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I think you'd struggle to argue that the Getty watermark was a general style and composition principle and not a distinct motif unique to Getty (and in music co

I think you'd struggle to argue that the Getty watermark was a general style and composition principle and not a distinct motif unique to Getty (and in music copyright cases, the defence of plagiarising motifs inadvertently frequently fails).

cheald 4y ago
From the model's perspective, it's not a distinct motif, that's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any concept of what a "watermark" is. As far as it's concerned, it's just a compositional element that happens to be in some images. Most "watermarks" Stable Diffusion produces are jumbles of colorized pixels which we can recognize as being evocative of a watermark, but which isn't the actual mark. A quick demo: I fed in the prompts "a getty watermark", "an image with a getty watermark", and "getty", and it spat out these: https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG - not a watermark to be seen (though lots of water). I was then able to generate an obviously-not-a-stock photo containing something approximating a Getty watermark, with the prompt "++++(stock photo) of a sea monster, art": https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ - the heavily forced attention on the "stock photo" forces the model to say "okay, fine, what's something that means stock photo? I'll add this splorch of white that's kinda like what I've seen in a lot of things tagged as stock photos" and it incorporates that into the image as a to satisfy the prompt. We can easily recognize that as attempting to mimic the Getty watermark, but it's not clearly recognizable as the mark itself, nor is the image likely to resemble much of anything in Getty's library.
- notahacker 4y ago
  > From the model's perspective, it's not a distinct motif, that's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any concept of what a "watermark" is. The court delivers the judgement, not the model. If courts can find against musicians whilst accepting they 'unconsciously' plagiarised key elements of a song in their own completely different song played by different musicians based on maybe hearing it in the background somewhere, they can certainly find against the creators of a model which has a sufficiently strong and obvious dependency on Getty IP they imported to output reasonably close approximations of Getty watermarks.
karmasimida 4y ago
IMO, it is very difficult to prove 1: If that watermark is recognizable enough to be a getty watermark or something whose shape vaguely looks like a watermark. 2. Where that watermark is coming from. From how the model is trained, it is possible that the model considers the watermark itself a style of the picture and mimics it. But it would be mission impossible to trace to a particular work that the inspiration is coming from.

cheald 4y ago

From the model's perspective, it's not a distinct motif, that's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any concept of what a "watermark" is. As far as it's concerned, it's just a compositional element that happens to be in some images. Most "watermarks" Stable Diffusion produces are jumbles of colorized pixels which we can recognize as being evocative of a watermark, but which isn't the actual mark. A quick demo: I fed in the prompts "a getty watermark", "an image with a getty watermark", and "getty", and it spat out these: https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG - not a watermark to be seen (though lots of water). I was then able to generate an obviously-not-a-stock photo containing something approximating a Getty watermark, with the prompt "++++(stock photo) of a sea monster, art": https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ - the heavily forced attention on the "stock photo" forces the model to say "okay, fine, what's something that means stock photo? I'll add this splorch of white that's kinda like what I've seen in a lot of things tagged as stock photos" and it incorporates that into the image as a to satisfy the prompt. We can easily recognize that as attempting to mimic the Getty watermark, but it's not clearly recognizable as the mark itself, nor is the image likely to resemble much of anything in Getty's library.

notahacker 4y ago
> From the model's perspective, it's not a distinct motif, that's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any concept of what a "watermark" is. The court delivers the judgement, not the model. If courts can find against musicians whilst accepting they 'unconsciously' plagiarised key elements of a song in their own completely different song played by different musicians based on maybe hearing it in the background somewhere, they can certainly find against the creators of a model which has a sufficiently strong and obvious dependency on Getty IP they imported to output reasonably close approximations of Getty watermarks.

karmasimida 4y ago

IMO, it is very difficult to prove 1: If that watermark is recognizable enough to be a getty watermark or something whose shape vaguely looks like a watermark. 2. Where that watermark is coming from. From how the model is trained, it is possible that the model considers the watermark itself a style of the picture and mimics it. But it would be mission impossible to trace to a particular work that the inspiration is coming from.