.
| karmasimida wrote:
| They should sue, and it will clarify things a bit, and the
| matter would be settled for the years to come.
|
| What is certain is that AI-powered image creation will here to
| stay forever.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| But this will decide whether it's democratised or locked-up
| by those who own large bodies of training data.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Stable Diffusion is already out in the world. The cat is
| out of the bag.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 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...
| scarmig wrote:
| China.
| baq wrote:
| Should've said, everywhere except the US. I'd point to
| classics like Luxembourg or Sweden?
| Gigachad wrote:
| The models are expensive to train right now, but I
| suspect in 10 years, anyone with a multi gpu rig could
| train the equivalent of Stable Diffusion.
| petercooper wrote:
| I first thought that if Getty were to sue anyone, it would be
| those _actually publishing and distributing_ works derived from
| copyright material (i.e. end users) rather than the providers
| of mere tools.
|
| But I wonder if they could make the argument that the _ML model
| itself_ is a "derivative work" (I don't agree that it is, but
| I can see the case being made). That would be a heck of a court
| case and resurface a lot of the "illegal number"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number) stuff again.
| spoonjim wrote:
| There are two separate open US legal questions:
|
| 1) Does the use of copyrighted images in the OpenAI training
| model make the output a copyright infringement? This is not yet
| settled law. If I read a thousand books and write my own book,
| it's not an infringement, but if I copy and paste one page from
| each of a thousand books it would be.
|
| 2) Can an OpenAI generated image be copyrighted? Courts have
| ruled that an AI cannot hold a copyright itself, but whether or
| not the output can be copyrighted by the AI's "operator"
| depends a lot on how the AI is perceived as a tool vs. as a
| creator. Nobody would argue that Picasso can't hold a copyright
| because he used a brush as a tool, but courts have ruled that a
| photographer couldn't hold the rights to a photo that a monkey
| took with his equipment. The ruling here will probably stem
| from whether the AI is ruled to be a creator itself, which the
| human just pushes a button on, vs. a tool like a brush, which
| needs a lot of skill and creativity to operate.
| jfoster wrote:
| Yeah, I think it might actually be a good thing to have some
| of the copyright questions settled one way or the other.
| extra88 wrote:
| > if I copy and paste one page from each of a thousand books
| it would be.
|
| It almost certainly would not be infringement. One page of
| text out of an entire work is very small. Amount and
| substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
| copyrighted work as a whole is one of the factors considered
| when making a fair use defense. This hypothetical book would
| also have zero effect on the potential market for the source
| books.
|
| AI-generated images generally won't infringe on the training
| images because they don't substantially contain portions of
| the sources. If a generated image happened to be
| substantially similar to a particular source image, it could
| also affect the potential market for that source image. But
| it's also likely that there tons of human-made images that
| are coincidentally also substantially similar and they're not
| infringing on each other; they're also probably in the AI's
| training set so good luck trying to make the case that _your_
| image in the training is the one being infringed. On top of
| that, if the plaintiff could win, the actual market value of
| the source work is relevant to damages and that value is
| likely almost nothing so congratulations, you tied up the
| legal system just to get one AI-image taken down.
|
| BTW, using all the images to train the AI is not itself
| infringement; I can't say there was no wrong-doing in the
| process of acquiring the images but using them to train the
| AI was not infringing on the copyrights of those images.
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
| belorn wrote:
| A few seconds of a song is also very small, and yet it only
| take a few notes in some cases for a court to find someone
| guilty of copyright infringement.
|
| > On top of that, if the plaintiff could win, the actual
| market value of the source work is relevant to damages and
| that value is likely almost nothing so congratulations, you
| tied up the legal system just to get one AI-image taken
| down.
|
| The pirate bay trial gave precedence that people can be
| found guilty of copyright infringement in the general
| sense, rather than for a specific case of a copyrighted
| work. The lawyers for the site tried to argue that the
| legal system should had been forced to first go to court
| over a specific work with a specific person in mind who did
| the infringement, but the judges disagreed. According to
| the court it was enough that infringement was _likely_ to
| have occurred somewhere and somehow. A site like getty
| could make the same argument that infringement of their
| images is likely to have occurred somewhere, by someone,
| and the court could accept that as fact and continue on
| that basis.
| extra88 wrote:
| Different domains of copyrightable material have
| different norms. The music industry, in response to
| sampling, has established that even small, recognizable
| snippets have marketable value and can therefore be
| infringed upon (there's it's also rife with case law
| with, in my opinion, bad wins by plaintiffs). For
| photographic images, collage is already an established
| art form and is generally considered transformative and
| fair use of the source images.
|
| I'm not familiar with any The Pirate Bay case; if you are
| referring to this one [0], it was in a Swedish court and
| I'm not familiar with Swedish copyright law. However, the
| first sentence says the charge was _promoting_
| infringement, not that they were engaged in infringement
| themselves. I don 't think that's relevant to what I was
| replying to but could be very relevant to Getty Images's
| decision, if AI-generate content is infringing, they
| don't want to be accused of promoting infringement.
| There's undoubtedly already infringement taking place on
| Getty Images but likely at such a small scale that the
| organization itself is not put at risk.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial
| sportslife wrote:
| It's interesting whether there will be a change to the
| norms.
|
| It's my faint memory that for music, when it was just
| some kids looping breaks on vinyl printed in the hundreds
| or low thousands, the sampling was fine or at least not
| obviously an issue; but then copyright-holders saw that
| those artists and their management had started bringing
| in real money, and the laws were clarified.
| bergenty wrote:
| Getty already ruined Google images by not letting them link
| directly to the image, I'm going to be massively pissed off if
| they try and ruin this ecosystem as well.
| ar-nelson wrote:
| 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 I don't own,
| maybe even watermarked), blur it with a strong Gaussian blur
| filter until it's unrecognizable, and use it as the background
| of an otherwise original digital painting.
|
| 2. I take a small GPL project on GitHub, manually translate it
| from C to Python (so that the resulting code does not contain a
| single line of code identical to the original), then
| redistribute the translated project under a GPL-incompatible
| license without acknowledging the original.
|
| Are these infringements?
|
| In both of these cases, a copyrighted original work is
| transformed and incorporated into a different work in such a
| way that the original could not be reconstructed. But,
| intuitively, both cases _feel_ like infringement. I don 't know
| how a court would rule, but there's at least some chance these
| would be infringements, and they're conceptually not too
| different from distilling an image into an AI model and
| generating something new based on it.
| kromem wrote:
| There's a literal arms race behind the scenes in AI right
| now.
|
| I think it's very unlikely that corporate IP claims that
| could substantially hold back progress in domestic AI
| development will end up being successful.
| indymike wrote:
| > 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-ability of output of AI is
| questionable at best. There's no way to monetize the
| generated images for a stock art that isn't at risk of a
| court ruling pulling the rug from under it.
| ummonk wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| indymike wrote:
| This is what I would like to believe... but needs to be
| proven before I stake my business on it.
| ska wrote:
| That's not so obviously clear cut. Can the model produce
| identical output from the same simple prompt?
| MintsJohn wrote:
| But that's exactly what happens, AI isn't randomness,
| it's a set of predefined calculations. The randomness is
| in the seed/starting point. For e.g Stable Diffusion it
| is given/user input, resulting in perfect
| reproducibility.
| ska wrote:
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| 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.
| cheald wrote:
| 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.
| Beldin wrote:
| > _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.
| ar-nelson wrote:
| That's true, but AI models trained on copyrighted images
| already exist and can't just be removed from the internet,
| and their output will often be indistinguishable from that
| of "clean" models. What I fear is a kind of legal hazard
| that would make even the possibility that AI had been used
| anywhere in a work radioactive.
|
| Imagine another hypothetical: I create a derivative work by
| running img2img on another artist's painting without their
| permission. Whether the AI model in question contains
| copyrighted content or not, this is probably infringement.
|
| Now suppose that, instead, I create an original work,
| without using img2img on someone else's art. But, as part
| of my process, I use AI inpainting, with a clean AI model,
| so that the work has telltale signs of AI generation in it.
|
| And then suppose an artist I've never heard of notices that
| my painting is _superficially_ similar to theirs--not
| enough to be infringement on its own, even with a
| subconscious infringement argument. But they sue me,
| claiming that my image was an img2img AI-generated
| derivative of theirs, and the AI artifacts in the image are
| proof.
|
| With enough scaremongering about AI infringement, it might
| be possible for a plaintiff to win a frivolous lawsuit like
| this. After all, courts are unlikely to understand the
| technology well enough to make fine distinctions, and
| there's no way for me to prove the provenance of my image!
| If it becomes common knowledge that AI models can easily
| launder copyrighted images, and assumed that this is the
| primary reason people use AI, then the existence of any AI
| artifacts in a work could become grounds for a copyright
| lawsuit.
| not2b wrote:
| For case 2, translating a novel from, say, English to
| Japanese, still requires permission of the holder of the
| copyright to the English version, even though the resulting
| novel "does not contain a single line ... identical to the
| original".
| nneonneo wrote:
| 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) copyrighted material, and can also
| demonstrably reproduce elements of copyrighted works on
| demand. If they were humans, a court could deem the outputs
| copyright infringement, perhaps invoking the subconscious
| copying doctrine (https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellec
| tual_property_law...). Similarly, if a person uses a model to
| generate an infringing work, I suspect that person could be
| held liable for copyright infringement. Intention to infringe
| is not necessary in order to prove copyright infringement.
|
| The harder question is whether the models _themselves_
| constitute copyright infringement. Maybe there's a Google
| Books-esque defense here? Hard to tell if it would work.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > consider the case of translating a literary work between
| languages: this is a classic example of a derivative work
|
| This is a classic example of "you need a license on the
| original material to sell it" (unless it is public domain)
|
| You need the rights also if you are translating from a pre
| existing translation in a different language (i.e. you're
| translating a Japanese book from the French authorized
| translation).
|
| Translating an opera is not automatically derivative work
| and does not fall under the umbrella of fair use.
|
| source: my sister is a professional translator
|
| EDIT: technically you'd need to acquire the rights even if
| you translate it by yourself, for fun, and show it to
| someone else.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Note that a derivative work doesn't instantly make it 'fair
| use' for the purposes of copyright. You typically still
| need 'adaptation' permission from the copyright holder to
| made a derivative work of it, so you can't make 'Breaking
| Bad: The Musical' by recreating major scenes in a play
| format, at least not without substantially changing it[0].
|
| For the purpose of fair use, copyright.gov has an
| informative section titled "About Fair Use" which details
| what sort of modifications and usage of a copyrighted work
| would be legal without any permission from the copyright
| holder https://www.copyright.gov/fair-
| use/#:~:text=a)(3).-,About%20...
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_My_Name!_(Musical)
| not2b wrote:
| 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.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| > 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 legal solution is to evaluate each piece
| individually rather than the process. And, within that, the
| court has settled on "if it looks like a duck and it quacks
| like a duck..." which is where the subconscious copying
| presumably comes in.
|
| I don't know where courts will go. The new challenge is AI
| can generate "potentially infringing" work at a much higher
| rate than humans, but that's really about it. I'd be
| surprised if it gets treated materially different than
| human-created works.
| notahacker wrote:
| > The new challenge is AI can generate "potentially
| infringing" work at a much higher rate than humans, but
| that's really about it
|
| The other challenges are: (i) the model isn't a human
| that can defend themself by explaining their creative
| process, it's a literal mathematical transformation of
| the inputs including the copyrighted work. (And I'm not
| sure "actually the human brain is just computation"
| defences offered by lawyers are ever likely to prevail in
| court, because if they do that opens much bigger cans of
| worms in virtually every legal field...) (ii) the
| representatives of OpenAI Inc who do have to explain
| themselves are going to have to talk about their approach
| to licenses for use of the material (which in this case
| appears to have been to disregard them altogether). That
| could be a serious issue for them even if the court
| agrees with the general principle that diffusion models
| or GANs are not plagiarism.
|
| And possibly also (iii) the AI has ridiculous failure
| modes like implementing the Getty watermark which makes
| the model look far more closely derived from its source
| data than it actually is
| 3000000001 wrote:
| 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...
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that the problem, in this
| scenario, is for the creator (ie, the human running the
| algorithm). They will need to determine whether a piece
| might violate copyright before using it or selling it.
| That seems like a very hard problem, and could be the
| justification for more [new] blanket rules on the AI
| process.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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.
| romwell wrote:
| >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
|
| ...and then gets told "Hey, go and paint me a copy of
| that Andy Warhol piece from memory".
|
| The model might not violate the copyright, but its output
| is derivative work if the copyrighted works are included
| in the training set.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Unfortunately for the Getty et al, "feels like" is worth
| exactly $0.
|
| Any court that understands the technology at even a lay
| level, has no path to find infringement applying existing
| precedent.
|
| NB "style" is not protected.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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._
|
| Indeed and your examples are intended to point to gray areas.
| But a much more problematic (for the user) example is: some
| Dall-E-like program spits out seemingly original images but
| 0.1% are visibly near duplicates of copyrighted images and
| these form the basis of a lawsuit that costs someone a lot of
| money. Copyright in general tends to use the concept
| provenance - knowing the sequence of authors and processes
| that went into the creation of the object [1] and naturally
| AI makes this impossible.
|
| The AI training sequence either muddies the waters hopeless
| or creates a situation where the trainer is liable to
| everyone who created the data. _And I don 't think the
| question will answered just once_. The thing to consider is
| that anyone can just create an "AI" that just spits out stock
| images (which is obviously a copyright violation) and so the
| court would have to look at detailed involved and neither the
| court nor the AI creator would want that at all.
|
| ianal... [1]
| https://serc.carleton.edu/serc/cms/prov_reuse.html
| afro88 wrote:
| 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.
| strangescript wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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 type of
| derivative work is a "new edition" of a preexisting work in
| which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or
| other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work.
|
| > In any case where a copyrighted work is used without the
| permission of the copyright owner, copyright protection will
| not extend to any part of the work in which such material has
| been used unlawfully. _The unauthorized adaptation of a work
| may constitute copyright infringement._
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| I believe the more important issue is that material generated
| through AI is not copyrightable by the author of such images.
|
| If you are an artist you can't claim any copyright on what
| you're generating.
|
| If you're not the copyrighted holder it follows that you can't
| sell it or that you can't complain if someone else copy it
| (verbatim) and sells it.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The criteria for a work being copyrightable literally is the
| slightest touch of creativity, and I'm quite certain that
| writing a prompt and selecting a result out of a bunch of
| random seeds would qualify for that.
|
| Fully automated mass creation would get excluded, as would be
| any attempts to assert that copyright to a non-human entity,
| but all the artwork I've seen generated by people should be
| copyrightable - the main debatable question is whether
| they're infringing on copyright of the training data.
|
| On a different note, I'd argue that the models themselves
| (the large model parameters, as opposed to the source code of
| the system) are not copyrightable works, being the result of
| a mechanistic transformation, as pure 'sweat of the brow'
| (i.e. time, effort and cost of training them) does not
| suffice for copyright protection, no matter how large.
| wnevets wrote:
| > 1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is
| open.
|
| I'm surprised it has taken this long to be honest. I've seen
| generated images with the blurred Getty watermark on them.
| ISL wrote:
| A little delay at $50k an infringement can go a long, long
| way.
|
| I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is for
| infringement, but I bet it is two years or more.
| jffry wrote:
| In the US it seems to be 5 years for criminal infringement,
| or 3 years for civil actions, according to Title 17,
| Chapter 5, Section 507:
| https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#507
| preinheimer wrote:
| First time I generated an image that had some iStockPhoto
| watermarks on it I started getting really uncomfortable.
| cheald wrote:
| 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 own. That's essentially what's going on.
|
| The model is only around 4GB, and it was trained on ~5B
| images. At 24 bit depth, that'd be 786k raw data per image,
| which would be 3.5 petabytes of uncompressed information in
| the full training set. Either the authors have invented the
| world's greatest compression algorithm, or the original image
| data isn't actually in the model.
|
| So, I think the argument is: if you look at someone else's
| (copyrighted) work, and produce your own work incorporating
| style, composition, etc elements which you learned from their
| work, are you engaged in copyright infringement? IANAL but I
| think the answer is "no" - you would have to try to reproduce
| _the actual work_ to be engaging in copyright infringement,
| and not only do these models not do that, it would be
| extremely hard to get them to do so without feeding them the
| actual copyrighted work as an input to the inference
| procedure.
| wnevets wrote:
| > 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 the model.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| A world where we can't use copyrighted material to update
| neutral network weights is a world where we can buy books
| but not read them...
| wnevets wrote:
| It is allowed to sale a book that is collection of pages
| from copyrighted books? Paragraph 1 is from a Stephen
| King novel, Paragraph 2 is from A Storm of Swords and so
| on? I am not a copyright attorney but that sounds like
| violation to me.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If you have legally obtained copies of the relevant
| novels, according to the first sale doctrine you should
| be allowed to cut them up, staple first chapter of one
| novel to the second chapter of another and third chapter
| of the next, and then sell the result.
|
| But the authors have the exclusive right to making more
| copies of their work, so if you'd want to make a thousand
| of these frankensteinbooks, you would need to get a
| thousand copies of the original books.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| 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.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Does O'Reilly ask for a percentage of a software
| engineer's income after they've read their book of perl
| recipes?
| cheald wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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
| deterministic functions of their inputs too" as being a
| successful legal argument any time soon. You'd have to
| throw out rather more of the legal system than just
| copyright if those arguments start to prevail...
| joe_the_user wrote:
| If a student studied an older master in school and
| produced a painting inspired by that old master that
| included a copy of the _signature_ of the old master,
| this would be more indication of intent to fraud than if
| they didn 't include the signature.
|
| Copyright can be fairly flexible in interpreting what
| constitutes a derivative work. The Getty water is
| evidence that an image belongs to Getty. If someone
| produces an image with the watermark and gets sued, they
| could say _" your honor, I know it looks like I copied
| that image but let's consider the details of how my
| hypercomplex whatsit work..."_ and then judge, say a
| nontechnical person, looks at the defendant and say _"
| no, just no, the court isn't going to look at those
| details, how could court do that?"_. Or maybe the court
| would consider it only if you paid 1000 neutral lawyer-
| programmers to come up with a judgement, at a cost of
| millions or billions per case.
| filoleg wrote:
| What if it was not the copied signature of the old
| master, but a new one with a similar style and placed in
| a similar spot on the painting, but with the name of the
| student instead and looking blurry/a bit different?
| Because that's what's happening here, and that doesn't
| sound quite like fraud.
|
| Another scenario, what if i create a painting of a river
| by hand in acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-
| looking thing on top using acrylic? As for why, i would
| put it there as an integral part of the piece, to allude
| to the fact of how corporations got their hands over even
| the purest things that have nothing to do with them, with
| the fake watermark in acrylic symbolizing it. You can
| make up any other reason, this is just the one i thought
| of as i was writing this. It wont look exactly like the
| real getty watermark, it will be acrylic and drawn by
| hand, so pretty uneven with colors being off and way less
| detailed. Doesn't feel like fraud to me.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| My argument isn't really whether this is morally fraud.
| Maybe the device is really being "creative" or maybe it's
| copying. The question is whether the things supposed
| originality can be defend in court.
|
| _What if i create a painting of a river by hand in
| acrylic and also draw a getty-watermark-looking thing on
| top using acrylic? As for why, i would put it there as an
| integral part of the piece, to allude to the fact of how
| corporations got their hands over even the purest things
| that have nothing to do with them, with the fake
| watermark in acrylic symbolizing it._
|
| A human artist might well do that and make that defense
| in court. For all anyone knows, some GPT-3-derived-thing
| might go through such a thought process also (though it
| seems unlikely). However, the GPT-3-derived-thing can't
| testify in court concerning it's intent and that produces
| problems. And it's difficult for anyone to make this
| claim for it.
|
| Edit: Also, if instead of a single work (of parody), you
| produced a series of your own stock photos, used the
| Getty Watermark and invited people to use them for stock
| photo purposes, then your use of the copyrighted Getty
| Watermark would no longer fall under the parody exception
| for fair use.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Noone is contesting the fact that images where copyright
| is owned by Getty were used the model.
|
| The contested issue is whether training a model requires
| permission from the copyright holder, because for most
| ways of using a copyrighted work - _all_ uses except
| those where copyright law explicitly asserts that
| copyright holders have exclusive rights - no permission
| is needed.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| It's not even necessarily trying to emulate any particular
| image it's seen before; it may just decide 'this is the
| kind of image that often has a watermark, so here goes.'
| notahacker wrote:
| 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).
| cheald wrote:
| From the model's perspective, it's _not_ a distinct
| motif, that 's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot
| to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any
| concept of what a "watermark" is. As far as it's
| concerned, it's just a compositional element that happens
| to be in some images. Most "watermarks" Stable Diffusion
| produces are jumbles of colorized pixels which we can
| recognize as being evocative of a watermark, but which
| isn't the actual mark.
|
| A quick demo: I fed in the prompts "a getty watermark",
| "an image with a getty watermark", and "getty", and it
| spat out these: https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG - not a
| watermark to be seen (though lots of water).
|
| I was then able to generate an obviously-not-a-stock
| photo containing something approximating a Getty
| watermark, with the prompt "++++(stock photo) of a sea
| monster, art": https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ - the heavily
| forced attention on the "stock photo" forces the model to
| say "okay, fine, what's something that means stock photo?
| I'll add this splorch of white that's kinda like what
| I've seen in a lot of things tagged as stock photos" and
| it incorporates that into the image as a to satisfy the
| prompt.
|
| We can easily recognize that as attempting to mimic the
| Getty watermark, but it's not clearly recognizable as the
| mark itself, nor is the image likely to resemble much of
| anything in Getty's library.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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
| brokers who have spent years collecting rent on the creativity
| of others.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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, EU, nor UK seem to have such
| legislation however.
|
| _This is all personal opinion and not legal advice, nor
| related to my employment._
| strangescript wrote:
| The AI doesn't actually need the image. It needs a two
| dimensional array that represents the pixel values. I am
| sure there are some very clever ways to get around that
| hurdle if that is where the bar is set.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Well, if you can create the array without using the image
| then you're golden; but if you're not using the image
| then you're not training on the image. If you are using
| the image, then you're deriving (at least) a
| representation from the image.
|
| IME, limited as it is, courts don't take kindly to overly
| clever attempts to differentiate things from what
| everyone agrees they are; like 'the file isn't the image,
| so I can copy that', judges aren't stupid.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| How is this any different from training artists? Other art
| is copied into their brain and they transform it to create
| something new.
| indymike wrote:
| Yes, but a computer is not a person - and copyright law
| is not very friendly to machine generated output.
| dingdong123 wrote:
| noobermin wrote:
| 5. Getty pictures were trained on likely without permission.
| So, they definitely might be considering starting a lawsuit.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Why would it be illegal to train a model on their free
| samples? I thought their business was paying to remove the
| watermark?
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| 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?
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| cheald wrote:
| 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.
| bergenty wrote:
| So what, me drawing the exact same image based on a Getty
| image doesn't violate anything and everything the AI is
| doing is massively derivative so I don't see how they
| could possibly have a case.
| ciberado wrote:
| They realized immediately that AI has reached a disruptive
| point for the stock photography industry, just like the digital
| composition changed the rules years ago.
|
| Probably their value in the advertisment production chain is
| going to become close to zero in a few years, and they will try
| to stop or at least slow it down.
|
| But once we have open source models released to the public I
| cannot see how a local legislation can have any impact at all.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I'm going against the grain but we should also recognize that
| it takes real effort and time to professionally take stock
| photographs and Getty has a lot of consignments. They travel,
| they go to junkyards, they search for subjects to take photos
| of. Catalog them. All this isn't free and these people would
| need to put food on the table.
|
| This isn't similar to "Elevator operators were obsolete after
| they had a control panel and elevators became reliable for
| people to feel safe. So their jobs must go".
|
| Here, it is more like "High quality stock photography would
| become scarce". There are free stock photography resources
| but IMO Getty's photos are on another level.
|
| That said, Getty has a history of being ridiculously
| protective and litigation powerhouse. They have a lot of
| lawyers.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think most stock image users really care all that
| much. They just want a picture of someone pointing at a
| whiteboard which AI will generate pretty well. And then
| people with a little more talent will use AI plus their
| knowledge of good photography to tweak and tune the output
| to generate high quality stuff at a fraction of the cost of
| going out and taking real photos.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They'll still be staggeringly rich, their wealth level just
| won't be automatically accelerating any more. If they
| litigate over it I doubt jurors will feel much of their pain.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Getty, skating to where the puck was.
| PointyFluff wrote:
| So...stealing from hunams, good. Stealing from robots, bad.
|
| You had your chance, meatbags!.
| datalopers wrote:
| Next week: Effective immediately, Getty Images will cease
| operations citing loss of their entire business model due to AI.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Getty is being the blockbuster of the generated art age.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| How would they know?
| benzin wrote:
| Until paint was produced commercially during the Industrial
| Revolution (circa 1800), painters had to make their own paints by
| grinding pigment into oil.[1]
|
| Photography drove painting deeper towards abstraction. [2]
|
| I'm not unsympathetic but the AI revolution might be a similar
| revolution despite fiddling with code currently being much less
| pleasant than flinging industrially mass-produced paint from
| mass-produced tools in a sunlit studio. At least in the medium
| term, someone will still have to manage the machine.
|
| [1] http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/paintings4.html
|
| [2] http://www.peareylalbhawan.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-the-
| inven...
| an1sotropy wrote:
| Getty's business relies on the legal framework of copyright, and
| how it enables control (and sale) of the licensing of copyrighted
| material. And they're saying: nope - AI output is so ambiguous
| w.r.t. copyright and licensing of the inputs (when it's not
| flagrantly in violation, as with recreating our watermarks), that
| we want to steer totally clear of this.
|
| When HN has discussed Github's Copilot [1] for coding, it seems
| like the role of copyright and licensing isn't discussed in much
| detail [2] (with some exceptions awhile back [3, 4]).
|
| Do you think there is a software-development analog to Getty (I
| mean a company, not FSF), saying "no copilot-generated code
| here"? Or is the issue of copyright/licensing/attribution even
| murkier with code than for images?
|
| [1] https://github.com/features/copilot/
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187362
|
| [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874166
| Jevon23 wrote:
| The impression that I'm getting from a lot of the comments here
| (and a lot of past discussions about AI art on HN) is that tech
| people view the art industry as a "challenge", and they want to
| use machine learning tools to "defeat" it - either because they
| just want to demonstrate the sheer power of these tools, or
| because they think artists are irrational for thinking that
| there's something special about human art and they want to prove
| them wrong, or what have you.
|
| I can't think of any other way to explain the persistent desire
| to keep forcing AI art into spaces where it's not wanted, or the
| repeated discussions about loopholes in the rules, how AI art can
| avoid detection, etc.
|
| I suppose the comparison I would make is to chess. Computer
| assistance is strictly forbidden in chess tournaments - it's
| cheating. Both the players and the spectators want to see matches
| played between two humans, without computer interference. You
| could devise clever ways of getting around the rules and cheating
| (there's a big cheating scandal rocking the chess world as we
| speak), but no one would praise you for doing this. They would
| just think you were being a jerk.
|
| Similarly, there will always be people who want to create
| communities centered around human art, simply because of the mere
| fact that it was made by a human and they want to see what human
| skill is able to accomplish without AI assistance.
| ReflectedImage wrote:
| That reads a lot like pretending that progress can be held
| back.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| Is it "holding back progress" to ban the use of engines in
| chess tournaments?
| furyofantares wrote:
| I'm simply deeply interested in knowing where this all goes.
| I'm not exactly forcing AI art into places where it's not
| wanted, but I am deeply interested in knowing where we will end
| up with all of this.
|
| I have basically no prediction, but it feels like we're on the
| cusp of some very powerful tools. I don't know if it will end
| up just being a novelty, or if it will replace current jobs, or
| if it will simply create powerful tools for humans to make new
| art with. Just no clue.
|
| In addition to this deep curiosity of what the future holds,
| I'm also very interested in it philosophically. I run a daily
| word game website, and every day's puzzle comes with an image
| that I generated for that day's words when you solve the
| puzzle. I often get people emailing in, asking who the artist
| was, because the day's image spoke to them, they found it
| beautiful.
|
| It always feels like I'm giving them such a let down when I
| give them the answer. They were looking for a human connection.
| The most valuable thing isn't the technical skill; it's the
| connection to another human who generated this image (though
| the technical skill is a demonstration of the artist's
| commitment and is another thing to connect with). Finding out
| that a human didn't generate the image is a lead balloon. I
| find this a very interesting, salient example in the "what is
| art?" and "what is meaning?" categories.
|
| It also brings me back to the tools question. Because, in many
| cases, ultimately there _is_ a human connection to be made. I
| had an idea, and I worked with an AI to realize it. Sometimes
| it took quite a bit of work on prompts. Not nearly as much as
| it would take a technical artist, and I didn 't get as exact an
| output as I had in my head.
|
| But if they want a connection to another human imagining
| something that speaks to them, it's there, I imagined it and
| then a computer realized it. It's not as meaningful as a piece
| that an artist committed numerous hours to after a lifetime of
| honing the craft, but it's not devoid of meaning either. And I
| don't have any art skills to speak of, so in fact it enabled
| some human connection that wasn't possible before.
| space_fountain wrote:
| There are different sorts of creative excises. I do think that
| there is something interesting going on in the contrast between
| generative art and generative programing responses, but it's
| also true that most creative output is work and isn't done for
| the joy of doing it. Getty images exists to provide quick easy
| to use stock images not to plumb the depths of human existence.
| Photo realistic painting or abstract art will remain
| interesting and some people will want to know it was done by a
| human just like cameras, photoshop, and digital art in general
| hasn't destroyed the market for paintings, but they have pretty
| much destroyed the market for portrait painters. Idk what the
| future will bring, but it probably won't be a bunch of humans
| hired to paint the goings on at red carpets and it probably
| will involve AI doing more of what we might call creative work
| houstonn wrote:
| Of all the example images Verge could have chosen for this
| article, why did they choose the one they chose? Apologies if
| this is too OT.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I always got a weird spidey sense from Getty Images and similar
| stock photo sites, and this just solidifies it. They exist in
| this limbo between open and closed, somehow finding a way to
| greatly enrich themselves while simultaneously not enriching
| their content contributors. Same for sites that put published
| papers behind paywalls, and even news sites that block access to
| articles unless the user goes to the enormous effort of (gasp)
| opening a new private window in the browser.
|
| I don't know how, but that stuff all has to end. We've got to
| move past this tragedy of the commons that's happening with
| copyright. We all suffer just so a handful of greedy rent seekers
| can be the gate keepers and shake us down.
|
| I had hoped that we'd have real micropayments by now so people
| could each spend perhaps $10 per month and distribute those funds
| to websites they visit and content they download, a few pennies
| at a time. Instead we somehow got crypto pyramid schemes and
| NFTs.
|
| I'm just, I'm just, I don't even know anymore! Can someone
| explain it? Why aren't the people with the resources solving this
| stuff? Why do they put that duty onto the hacker community, which
| has to toil its life away in its parents' basement on a
| shoestring budget as yet another guy becomes a billionaire?
|
| I'm just so over all of the insanity. How would something like
| this AI ban even be enforceable? Whatever happened to fair use?
| Are they going to spy on everything we do now and send the
| copyright police? Truly, what gives them the right? Why are we
| paying these people again?
| mikkergp wrote:
| I love the micropayments idea for consumers, but I suspect it
| would be really hard to get businesses on board, similarly to
| how music companies lost money when moving from albums to
| individual songs, and now streaming.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Oh ya, good point. I hadn't considered the long tail problem,
| how democratizing music production counterintuitively killed
| the recorded music business so performing onstage is the only
| real way to make money now.
|
| I feel like that problem is only going to spread to all
| industries, so that the only work that will be compensated is
| manual labor.
|
| Someday we'll have to evaluate if running the rat race is the
| best use of human potential. Is that premature right now?
| Will it be in 10 years? I dunno, but I feel like now is the
| time to be solving this, not in some dystopian future where
| we spend our entire lives just working to make rent..
| cal85 wrote:
| Seems like a statement of intent without any details. How do they
| define 'AI-generated'? And do they plan to automatically detect
| it, and how?
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I guess images generated by computer systems that use if/else
| technology and mathematical vectors. /s
|
| That's probably how lawyers will put it.
| aeturnum wrote:
| This is a legal distinction, not a technical filter. They are
| telling their users that it breaks their terms of service to
| upload "AI-generated" images. So if you upload an image and it
| turns out, through a legal challenge, that Getty learns it was
| made by AI (whatever that means) - they can just walk away.
| jppope wrote:
| Business opportunity right there...
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya you're right, I always seem to go to the negative instead of
| recognizing opportunity. Companies that set these backwards-
| looking policies should be aware that someone else can always
| come along and eat their lunch. I'm always amazed that they
| think they can just get away with it without consequence!
| gbasin wrote:
| the innovator's dilemma
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The creators of AI image generators say the technology is
| legal...
|
| Which means nothing really, they always make this claim, whether
| it's correct or not. There's too strong an ethos of an "ask for
| forgiveness, not permission" in the tech world.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >There's too strong an ethos of an "ask for forgiveness, not
| permission"
|
| What's the alternative though? Waiting for permission could
| take decades while your competitors are eating your lunch.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The only winning move is not to play
| z9znz wrote:
| The tech world shows us that the winning strategy is to
| just go ahead and do what you want, ideally with consistent
| financial backing, and pay our way out of any issues that
| arise.
| supergnu wrote:
| the only truly illegal thing is to not have enough money
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yet another example of when you have money, normal rules
| no longer apply to you.
| seibelj wrote:
| There is criminal and there is civil. Just because
| something is illegal (speeding, jay walk-ing) doesn't
| mean I'm some sort of psychopath for ignoring those laws
| - I make a calculation about how likely it is I'll be
| caught vs. time saved.
|
| Similarly a business looks at a penalty and makes a
| judgement. This isn't some insane immoral concept.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >There is criminal and there is civil.
|
| Okay, but everything you said after that has nothing to
| do with that statement.
|
| You choosing to break laws has nothing to do with
| criminal vs civil. It has everything to do with where
| your moral compass points. You choose to break rules
| because you've decided to do that based on whatever moral
| integerity you do/don't have.
| seibelj wrote:
| Sure but many laws are ridiculous and immoral. See
| slavery segregation anti-women laws etc. etc. People love
| to get in their moral high horse when it suits them
| ("Business bad!") but conveniently ignore it in other
| cases.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That helps, but simply doing something that nobody has
| anticipated is often sufficient. If enough people like
| what you did, technicalities often fall by the wayside.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Great.
|
| So who is now starting the Getty competitor that does accept
| these or (even better) accepts these and makes them available via
| CC license?
|
| With good custom and tagging, easier since you have the text
| prompt that generated the content, you could probably disrupt
| Getty's entire business model in half a year.
| latchkey wrote:
| I think the copyright stuff is a ruse to distract from the real
| thing... they just don't want AI artwork.
|
| I asked this same question on here a few days ago when another
| site blocked AI artwork. I realized that the more that AI
| artwork gets blocked, the more that this is an opportunity to
| provide exactly that! Niches make great business models.
|
| Someone responded...
|
| https://lexica.art/
|
| While not quite exactly what I was thinking, I think it is a
| good first start.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| What would be the use-case of an AI-art library? The AI _is_
| the library.
| latchkey wrote:
| img2img?
|
| Sharing generative text / parameters?
|
| Not just a library, but a community.
| can16358p wrote:
| This.
|
| AI imagery is here to stay and will get better every day.
|
| A service should either embrace it or they will lose a
| significant portion of their users/customers to another who
| does support AI content. While most of the AI content is not
| ready for prime time in terms of coherence and resolution, it's
| just a matter of time that it reaches (and quickly surpasses)
| traditional methods.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| But it's not copyrightable. I guess you can lie and say you
| created it, but you didn't, and computer generated. You
| created it no more than you created your house because you
| picked the layout and paint colors. There is no money in non-
| copyrightable generated computer images.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Of course it is. Following your logic no photograph can be
| copyrighted taken with a camera. After all, the subject
| already existed you've seen in your camera, you merely
| recorded the photons with a sensor, digital or analog,
| doesn't matter.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The question of whether it's copyrightable is completely up
| in the air right now. To my mind, emitting it into the
| Creative Commons somewhat side steps the question.
|
| Besides, there's all sorts of use cases where copyright is
| less relevant. Advertising agencies care less if their
| artwork gets copied because it puts it in front of more
| eyeballs.
|
| > There is no money in non-copyrightable generated computer
| images.
|
| I'm a game developer but not an artist. If a computer can
| generate the artwork for my game, I completely get to
| sidestep paying an artist for that work. That's huge value.
| I would pay a subscription service to a database of AI
| generated content even if it couldn't be copyrighted.
| mring33621 wrote:
| 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.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| 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 generating a widget, you did not create
| art.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Do you have citations for a ruling that AI generated art
| is not copyrightable? To my knowledge, such a ruling has
| not been made, so we can at best make wild guesses at
| what the courts will find.
|
| I don't think this particular wild guess is on the right
| track; the creative input given to the AI generator was
| the prompt. There is also an argument to be made that, in
| the same sense a photograph can be copyrighted even
| though it's just a single still image from a moment that
| occurred around it, an Ai-generated artwork can be
| copyrighted because the artist performed the creative act
| of retaining it. In essence, they pulled it from the soup
| of possible outputs and held it up as one worth noting,
| as a photographer pulls an image from the soup of
| possible moments and framings.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| 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 "anonymous work" is a work on the copies or
| phonorecords of which no natural person is identified as
| author.
|
| The fact that it is a curated 'anonymous work' does not
| make it somehow more copyrightable.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Also there was no need to call bullshit. You're the
| reason the internet sucks now.
| can16358p wrote:
| Assume a painter with a good visual memory observed many
| scenes around the world. They are very intellectual and
| know pretty much about anything regarding physical objects,
| shapes, and visual styles. Then they have the ability to
| draw very realistic scenes of whatever we ask them to do,
| in whatever style we want. We pay the person (or they might
| offer this as a courtest too), and they paint and give
| exactly what we want, with all the rights to sell the
| image.
|
| It's the same: the "someone" is replaced by a computer
| software that "learned" in a similar fashion, being able to
| draw what we ask them to draw. Unless it's directly
| sampling some copyrighted work as-is, whatever it creates
| can be copyrightable.
|
| Whether the painter allows this is another story.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Why would you search a Getty competitor for AI generated images
| when you can just roll your own?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's faster to sift through pre-generated images than to
| build novel ones.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| As a designer who searches stock photography for work
| fairly often, I'm not so sure about that. Plus the minor
| time savings might well be offset by the cost savings and
| licensing freedoms of rolling your own depending on the
| generating engine.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| It's inevitable there will be a AI Stock Photo competitor, but
| I don't envy the legal battles that'll follow. Getty, Adobe,
| iStock, etc are almost guaranteed to sue, and it'll be an
| expensive and long process.
|
| I look forward to these stock photo sites dying - image
| copyright is a royal PITA since discovering copyright is almost
| always just paying shakedown notices from DMCA bot lawyers
| after the fact when you make mistakes.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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 that we need ways for people to
| share things along the lines of all the open-source licenses we
| see.
|
| You could imagine a GPL-like license being really good for the
| community/ecosystem: "If you train on this content, you have to
| release the model."
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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
| vhold wrote:
| To me the difference is this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
|
| It's possible for generation models to perfectly memorize and
| reproduce training data, at which point I view it as a sort of
| indexed slightly-lossy compression, but it's almost never
| happening with image generation because the models are too
| small to memorize billions of pictures, it can't produce
| copies.
|
| Stable diffusion 1.4 has been shrunk to around 4.3GB, and has
| around 900 million parameters.
|
| I don't know how big Copilot is, but a relatively recently
| released 20 billion parameter language model is over 40GB. (
| https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-neox-20b/tree/main )
| GPT-3, according to OpenAI, is 175 billion parameters.
|
| It's possible there are some images in there you can pull out
| exactly as is from the training data, if they were to appear
| enough times, like I suspect the Mona Lisa could be almost
| identically reconstructed, but it would take a lot of random
| generation. I'm trying it now and most of the images are
| cropped, colors blown out, wrong number of hands or fingers,
| eyes are wrong, etc.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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?_
|
| A) This is just taking divided opinion and treating it like a
| person with a contradictory opinion (as others have noted).
|
| B) Nothing about GPL makes it "less copyrighted". Acting like a
| commercial copyright is "stronger" because it doesn't
| immediately grant certain uses is false and needs to be
| challenged whenever the claim is made.
|
| C) If anything, I suspect image generation is going to be
| practically more problematic for users - you'll be exhibiting a
| result that might be very similar to the copyrighted training,
| might contain a watermark, etc. If you paste a big piece of
| GPL'd copy into your commercial source code, it won't
| necessarily be obvious once the thing is compiled (though there
| are whistleblowers and etc, don't do it).
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Nothing about GPL makes it "less copyrighted". Acting like
| a commercial copyright is "stronger" because it doesn't
| immediately grant certain uses is false and needs to be
| challenged whenever the claim is made.
|
| GPL says "you have a license to use it if you do XYZ." The
| alternative is "you have no license to use it." How is that
| not strictly "stronger?"
| bakugo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't care either way. If an AI can do your programmer job,
| it means you aren't using your brain enough.
|
| An AI can probably do half of my day job because it's
| stupidly repetitive. Leadership imposes old ways, and they
| dismiss anything "new" (i.e. newer than 2005). For example,
| writing all these high-level data pipelines and even web
| backends in C++ despite having no special performance need
| for it. Even though I'm not literally copy-pasting code, I'm
| copy-pasting something in my mind only a little higher-level
| than that, then relying on some procedural and muscle memory
| to pump it out. It's a skill that anyone can learn, just
| takes time. If I didn't have side projects, I'd forget what
| it's like to _think_ about my code.
|
| Some old-school programmers complain about kids with high-
| level languages doing their job more efficiently, so they
| work on lower-level stuff instead. It's been that way for
| decades. Now AI is knocking on that door. But before AI, C
| was the high-level thing, and we got compiler optimizations
| obviating much of the need for asm expertise, undoubtedly
| pissing off some who really invested in that skillset. If I'm
| working on something needing the performance guarantees of C
| or Asm, and the computer can assist me, I'm all for it.
| Please take this repetitive job so I can use my brain
| instead.
|
| And the copyright thing is just an excuse. Programmers
| usually don't give a darn about copyright other than being
| legally obligated to comply with it. So much of programming
| is copy-paste. GPL had its day, and it makes less and less
| sense as services take over. GPL locks small-time devs out of
| including the code in a for-profit project but does nothing
| to stop big corps from using it in a SaaS. The biggest irony
| is how Microsoft not only uses GPL'd code for profit but also
| ships WSL, all legally.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > You could imagine a GPL-like license being really good for
| the community/ecosystem: "If you train on this content, you
| have to release the model."
|
| The issue with that is that it is perfectly legal to ignore the
| license, if you use the copyrighted work in a transformative
| way.
|
| It doesn't matter what the license says, if it is legal to
| ignore the license.
| LanceH wrote:
| 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 viewed by the AI?
| collegeburner wrote:
| that's bc hn has a lot of gpl zealots who want special rules
| because they believe a viral license is a "fundamental good"
| and closing stuff off via copyright is the opposite. i don't
| agree and think viral licenses suck, but it's not a unpopular
| opinion on here.
| jstanley wrote:
| > 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?
|
| I don't think this is right. I think different people have
| different views, and you're just assuming that the same people
| have contradictory views.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Eh, I'm not assuming individuals have contradictory views,
| but I see how it could read that way, since I'm being fast
| and loose with the language. The community
| (anthropomorphizing the blob again) definitely empirically
| reacts very differently to the two topics.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The real question is: Why would we need Getty Images or other
| stock photo providers if we can have AI-generated content?
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Email this morning:
|
| AI Generated Content
|
| Effective immediately, Getty Images will cease to accept all
| submissions created using AI generative models (e.g., Stable
| Diffusion, Dall-E 2, MidJourney, etc.) and prior submissions
| utilizing such models will be removed.
|
| There are open questions with respect to the copyright of outputs
| from these models and there are unaddressed rights issues with
| respect to the underlying imagery and metadata used to train
| these models.
|
| These changes do not prevent the submission of 3D renders and do
| not impact the use of digital editing tools (e.g., Photoshop,
| Illustrator, etc.) with respect to modifying and creating
| imagery.
|
| Best wishes,
|
| Getty Images | iStock
| biggerChris wrote:
| It's funny because, I can make an image and they wouldn't know
| it's A.i generated.
| ISL wrote:
| They can ask that you assert, under substantial penalty of
| assuming Getty's potential liabilities, that it was not AI
| generated.
| contravariant wrote:
| Doesn't matter, as far as they are concerned that's on you
| for breaking the terms and conditions. They're just 'making
| an effort' for legal reasons.
| karaterobot wrote:
| You can also plagiarize someone else's work and submit it as
| your own, and they won't notice. But if they find out, it'll
| be removed and there will be some punitive action. I assume
| it's the same enforcement model in this case.
| GameOfFrowns wrote:
| >You can also plagiarize someone else's work and submit it
| as your own, and they won't notice.
|
| Or just take an image that is already in public domain and
| just slap a gettyimages(r) watermark on it...
| j-bos wrote:
| Getty's way ahead of you:
| https://www.techdirt.com/2019/04/01/getty-images-sued-
| yet-ag...
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| That's Getty's business model.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| Why is this voted down? It's true. How can this be in
| actuality prevented?
|
| Changing times. Not even imagery or art can be trusted. A
| whole range of human creativity based occupations is
| approaching the border of redundancy.
|
| You can argue that they may never arrive at that border, but
| there is no argument to be made that this is the first time
| ever in the history of human kind where artists are
| approaching that border of redundancy.
|
| And what does this mean for every other human occupation? The
| AI may be primitive now, but it's still the beginning and it
| it is certainly possible for us to be approaching a future
| where it produces things BETTER then what a human produces.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > How can this be in actuality prevented?
|
| By abolishing copyright and making crediting the author a
| habit. There is no way copyrights can survive the AI. There
| is no way human civilization will let 200 year old legal
| practices hold back technological advancement.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > There is no way human civilization will let 200 year
| old legal practices hold back technological advancement.
|
| Human civilization has kings and queens, and laws based
| on the sayings of ancient prophets.
|
| Instead of trying to figure out what "human civilization"
| will accept, figuring out what current wealthy capital-
| owners will accept will be more predictive.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Even if wealthy-capital owners get the AI banned where
| they can, the countries where they don't hold the power
| will get ahead by not banning the AI/
| b800h wrote:
| I think there's a strong case for arguing that we may
| actually completely ban AI and any sufficiently strong ML
| algorithm. AI hasn't even realised a millionth of its
| potential yet, and it's already running rings around
| humans (cf. algorithmic feeds driving political conflicts
| online). I think potentially it will cease to be
| tolerated and be treated a bit like WMDs.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am beginning to feel like the Butlerian Jihad may have
| had the right idea.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > we may actually completely ban AI and any sufficiently
| strong ML algorithm.
|
| Who are 'you'. The US, or maybe Angloamerican countries
| may do it. Many countries won't. Those who don't do it,
| will get ahead of everyone else.
| b800h wrote:
| At what cost? Perhaps the WMD comparison continues to
| work here.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| How are you going to un-invent it? Will this involve
| confiscating GPUs or criminalizing owning more than 1 of
| them? The thing is much like the problem of gun control
| in a warzone; _weapons are just not that hard to make_
| especially if you have a surplus of parts.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| First time I've heard that line of thinking. How and when
| do you think thatl happen?
| b800h wrote:
| 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 generating that content for it). Regardless, it
| becomes apparent that the eventual infinitely engaging
| result is bad for humans.
|
| 2) Social posting. It becomes increasingly impossible to
| distinguish a bot from a human on Twitter et al. People
| realise that they're spending their time having
| passionate debates with machines whose job it is to
| outrage them. We realise that the chance of someone we
| meet online being human is 1/1000 and the other 999 are
| propaganda-advertising machines so sophisticated that we
| can't actually resist their techniques. [Arguably the
| world is going so totally nuts right now because this is
| already happening - the tail is wagging the dog. AI is
| creating a culture which optimises for AIs; an AI-
| Corporate Complex?]
|
| 3) Art and Music. These become unavoidably engaging. See
| 1 and 2 above.
|
| This can be applied to any field of the knowledge
| economy. AI conducts an end-run around human nature - in
| fact huge networks of interacting AIs and corporations do
| it, and there are three possible outcomes:
|
| 1) We become inured to it, and switch off from the
| internet.
|
| 2) We realise in time how bad it is, but can't trust
| ourselves, so we ban it.
|
| 3) We become puppets driven by intelligences orders of
| magnitude more sophisticated than us to mine resources in
| order to keep them running.
|
| History says that it would really be some combination of
| the above, but AI is self-reinforcing, so I'm not sure
| that can be relied upon. We may put strong limits on the
| behaviour and generality of AIs, and how they communicate
| and interact.
|
| There will definitely be jobs in AI reeducation and
| inquisition; those are probably already a thing.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > 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
| elcomet wrote:
| Because it's a legal thing, not a practical thing. If
| they're preparing a lawsuit, they want to show the court
| that they forbid people from uploading AI-generated images.
| It's a rule without real enforcement.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Why is this voted down? It's true. How can this be in
| actuality prevented?
|
| It's no different than submitting a plagiarized essay to a
| teacher. Yeah, it's often hard to detect/prevent such
| submissions and you could even get away with it. But if you
| get caught, you'll still get in trouble and it will be
| removed.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| This is different from plagiarism. Because in plagiarism
| there is an original that can be compared against. There
| is a specific work/person where a infraction was commit-
| ed against.
|
| In AI produced artwork, the artwork is genuinely original
| and possibly better then what other humans can produce.
| No one was actually harmed. Thus in actuality it offers
| true value if not better value then what a human can
| produce.
|
| It displaces humanity and that is horrifying, but
| technically no crime was committed, and nothing was
| plagiarized.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >No one was actually harmed. //
|
| In a couple of years, unchecked, many artists will be out
| of work and companies like Getty will be making a lot
| less revenue. That's "harm" in legal terms.
|
| On a previous SD story someone noted they create recipe
| pictures using an AI instead of using a stock service.
|
| These sorts of developments are great, IMO, but we have
| to democratise the benefits.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| That's like me creating a car that's faster and better
| then other cars and more energy efficient.
|
| Would it be legal to ban Tesla because it harms the car
| industry through disruption? AI generated art is
| disrupting the art industry by creating original art
| that's cheaper and in the future possibly better. Why
| should we ban that.
|
| By harm I mean direct harm. Theft of ideas and direct
| copying. But harm through creating a better product.
| Morally I think there is nothing wrong with this.
|
| Practically we may have to do it, but this is like
| banning marijuana.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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 protect human artists somewhat
| when AIs come to eat their lunch and want to make a plate
| out of the human artists previous work [it's like a whole
| sector is getting used to train their replacement, but
| they're not even being paid whilst they do that].
| jjulius wrote:
| You asked why someone was downvoted for laughing about
| how AI-generated content is hard to detect/can still be
| submitted, and then asked, "How can this be in actuality
| prevented?". The comparison I was making was the
| comparison _to the process of submitting plagiarized
| content_ , not whether or not AI-generated content and
| plagiarized works are the same thing.
| biggerChris wrote:
| hedora wrote:
| What if someone uses the Stable Diffusion editor plugin for
| photoshop, etc?
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| LOL how will they even know? Are they going to ask for
| every .psd and read the entire edit history? what's to stop
| you making images all day in SD, and when you find one you
| like, just tracing over it in a new layer?
| cheald wrote:
| 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?
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