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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 cop

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.
  - wnevets 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. 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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
ISL 4y ago
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.
spoonjim 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Yeah, I think it might actually be a good thing to have some of the copyright questions settled one way or the other.
- extra88 4y ago
  > 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/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
samstave 4y ago
- samstave 4y ago
  So funny how ppl are defending Getty when they don’t know their history…
noobermin 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523
- plussed_reader 4y ago
  Why would it be illegal to train a model on their free samples? I thought their business was paying to remove the watermark?
  - shagie 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 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 https://imgur.com/a/N1OufD1 Now, you tell me if there's a copyrighted image encoded in that data set or not.
anigbrowl 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    How is this any different from training artists? Other art is copied into their brain and they transform it to create something new.
    - indymike 4y ago
      Yes, but a computer is not a person - and copyright law is not very friendly to machine generated output.
  - dingdong123 4y ago
    [dead]
  - strangescript 4y ago
    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.
ar-nelson 4y ago
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.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Honestly, as much as I am rooting for AI "art" (still not sure about that term here) I can see how Getty would easily have a claim in court if the AI was indeed trained on some of their images AND they can prove it somehow. If that's not derivative then I don't know what is. Maybe a special niche could be carved out for people who are only researching and experimenting and not really "selling" or profiting from the resulting images. It would seem if they're right that maybe they could bury a watermark in their images that identifies it as Getty (or just whomever) and that it's copyrighted by them and they don't give permission to use it for training AI. Maybe I just don't know enough about how the algorithms work though shrug
- nneonneo 4y ago
  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/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2016-17/march-april/ghosts-hit-machine-musical-creation-doctrine-subconscious-copying/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_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.
karmasimida 4y ago
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 4y ago
  But this will decide whether it's democratised or locked-up by those who own large bodies of training data.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    Stable Diffusion is already out in the world. The cat is out of the bag.
    - sdenton4 4y ago
      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...
      - adamsmith143 4y ago
        They are indeed hard to train but groups like EleutherAI have already basically crowdsourced training LLM's successfully so it's absolutely doable by non Corporate/Academic/Government entities to train high end models like this.
      - scarmig 4y ago
        China.
        baq 4y ago
        Should’ve said, everywhere except the US. I’d point to classics like Luxembourg or Sweden?
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > The criteria for a work being copyrightable literally is the slightest touch of creativity If a prompt is copyrightable, that's a problem. Because it's just words. Recipes should be in the same league then. If I can get the same output with a slightly different prompt, how would you protect your works? If I copy your output, how can you protect your works, given that the output depends on something not copyrightable? (as per your statement, which I agree with) Look at it this way: If I make something out of a Spirograph, is it a copyrightable work?
ciberado 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago
strangescript 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 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.
  - nomel 4y ago
    This is being downvoted, so I'm worried my understanding is incorrect. Could anyone explain how this is wrong? IANAL.
  - brobinson 4y ago
    So by this logic, Deadly Premonition and Mizzurna Falls are derivative works of Twin Peaks?
    - kiicia 4y ago
      "inspired by"
petercooper 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number) stuff again.
bergenty 4y ago
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.
beiller 4y ago
Most of the usage I've seen or even tried myself is like "Sonic the hedgehog doing a kickflip". It kind of makes it obvious in my opinion that yeah, this is pretty much not right. Even worse I'm seeing things like "Sonic the hedgehog artstation in the style of (artist xyz)". Is it just ripping artists images from art station without explicit permission?
- Xelynega 4y ago
  It's my understanding that a lot of branded material(like "sonic the hedgehog") was filtered out of training data so that the copyright challenges were limited to small holders that can't fight back instead of large holders like Sega and Disney. So any prompts expecting copyright characters is going to end up wierd because of lack of training data.

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.
- wnevets 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. 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.

ISL 4y ago

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.

spoonjim 4y ago

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 4y ago
Yeah, I think it might actually be a good thing to have some of the copyright questions settled one way or the other.
extra88 4y ago
> 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/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

samstave 4y ago

samstave 4y ago
So funny how ppl are defending Getty when they don’t know their history…

noobermin 4y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523

plussed_reader 4y ago
Why would it be illegal to train a model on their free samples? I thought their business was paying to remove the watermark?
- shagie 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 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 https://imgur.com/a/N1OufD1 Now, you tell me if there's a copyrighted image encoded in that data set or not.

anigbrowl 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  How is this any different from training artists? Other art is copied into their brain and they transform it to create something new.
  - indymike 4y ago
    Yes, but a computer is not a person - and copyright law is not very friendly to machine generated output.
- dingdong123 4y ago
  [dead]
- strangescript 4y ago
  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.

ar-nelson 4y ago

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.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
Honestly, as much as I am rooting for AI "art" (still not sure about that term here) I can see how Getty would easily have a claim in court if the AI was indeed trained on some of their images AND they can prove it somehow. If that's not derivative then I don't know what is. Maybe a special niche could be carved out for people who are only researching and experimenting and not really "selling" or profiting from the resulting images. It would seem if they're right that maybe they could bury a watermark in their images that identifies it as Getty (or just whomever) and that it's copyrighted by them and they don't give permission to use it for training AI. Maybe I just don't know enough about how the algorithms work though shrug
nneonneo 4y ago
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/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2016-17/march-april/ghosts-hit-machine-musical-creation-doctrine-subconscious-copying/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_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.

karmasimida 4y ago

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 4y ago
But this will decide whether it's democratised or locked-up by those who own large bodies of training data.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Stable Diffusion is already out in the world. The cat is out of the bag.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    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...
    - adamsmith143 4y ago
      They are indeed hard to train but groups like EleutherAI have already basically crowdsourced training LLM's successfully so it's absolutely doable by non Corporate/Academic/Government entities to train high end models like this.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      China.
      - baq 4y ago
        Should’ve said, everywhere except the US. I’d point to classics like Luxembourg or Sweden?

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > The criteria for a work being copyrightable literally is the slightest touch of creativity If a prompt is copyrightable, that's a problem. Because it's just words. Recipes should be in the same league then. If I can get the same output with a slightly different prompt, how would you protect your works? If I copy your output, how can you protect your works, given that the output depends on something not copyrightable? (as per your statement, which I agree with) Look at it this way: If I make something out of a Spirograph, is it a copyrightable work?

ciberado 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago

strangescript 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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 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.
- nomel 4y ago
  This is being downvoted, so I'm worried my understanding is incorrect. Could anyone explain how this is wrong? IANAL.
- brobinson 4y ago
  So by this logic, Deadly Premonition and Mizzurna Falls are derivative works of Twin Peaks?
  - kiicia 4y ago
    "inspired by"

petercooper 4y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number) stuff again.

bergenty 4y ago

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.

beiller 4y ago

Most of the usage I've seen or even tried myself is like "Sonic the hedgehog doing a kickflip". It kind of makes it obvious in my opinion that yeah, this is pretty much not right. Even worse I'm seeing things like "Sonic the hedgehog artstation in the style of (artist xyz)". Is it just ripping artists images from art station without explicit permission?

Xelynega 4y ago
It's my understanding that a lot of branded material(like "sonic the hedgehog") was filtered out of training data so that the copyright challenges were limited to small holders that can't fight back instead of large holders like Sega and Disney. So any prompts expecting copyright characters is going to end up wierd because of lack of training data.