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

305 points by baptiste313 4y ago

colordrops 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
Velc 4y ago
Can two images be identical if both are generated using the same prompt and model combination? If all images generated are unique, I fail to see how copyright can ever be enforced.
acehw 4y ago
I feel like the easiest thing to do would be to declare that entirely ai generated images are public domain because a human didn't have enough of a hand in making them (and only humans and groups of humans can have a copyright), and there's not enough of any one image from the the training data in the output to say that the output contains a recognizable segment of any of the images that it was trained on, even assuming the training images were all copyrighted.
tablespoon 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  >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 4y ago
    The only winning move is not to play
    - z9znz 4y ago
      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.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        Yet another example of when you have money, normal rules no longer apply to you.
        seibelj 4y ago
        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.
        4y ago
cal85 4y ago
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?
- aeturnum 4y ago
  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.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  I guess images generated by computer systems that use if/else technology and mathematical vectors. /s That's probably how lawyers will put it.
cantSpellSober 4y ago
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 4y ago
- biggerChris 4y ago
  It’s funny because, I can make an image and they wouldn’t know it’s A.i generated.
  - contravariant 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      >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® watermark on it...
supergnu 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
hleszek 4y ago
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.
z9znz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
  > Getty images should be planning a big pivot strategy They very well might be, with step 1 of the plan being "delay".
waffletower 4y ago
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."
- supergnu 4y ago
  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.
- kradeelav 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    why not? human artists do exactly the same thing - combine learned patterns into new compositions.
    - kradeelav 4y ago
      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.
ClassyJacket 4y ago
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 4y ago
  By default, Stable Diffusion watermarks images. However as it's open source, it's obviously trivial to remove it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lkbm 4y ago
  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/69ae4b35e0a0f6ee1af8bb9a5d0016ccb27e36dc/scripts/txt2img.py#L68-L73 https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/69ae4b35e0a...
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Stable diffusion does: https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion#reference-sampling-script 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
daniel_iversen 4y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  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.
  - henryfjordan 4y ago
    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.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-office-rules-ai-art-cant-be-copyrighted-180979808/ 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 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=copyright+office+ai
datalopers 4y ago
Next week: Effective immediately, Getty Images will cease operations citing loss of their entire business model due to AI.
an1sotropy 4y ago
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/ https://github.com/features/copilot/ [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&query=copilot&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187362 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874166
zackmorris 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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..
jppope 4y ago
Business opportunity right there...
- zackmorris 4y ago
  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!
shadowgovt 4y ago
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.
- can16358p 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      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.
      - chlorion 4y ago
hospadar 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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
    - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        > "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-music-genre/ 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.
habibur 4y ago
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.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  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.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  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.
can16358p 4y ago
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?
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  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.
- lbotos 4y ago
  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.
- adultSwim 4y ago
  It's not just splitting hairs either. Training datasets also come into play with tools like resolution upscalers.
advisedwang 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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".
mg 4y ago
A visualization of the announcement by a neural network: https://twitter.com/illubots/status/1572620909885669378 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 4y ago
  These are really cool
- spookie 4y ago
  That's a cool idea, wish you luck!
jfoster 4y ago
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 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.
- wnevets 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#507
  - preinheimer 4y ago
    First time I generated an image that had some iStockPhoto watermarks on it I started getting really uncomfortable.
  - cheald 4y ago
    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.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
How would they know?
benzin 4y ago
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 http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/paintings4.html [2] http://www.peareylalbhawan.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-the-invention-of-photography-changed-art/ http://www.peareylalbhawan.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-the-inven...
toss1 4y ago
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.
Jevon23 4y ago
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 4y ago
  That reads a lot like pretending that progress can be held back.
  - Jevon23 4y ago
    Is it “holding back progress” to ban the use of engines in chess tournaments?
- furyofantares 4y ago
  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.
gbasin 4y ago
the innovator's dilemma
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
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."
- bakugo 4y ago
  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.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
cinntaile 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
houstonn 4y ago
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.
PointyFluff 4y ago
So...stealing from hunams, good. Stealing from robots, bad. You had your chance, meatbags!.
blibble 4y ago
I can't wait until I can sue everyone that's ever used copilot because MS trained its corpus on my code
- fl0id 4y ago
  It would be easier to use MS probably. Because there you know they used your code.
bell-cot 4y ago
> 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?
jarrenae 4y ago
I've actually been working on a stock photos site built around Stable Diffusion for some of these exact reasons. https://ghostlystock.com/ 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.
dan_quixote 4y ago
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_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
elzbardico 4y ago
The real question is: Why would we need Getty Images or other stock photo providers if we can have AI-generated content?
kyriakos 4y ago
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.
legendofbrando 4y ago
This is the pre-news story to the inevitable: “AI generated content bans Getty Images by forcing it into early retirement”
obert 4y ago
Makes sense, like banning electricity in candle stores.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Getty, skating to where the puck was.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Getty is being the blockbuster of the generated art age.
paxys 4y ago
Interesting that they will still accept fully computer generated images, most of them created with a massive amount of help from AI-assisted algorithms in Photoshop and the like.
paxys 4y ago
When your business sees an existential threat on the horizon you have two options – be at the forefront of the change and get ahead of your competitors and any new entrants by adopting the change yourself, or stall/threaten/litigate/raise prices/lower prices and otherwise hold on to your business model at all costs. Those in the latter group don't survive very long.
zx8080 4y ago
Getty in theory could just ask for a "fair" (whatever large or small could it be) share in any AI company uses Getty's images to train its models. It could be battle not for instinction, but for the new market share and control over AI companies.
ksidudwbw 4y ago
Meanwhile China doesnt care and is creating super apps unencumbered
seydor 4y ago
Getty opening a market opportunity to competitors
isaacfrond 4y ago
I read a paper some time ago, where somebody ran a facial recognition algorithm on the output of a GAN face generator. It found lots of images in the training data that looked strikingly similar. In other words, one reason AI images look so good, is that look a lot like actual images. Thing, is for the love of me, I can't find the paper anymore? Who knows it?

305 points by baptiste313 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

Velc 4y ago

Can two images be identical if both are generated using the same prompt and model combination? If all images generated are unique, I fail to see how copyright can ever be enforced.

acehw 4y ago

I feel like the easiest thing to do would be to declare that entirely ai generated images are public domain because a human didn't have enough of a hand in making them (and only humans and groups of humans can have a copyright), and there's not enough of any one image from the the training data in the output to say that the output contains a recognizable segment of any of the images that it was trained on, even assuming the training images were all copyrighted.

tablespoon 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
>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 4y ago
  The only winning move is not to play
  - z9znz 4y ago
    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.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Yet another example of when you have money, normal rules no longer apply to you.
      - seibelj 4y ago
        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.
        4y ago

cal85 4y ago

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?

aeturnum 4y ago
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.
tiborsaas 4y ago
I guess images generated by computer systems that use if/else technology and mathematical vectors. /s That's probably how lawyers will put it.

cantSpellSober 4y ago

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 4y ago
biggerChris 4y ago
It’s funny because, I can make an image and they wouldn’t know it’s A.i generated.
- contravariant 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    >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® watermark on it...

supergnu 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

hleszek 4y ago

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.

z9znz 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
> Getty images should be planning a big pivot strategy They very well might be, with step 1 of the plan being "delay".

waffletower 4y ago

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."

supergnu 4y ago
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.
kradeelav 4y ago
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 4y ago
  why not? human artists do exactly the same thing - combine learned patterns into new compositions.
  - kradeelav 4y ago
    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.

ClassyJacket 4y ago

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 4y ago
By default, Stable Diffusion watermarks images. However as it's open source, it's obviously trivial to remove it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lkbm 4y ago
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/69ae4b35e0a0f6ee1af8bb9a5d0016ccb27e36dc/scripts/txt2img.py#L68-L73 https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/69ae4b35e0a...
Ajedi32 4y ago
Stable diffusion does: https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion#reference-sampling-script 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago

daniel_iversen 4y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
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.
- henryfjordan 4y ago
  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.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-office-rules-ai-art-cant-be-copyrighted-180979808/ 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 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=copyright+office+ai

datalopers 4y ago

Next week: Effective immediately, Getty Images will cease operations citing loss of their entire business model due to AI.

an1sotropy 4y ago

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/ https://github.com/features/copilot/ [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&query=copilot&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187362 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874166

zackmorris 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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..

jppope 4y ago

Business opportunity right there...

zackmorris 4y ago
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!

shadowgovt 4y ago

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.

can16358p 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    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.
    - chlorion 4y ago

hospadar 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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
  - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > "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-music-genre/ 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.

habibur 4y ago

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.

yieldcrv 4y ago
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.
squeaky-clean 4y ago
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.

can16358p 4y ago

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?

squeaky-clean 4y ago
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.
lbotos 4y ago
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.
adultSwim 4y ago
It's not just splitting hairs either. Training datasets also come into play with tools like resolution upscalers.

advisedwang 4y ago

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 4y ago
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".

mg 4y ago

A visualization of the announcement by a neural network: https://twitter.com/illubots/status/1572620909885669378 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 4y ago
These are really cool
spookie 4y ago
That's a cool idea, wish you luck!

jfoster 4y ago

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 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.

wnevets 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#507
- preinheimer 4y ago
  First time I generated an image that had some iStockPhoto watermarks on it I started getting really uncomfortable.
- cheald 4y ago
  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.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

How would they know?

benzin 4y ago

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 http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/paintings4.html [2] http://www.peareylalbhawan.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-the-invention-of-photography-changed-art/ http://www.peareylalbhawan.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-the-inven...

toss1 4y ago

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.

Jevon23 4y ago

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 4y ago
That reads a lot like pretending that progress can be held back.
- Jevon23 4y ago
  Is it “holding back progress” to ban the use of engines in chess tournaments?
furyofantares 4y ago
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.

gbasin 4y ago

the innovator's dilemma

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

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."

bakugo 4y ago
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.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

cinntaile 4y ago

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 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

houstonn 4y ago

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.

PointyFluff 4y ago

So...stealing from hunams, good. Stealing from robots, bad. You had your chance, meatbags!.

blibble 4y ago

I can't wait until I can sue everyone that's ever used copilot because MS trained its corpus on my code

fl0id 4y ago
It would be easier to use MS probably. Because there you know they used your code.

bell-cot 4y ago

> 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?

jarrenae 4y ago

I've actually been working on a stock photos site built around Stable Diffusion for some of these exact reasons. https://ghostlystock.com/ 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.

dan_quixote 4y ago

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_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

elzbardico 4y ago

The real question is: Why would we need Getty Images or other stock photo providers if we can have AI-generated content?

kyriakos 4y ago

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.

legendofbrando 4y ago

This is the pre-news story to the inevitable: “AI generated content bans Getty Images by forcing it into early retirement”

obert 4y ago

Makes sense, like banning electricity in candle stores.

imwillofficial 4y ago

Getty, skating to where the puck was.

imwillofficial 4y ago

Getty is being the blockbuster of the generated art age.

paxys 4y ago

Interesting that they will still accept fully computer generated images, most of them created with a massive amount of help from AI-assisted algorithms in Photoshop and the like.

paxys 4y ago

When your business sees an existential threat on the horizon you have two options – be at the forefront of the change and get ahead of your competitors and any new entrants by adopting the change yourself, or stall/threaten/litigate/raise prices/lower prices and otherwise hold on to your business model at all costs. Those in the latter group don't survive very long.

zx8080 4y ago

Getty in theory could just ask for a "fair" (whatever large or small could it be) share in any AI company uses Getty's images to train its models. It could be battle not for instinction, but for the new market share and control over AI companies.

ksidudwbw 4y ago

Meanwhile China doesnt care and is creating super apps unencumbered

seydor 4y ago

Getty opening a market opportunity to competitors

isaacfrond 4y ago

I read a paper some time ago, where somebody ran a facial recognition algorithm on the output of a GAN face generator. It found lots of images in the training data that looked strikingly similar. In other words, one reason AI images look so good, is that look a lot like actual images. Thing, is for the love of me, I can't find the paper anymore? Who knows it?