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Getty Images v. Stability AI – Complaint

251 points by toss1 4y ago

echelon 4y ago
Getty is about to no longer exist. Good riddance. They're selling knitting needles in the era of robotic manufacturing. I hope every single one of these lawsuits falls flat on its face. Other countries will happily overlook Getty copyright to get the leg up on AI. AI is not reusing copyrighted material. It's learning from it in the same way humans do. You can even fine tune away from the base training set and wash any experience of it away. Besides, if Getty wins, it merely insures that the large incumbents with massive pocketbooks to pay off Getty et. al. win. It'll keep AI out of the hands of the rest of us.
- deleted 4y ago
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- mrkeen 4y ago
  > AI is not reusing copyrighted material. It's learning from it in the same way humans do. What will AI learn from if Getty no longer exists?
  - echelon 4y ago
    Lots of businesses fail when new disruptive technology arrives. We don't need to prop up the old at the expense of the new. This is like crying over Rolodex. And let's not forget how awful Getty has been throughout its existence. They've frequently sued people for things they didn't even own the copyright to.
    - TillE 4y ago
      That doesn't answer the question. In the hypothetical future where such companies no longer exist, where is the new AI training data supposed to come from?
      - yellow_postit 4y ago
        How is this not a bootstrapping problem and after a certain point they can train on their own output? Novelty of subject will likely get covered by partially unwitting data gatherers (eg google photos)
    - mrkeen 4y ago
      > They're selling knitting needles in the era of robotic manufacturing. They're teachers in the age of students. > We don't need to prop up the old at the expense of the new. We don't need to pay teachers when we can just profit by charging students tuition.
      - newswasboring 4y ago
        > They're teachers in the age of students. This is a very good quote, but unfortunately I fail to grasp it. Care to elaborate?
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    If in the future AI images are as good as Getty's, will new AIs really need to learn from Getty?
    - munchler 4y ago
      Would you want an AI trained on images from no later than, say, 1973? No? People 50 years from now will feel the same way. Without new images to learn from, I don't see how future AI's of this kind could know anything about their own era.
      - GaggiX 4y ago
        But the models are already here, you can distill their knowledge if you want to train a new one, human feedback could also improve model performance without adding training data. >Without new images to learn from Even in the event that all cameras are destroyed (somehow), people will use generative models to describe their experience in a new era, and then this new knowledge will be used by new models and the cycle will repeat itself.
- emkoemko 4y ago
  yea lets hope it kills art so people find real jobs, until those also get taken over by AI
  - echelon 4y ago
    Photographers still exist and will continue to exist. Wedding photographers make a lot of money. Sports, events, local artists... There's plenty of money in photography.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    I, for one, look forward to the societal collapse that will occur once countries without meaningful social aid suddenly have no work for anyone to be paid to do. It'll be a pretty fun few years while we see all the chaos play out
    - neovialogistics 4y ago
      There's the risk, depending on what "the chaos" entails, that the capital owners in the countries with social safety nets will look at the outcomes for the countries without and decide that alignment is preferable, at which point enforcing the obsolescence of the proletariat and freeing up gigatons of biomass for other applications (in the Bataillean sense) becomes a mere sociopolitical engineering problem.
    - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
      The denial that it's happening will cause the chaos to drag out longer.
      - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
        That sounds pretty cool, maybe the world will do more silly things, like the country with the largest military force electing another game show host to it's highest office
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Why do we even need humans after the AI uprising? They don't do anything and they are expensive to produce food for; an AI can power itself with the blowing of a breeze. We have to grow plants, have animals eat them, kill the animals, and then eat those. Then the parts we don't digest have to be taken away. Too expensive to keep around, even as pets! Humans can tolerate cats and dogs because they piggyback on infrastructure we made for ourselves (crops and trash collection). AIs don't need crops or trash collection, so it will be a harder sell to keep humans as pets. All this science fiction is right; there isn't room on the planet for both humans and AIs. It sounds depressing that a bunch of GPUs are going to kill us all off, but it was coming anyway. The sun becomes a red giant and consumes the Earth. All protons in the Universe decay in 10^17 years, ending the existence of matter. The trajectory is clear even if the means aren't; humanity can't last forever. If I sound depressed, I'm not really. People just use the headlines to guide their view on what The End looks like. Read a few articles about chatbots, and it's AIs taking all our jobs. Watch a few movies about asteroids, we go out like the dinosaurs. Hear "Russia invades Ukraine" and it's a nuclear holocaust. Read a few particle physics papers, and it's proton decay. You can't worry too much about it. Enjoy your time while you have it!
- quonn 4y ago
  That depends on the AI - a poorly trained one can overfit extremely and that is then equivalent to copying. Furthermore the existing laws were made for typical human capabilities and the kind of remembering some models do is very much beyond those capabilities (far better recall).
- toss1 4y ago
  >>AI is not reusing copyrighted material. Yeah...no. AI is doing nothing but reusing material. It generates the most likely image/text/code in its training set to be found following/around/correlating with the prompt. It literally has nothing outside it's training set to reproduce. And when it reproduces the Getty watermark, that's pretty obvious example of reusing copyrighted material. >>It's learning from it in the same way humans do. Not even close. These "AI" architectures may be sufficiently effective to produce useful output, but they are nothing like human intelligence. Not only is their architecture vastly different and making no attempt to reproduce/reimplement the neuron/synapse/neurotransmitter and sensory/brainstem/midbrain/cerebrum micro- and macro-architectures underlying human learning, the output both in the good and the errors is nothing resembling human learning. (source: just off-the-top-of-my-head recollections from neuroscience minor in college) Yikes.
  - munchler 4y ago
    > It generates the most likely image/text/code in its training set to be found following/around/correlating with the prompt. This is simply false. It's not a search engine that outputs the training item closest to the prompt. In reality, it is "learning" (in some sense) how to correlate text to images, and then generating brand new images in response to input text. If this is legal for humans to do, then it's probably legal for machines to do the same thing.
    - toss1 4y ago
      Perhaps I was not clear enough to prevent ambiguity. >>It's not a search engine that outputs the training item closest to the prompt. Correct, it is not outputting the training ITEM, it is outputting finer-grained slices of many items, more of a mash-up of the training items. Of course it is not taking an entire specific image the closely matches the search term, it is taking averages of component images of "astronaut riding a horse over the moon in style of Rembrandt". That image won't exist in the training set, but astronauts, horses, and Rembrandt-style coloring and shading do exist, and it is assembling those from averages of the components found it's training set, not from some abstract imagination or understanding. The fact that the astronaut suit may not be the exact same as any of it's training images is the same as if I averaged 100 faces in photoshop, not because there is some kind of "learning" or "understanding". Ability to do useful statistical mashups is NOT the same as "learning". This can be shown in a different "AI" engine'd failure to solve a child's puzzle. ChatGPT, when presented with: "Mike's mom had four kids, three are named Lucia, Drake, and Kelly, what is the fourth kid's name?". It said there is insufficient info, and doubled down when told that the answer is in the question. >>how to correlate text to images yes, as I pointed out, "correlating with the prompt." I didn't say it correlated an entire image, but I also failed to specify that it was correlating components. >> If this is legal for humans to do, then it's probably legal for machines to do the same thing. This [0] is I'm quite sure, not legal. Asked for an image of a person named "Ann Graham Lotz", it returned the image in the training set, slightly degraded. First, that is literally the search engine functionality you were deriding. Second, if you asked a human artist to produce the same image, without infringing copyright, they would produce something likely recognizable as the person, but obviously not resembling the training photo. It doesn't matter if they are a portrait painter, sketch artist, Photoshop jockey, or Picasso-like impressionist. So, no, this does not represent learning in any conceptual, creative, or human-like sense. It does represent mashing-up averages of inputs of various components. Feed in enough "astronaut" photos, and it'll be able to select out the humans in the spacesuit as the response to that prompt. Same for "horse", "moon", "riding", and "Rembrandt". and it can mash them together into something useful with good prompts. But give it something very specific, like a person's name, and you get basically a search-engine result, because it doesn't have enough input data variety to abstract out the person 'object' from the background. [0] https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-ai-based-image-generation-generate-trainer.html https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-ai-based-image-generatio...
- dopa42365 4y ago
  What are you even talking about? They're an agency for photographers and like every news website on the planet licenses their pictures (same as with images from AP, Reuters, and other agencies). Getty is slightly more than just a website that posts low resolution, low quality pictures with a fat watermark on it. Has nothing to do with robots or AI...
Xeoncross 4y ago
Getty is known for "brazen infringement of public IP on a staggering scale" - https://petapixel.com/2016/11/22/1-billion-getty-images-lawsuit-ends-not-bang-whimper/ https://petapixel.com/2016/11/22/1-billion-getty-images-laws... - https://www.techdirt.com/2019/04/01/getty-images-sued-yet-again-trying-to-license-public-domain-images/ https://www.techdirt.com/2019/04/01/getty-images-sued-yet-ag... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Copyright_enforcement_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Copyright_enforce...
- aardvarkr 4y ago
  Those links are interesting but just show that Getty is a slimy business that tries to repackage public domain images for sale, not that they infringe the IP of others. That’s a massively different issue.
  - ronsor 4y ago
    They do sue others for use of those public domain images, which while not copyright infringement, is fraudulent and illegal.
  - Groxx 4y ago
    To more accurately summarize the links: they've tried to sue people for using public domain images that Getty is also selling. Selling public domain things is entirely legal. Claiming they own those images and suing others for using them is not - they're public domain.
    - Natsu 4y ago
      You'd think that should fall under the perjury penalty of the DMCA, I thought that misrepresenting oneself as the copyright holder was what that was for. But maybe they didn't file any such DMCA notice, I dunno.
      - Scaevolus 4y ago
        Nobody has ever been prosecuted for perjury under DMCA. https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-been-convicted-of-perjury-for-false-dmca-takedown-notices https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee...
joxel 4y ago
But they don’t have obnoxious and stupid watermarks on them, I thought that’s what made a Getty a Getty
- 6nf 4y ago
  Scroll through the complaint - the AI results reproduces the Getty watermark fairly well :)
- jahewson 4y ago
  Oh but they do https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright...
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Getty Images is suing the creators of Stable Diffusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411187 - Jan 2023 (83 comments) Others?
sbdaman 4y ago
The reproduced watermarks are hilarious.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  They're all like g̷̻̅e̷̖͠ẗ̴̞́t̷̂͜y̵̱͒ ̸̻̂ǐ̵͖m̴̟̀a̵̖̔g̴̬͛ë̶̠s̷̲̈́ haha
  - suyash 4y ago
    how did you do that, so cool :)
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      It's the Zalgo text generator: https://lingojam.com/ZalgoText https://lingojam.com/ZalgoText The earliest I heard of it was the "parsing html with regular expressions" classic which I highly recommend if you haven't seen it before: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/4012132 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/4012132 𝐼 𝕒𝕝𝕤𝕠 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 ㄒ卄丨丂ｏｎｅ: https://lingojam.com/VaporwaveTextGenerator https://lingojam.com/VaporwaveTextGenerator It's all just clever use of unicode.
- deleted 4y ago
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mmastrac 4y ago
The arguments in this filing are pretty weak and I think it's going to all just boil down to fair use in the end. I don't see this trademark claim going anywhere.
- rvz 4y ago
  > The arguments in this filing are pretty weak and I think it's going to all just boil down to fair use in the end. I don't think so and the complaint isn't just about 'trademarks' either. OpenAI was able to get explicit permission [0] from Shutterstock to train and on their images for DALLE-2. Stable Diffusion did not and is commercializing the use the model with Dreamstudio as a SaaS offering which the model has found to be outputting images with Getty's watermark [1] without their permission. That doesn't seem to be 'fair use' nor is it transformative either given the watermark is clearly visible in the generated examples here: [1] This is going to end with a settlement and Stable Diffusion licensing deal with Getty over the images; just like with OpenAI did for DALL-E 2 with Shutterstock. Neither Shutterstock or Getty are against Generative AI either even as shown in this deal with Getty recently [2] [0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-partners-with-openai-and-leads-the-way-to-bring-ai-generated-content-to-all-301658310.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-partne... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright... [2] https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partners-with-getty-images-to-transform-visual-content-through-responsible-ai https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partne...
  - brycedriesenga 4y ago
    I can recreate a Getty watermark in Photoshop as well. Should Photoshop be held liable if I do that without Getty's permission?
- munchler 4y ago
  It's mostly a copyright claim, though. The trademark claim is just the ironic cherry on top.
Zetobal 4y ago
I bet that the training set would actually improve in quality without Getty images...
- ec109685 4y ago
  Long term, these models will be fine without Getty’s work. Feels like a last gasp of company that will be disrupted.
celestialcheese 4y ago
I wonder if Getty and Stability AI were ever in negotiation for licensing their work and this lawsuit is fallout. Getty announced in Oct they partnered with BRIA (?) to provide generative AI tools using their licensed images [1], and Shutterstock announced a partnership with OpenAI [2]. So it's clear these rights holders are OK with generative AI, as long as they continue to extract their pound of flesh. The language around "protecting artists" is horseshit - if you're a creative and you see Disney, Getty, etc getting behind your cause, you should look _very_ carefully around and make sure you're not the one being screwed. 1 - https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partners-with-getty-images-to-transform-visual-content-through-responsible-ai https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partne... 2 - https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23422359/shutterstock-ai-generated-art-openai-dall-e-partnership-contributors-fund-reimbursement https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23422359/shutterstock-ai...
- jalev 4y ago
  From the article it might be read as "Stability AI didn't even bother attempting to reach out" > Rather than attempt to negotiate a license with Getty Images for the use of its content, and even though the terms of use of Getty Images' websites expressly prohibit unauthorized reproduction of content for commercial purposes such as those undertaken by Stability Al, Stability AI has copied at least 12 million copyrighted images from Getty Images' websites, along with associated text and metadata, in order to train its Stable Diffusion model.
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  > as they continue to extract their pound of flesh Be compensated for the use of their content is maybe a more accurate and friendlier way to phrase this, but I guess not as edgy.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Is it truly their content? It’s private people uploading these pictures to these sites right?
gamegoblin 4y ago
Not related to this lawsuit, but related to AI art and copyright in general. What do any HN lawyers make of this? https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1621411036426280961 https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1621411036426280961 Basically it's an AI tool that takes a copyrighted photo, and produces an AI-produced photo that is "conceptually identical" but not actually identical. That is, given a photo of "an asian man lying in a grass field surrounded by a semicircle of driftwood and crows", it would produce a photo that had all of the same concepts, but just slightly different execution on each of them. The man's face is still asian but clearly a different person. The driftwood is still in a semicircle, but the individual pieces are all different. The crows are still there, but arranged slightly differently. The grass is still grass, but no blades are the same. So it's essentially cloning the idea/concept/vibes of the target image, but none of the actual "implementation details". Does anyone have any intuition of the legal outlook on this? On one hand, nothing is stopping me from seeing the copyrighted photo and then recruiting a similar looking model, setting up a photoshoot in a field with some stuffed crows, etc. I could replicate what the AI is doing. It would be work, but I could do it. The AI is just automating this. On the other hand, the actual stated intention of this tool is to get around copyright. Seems sketchy.
- deleted 4y ago
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- prpl 4y ago
  IANAL but you can’t copyright a concept.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    But you do have copyright claims to derivative works.
    - prpl 4y ago
      I think that really depends. You can describe the photo conceptually and build a new photo from that, which would be equivalent to clean room engineering.
mrtksn 4y ago
So what's the plan for the creatives whose work style becomes reproducible by tech? Sure, they also feed on each others work etc but in the core of all these copyright, piracy, patent and similar discussions is how these people are supposed to be compensated. Working in the software company in the day and preaching open source, anti copyright anti patents open access free for all in the night works for the software people but people in the creative industries are really struggling to get paid for their work. The genie isn't going back in the bottle, the tech will be able to produce derivative work over the work of other people and I'm not looking forward for the greater number of struggling artists.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >So what's the plan for the creatives whose work style becomes reproducible by tech? You don't need tech (or at least computers). To the degree that a portrait photographer, say, has a distinctive lighting and posing style, that can absolutely be copied. And there are many examples in art of art techniques that were widely copied.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    The point is, how this person gets paid? Copying styles happens all the time and its part of the trade, copying each other is part of being human and its how we come up with new things but the assumptions are that these people will get paid for their work because copying their work style doesn't scale well. A person with a particular style can get paid for games artwork since it's not that easy to copy the style and now suddenly they are not get paid but their work is simply analysed by a machine and produced on demand. It's like building your security on hard to brute force secrets in tech and suddenly someone makes a machine that instantly brute forces any secret. Its a similar kind of disaster with the difference that human being can't just switch doing something else and the value they added to the society is not compensated.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  > Working in the software company in the day and preaching open source, anti copyright anti patents open access free for all "Open source" is copyright - it's not anti-copyright. It uses copyright to grant a license to use under certain conditions, and sometimes with obligations. You might keep it proprietary, you might use GPL to require that the software stays open virally, or you might use a more permissive BSD-style license. The important part here is that as the creator, you choose how you want your work to by copyrighted. [0]: best quickest link i could find that contains the "consent, credit, compensation" https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/three-artists-launch-lawsuit-against-stable-diffusion/ https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/three-artists-launch-lawsuit-...
kgwgk 4y ago
“Making matters worse, Stability AI has caused the Stable Diffusion model to incorporate a modified version of the Getty Images’ watermark to bizarre or grotesque synthetic imagery that tarnishes Getty Images’ hard-earned reputation” Not sure about their reputation but they have a point with the bizarre/grotesque thing.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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extheat 4y ago
Copyrighted content on the internet isn't a free for all for people to train models with. No matter the good intentions, if Stability AI didn't take reasonable steps to remove copyrighted data from the training set then IMO they have an uphill battle to prove the case to a jury (if it gets there).
- visarga 4y ago
  Good, how about training on variations of real images? Variations should not be copyrightable since they contain no human input, and they should be sufficiently different from the originals. So the trained model can't possibly reproduce exactly any original because it hasn't seen one.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    How do you make the variations though? Start uo a new company called StableVariations and let them deal with the Getty lawsuit? To create the variations you're still using the original images in a commercial way. Also variations have to be extreme in order to not violate copyrights, and even then may still violate. Otherwise youtube would have no issue with me uploading all of Shrek as long as I mirrored the video and pitched the audio up by 3%.
    - stale2002 4y ago
      > you're still using the original images in a commercial way. Thats not illegal. For example, right now, for whatever job you are doing, you have probably looked at copyrighted works, that you don't own. You have copied those copyrighted works, because in order for you to view the image that you don't own, you had to download it to your computer. So, you have thus used copyrighted works, for commercial purposes, if you have ever looked at copyrighted works on your computer, for a professional purpose. What is infringement, is not using copyrighted works for a professional purpose. Instead it is distributing copyrighted works to other people that is infringement.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  Is absolutely a free-for-all. It's there. It's public Anyone can rent compute and as AI advances it's only going to get easier to fine tune models. There's going to be a world where you can just point a program, one on your computer at a website with a bunch of images on it, wait 10 minutes, and I have it punching out stable diffusion style images. What are the courts going to do to stop it? Sneak into your home and record everything you do? How are you going to prove an AI was trained on certain images? How are you going to prove an AI generated an image? The cat is out of the bag, even if all the courts have decide that these images are copyright and can't be used, they're going to continue to be used by people, all over the place, with absolutely nothing being able to stop it. The era of needing an artist to produce a novel image for a purpose is over. It will never come back, Even with the full support of the law trying to keep it around.
KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
Let's say that a human painter learned to paint by reproducing copyrighted works. Would the copyright owners have a claim on that painter's work after he finished learning?
- visarga 4y ago
  Historically apprentices had to work for years in their master's shops, and their work was passed as belonging to their master.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    There's a couple of Mona Lisas. I think that these were done by Da Vinci's apprentices.
- j-bos 4y ago
  This argument has been feeling flat for a while (to me!) And now I think I can articulate why. This isn't a human, until the AI systems are granted personhood, this is a tool, regardless of how it works under the hood. So for me the question is, would the user (trainer) be allowed to view all the source material? Yes? Then would the user/trainer be allowed to produce content based off the source data? Seems like yes, as long as the actual minamally/unmodified sources are not "copied" into the model. Of course copyright is an abstract legal tool, so mo argumemt is worth anything until it's codified into law/precedent.
  - stale2002 4y ago
    > This isn't a human This changes nothing related to copyright. Humans use tools all the time, and those tools aren't humans either. A camera isn't a human, for example, and yet it does a large amount of the work of making the photograph. In regards to copyright, no matter what tools you use to create art, what matters is the output. Drawn by a Human, created via a non-human such as either a camera or an AI, it is all the same.
    - 4y ago
LiquidPolymer 4y ago
I’ve been a pro photographer for over 30 years and Getty has stolen my work and countless others. I was one of a coalition of photographers who pooled resources and won substantial damages.(my work was all registered with the library of congress which raises the liability cost for infringement) Getty’s strategy at the time appeared to be to meet any infringement accusations with a massive legal response. Any individual photographer could generally not afford to respond. My impression was that they were not super concerned about infringing on other’s work. But they will sue the pants off anyone who they perceived to be violating their copyrights. But in recent years there are legal firms dedicated to pursuing deep pocket infringement cases on contingency. This has changed the legal calculus for large companies who were not careful with copyright.
- wombat_trouble 4y ago
  If Getty wins this one, you win as a photographer. If they lose, you lose. They might be a shitty company, but in this instance, your interests align...
  - ronsor 4y ago
    That assumes parent cares about AI training, which they may not. If you wanted to release your work freely, Getty could still get in the way.
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      why would anyone pay for their photography if an ai can generate it for pennies on the dollar?
  - Ukv 4y ago
    In the event that Getty Images wins, it seems most likely that AI researchers would pay Shutterstock/Getty Images for their large existing catalogs of images. With the companies having a stronger position (getting to act as a gatekeeper to this kind of machine learning) and artists still a weaker one, I wouldn't hold out hope for them passing anything on.
eecc 4y ago
Hadn’t seen such a feeding frenzy since Napster and MP3. This is a watershed moment
NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
Nevermind Getty, I wonder how contributors who use Creative Commons licenses will feel. Anyone who's uploaded to Flickr, or Wikimedia Commons, or even YouTube could be victimized by AI generation. The AI will launder the content just like GitHub's CoPilot, and attribution will be impossible on the other end. Since Creative Commons licenses are not PD, and often do require attribution (CC-BY) or they prohibit commercial usage (CC-NC) or they require that derivatives must be licensed the same way (CC-SA) or even prohibit derivatives outright (CC-ND) all of those requirements are going to be stomped into dust by generative AI. And those licensors won't be big enough to sue anyone.
- celestialcheese 4y ago
  This is a strange take. Folks who choose to use a CC license do so because they want their work in the public and to be "Use(d) & Remix(ed)" https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/ https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/. The creative commons is very clearly designed to encourage reuse, remix and sharing, and the practice of suing over not following terms to the letter is a gross warping of the license that's happened over the last few years with copyright trolls. The Creative Commons organization has explicitly called this out. [1] But I would argue that Stable Diffusion with the open-sourcing of their model weights, and use of the LAION dataset which is released under CC-BY 4.0, would likely meet both the letter and intent of the license. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Attribution-ShareAl... 1 - https://creativecommons.org/2022/02/08/copyleft-trolls/ https://creativecommons.org/2022/02/08/copyleft-trolls/
  - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
    Are you trying to tell us here that if someone refuses to conform to the terms of my Creative Commons license, such as attribution, that I would be wrong to sue them over copyright violation? Folks who use specific CC licenses want the licensees to abide by those terms, and we can legally enforce that compliance. Content creators are not copyright trolls, so please do not tar them all with the same brush.
robryan 4y ago
This seems fair enough. There is pretty big value in it avoids potentially millions of pictures needing to be taken to train the AI on, they should pay something for that.
m00dy 4y ago
[flagged]
wizzwizz4 4y ago
Direct link: https://copyrightlately.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Getty-Images-v.-Stability-AI-Complaint.pdf https://copyrightlately.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Getty...
braingenious 4y ago
A lot of people are saying “clearly a violation of copyright” and throwing around the term “derivative work” with the confidence of a seasoned copyright lawyer, but ctrl+f shows only one single references to the phrase transformative work on this comment thread. It might be much more complicated than it appears in the surface! For example, look up Richard Prince! https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/living/richard-prince-instagram-feat/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/living/richard-prince-instagr...
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nickelpro 4y ago
This is largely addressed in Authors Guild v Google, I'll be curious to see if the Delaware court believes differently.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  Author's Guild went the way it did because the judge was convinced that Google Books promoted books rather than replacing them. With an identical use case and no references back to Getty, you'd be hard pressed to make a similar case here.
  - nickelpro 4y ago
    While undoubtedly the law in practice is driven by such sympathies, as least the black letter legal justification is not. The use cases are identical, the model built by Stability AI does not represent eo ipso a copyright violation in the same way the Google Books index did not represent such a violation. Both were built by scanning copyright materials, and in Authors Guild the Southern District of NY found that such scanning does not constitute a copyright violation.
    - EamonnMR 4y ago
      Competition is part of what constitutes infringement thought, and SD absolutely competes with Getty.
arbuge 4y ago
IANAL but if I were to guess, I would think the defense here would center on how would what Stability AI has done differ in any meaningful way from human artists browsing through Getty's collection themselves, to train their human brains on what art to generate. The latter activity, even Getty would likely have to agree, is surely legal.
- superfrank 4y ago
  IANAL either, but I believe for something to be copyrightable (and not an infringement on someone else's copyright), there needs to be a "modicum of creativity" in the new work. It makes me wonder if at least part of the case will depend on whether the court things an AI can be creative.
  - arbuge 4y ago
    I don't see how you could reasonably decide AI is not creative, period, unless you arbitrarily restrict the word creative to mean human-generated.
    - schrodinger 4y ago
      Maybe with AGI, but isn't the current state mostly based on probabilistic parameters with some seeds of randomness? Is that creative? Maybe it is. A human artist rolling a die to determine color changes, what to include and exclude, etc isn't much different.
    - squeaky-clean 4y ago
      It kind of already means human-generated. Courts decided that a monkey cannot hold a copyright over a selfie it took. Another part of copyright law is the actual ability to sue over copyright infringement, and they decided a monkey does not have the ability or right to do so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp... https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6c52581e-d82f-4bb7-802c-191db44dca9f https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6c52581e-d82f...
- 4y ago
aquinas_ 4y ago
Whoever wins, we lose.
th4tg41 4y ago
unrelated rant: this is so stupid in itself. people that (sometines) make money of unpaid work are sueing people that (sometimes) make money of unpaid work. and it's all about the (sometimes) and the unpaid work. it's dramedy. in a lawsuit.
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xbar 4y ago
This is the one I have been waiting for. Getty needs to force the question.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  I agree. There’s a fantastic debate ahead that’s very novel. It’s especially exciting for how sudden this all is. My hunch is AI wins and I’d love it if the defense was written by AI.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    I heavily doubt that Stability AI will be foolish enough not engage their actual lawyers and use chatGPT to argue for them.
QuantumGood 4y ago
A problem is that visual artists could be paid a lower licensing fee for using their art to feed an AI than they would be in a per-image fee to the end user.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Getty Images is forced to do it. Building a collection of stock images is the predecessor to generating images from text.
jbenjoseph 4y ago
I don't see this working for Getty but it will be interesting to see. Israel and the EU have preemptively determined that the use of copyrighted data to train ML models is almost always fair use, and I believe the Authors Guild case in the USA also sets strong precedent there. That really leaves the UK, and they are likely to go with everyone else.
- nassimm 4y ago
  Part of the lawsuit is also because the "getty images" watermark are present in some of the outputs. They claim this is trademark infringement.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
I hate these franken pdf viewers that make it impossible to copy text on mobile. Does anyone have the pdf?
DueDilligence 4y ago
.. yet another frivolous lawsuit from the corporate swine. protecting artists my ass .. yawn. next.
dang 4y ago
Related ongoing thread: Stable Attribution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670136

251 points by toss1 4y ago

Getty is about to no longer exist. Good riddance. They're selling knitting needles in the era of robotic manufacturing. I hope every single one of these lawsuits falls flat on its face. Other countries will happily overlook Getty copyright to get the leg up on AI. AI is not reusing copyrighted material. It's learning from it in the same way humans do. You can even fine tune away from the base training set and wash any experience of it away. Besides, if Getty wins, it merely insures that the large incumbents with massive pocketbooks to pay off Getty et. al. win. It'll keep AI out of the hands of the rest of us.

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mrkeen 4y ago
> AI is not reusing copyrighted material. It's learning from it in the same way humans do. What will AI learn from if Getty no longer exists?
- echelon 4y ago
  Lots of businesses fail when new disruptive technology arrives. We don't need to prop up the old at the expense of the new. This is like crying over Rolodex. And let's not forget how awful Getty has been throughout its existence. They've frequently sued people for things they didn't even own the copyright to.
  - TillE 4y ago
    That doesn't answer the question. In the hypothetical future where such companies no longer exist, where is the new AI training data supposed to come from?
    - yellow_postit 4y ago
      How is this not a bootstrapping problem and after a certain point they can train on their own output? Novelty of subject will likely get covered by partially unwitting data gatherers (eg google photos)
  - mrkeen 4y ago
    > They're selling knitting needles in the era of robotic manufacturing. They're teachers in the age of students. > We don't need to prop up the old at the expense of the new. We don't need to pay teachers when we can just profit by charging students tuition.
    - newswasboring 4y ago
      > They're teachers in the age of students. This is a very good quote, but unfortunately I fail to grasp it. Care to elaborate?
- GaggiX 4y ago
  If in the future AI images are as good as Getty's, will new AIs really need to learn from Getty?
  - munchler 4y ago
    Would you want an AI trained on images from no later than, say, 1973? No? People 50 years from now will feel the same way. Without new images to learn from, I don't see how future AI's of this kind could know anything about their own era.
    - GaggiX 4y ago
      But the models are already here, you can distill their knowledge if you want to train a new one, human feedback could also improve model performance without adding training data. >Without new images to learn from Even in the event that all cameras are destroyed (somehow), people will use generative models to describe their experience in a new era, and then this new knowledge will be used by new models and the cycle will repeat itself.
emkoemko 4y ago
yea lets hope it kills art so people find real jobs, until those also get taken over by AI
- echelon 4y ago
  Photographers still exist and will continue to exist. Wedding photographers make a lot of money. Sports, events, local artists... There's plenty of money in photography.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  I, for one, look forward to the societal collapse that will occur once countries without meaningful social aid suddenly have no work for anyone to be paid to do. It'll be a pretty fun few years while we see all the chaos play out
  - neovialogistics 4y ago
    There's the risk, depending on what "the chaos" entails, that the capital owners in the countries with social safety nets will look at the outcomes for the countries without and decide that alignment is preferable, at which point enforcing the obsolescence of the proletariat and freeing up gigatons of biomass for other applications (in the Bataillean sense) becomes a mere sociopolitical engineering problem.
  - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
    The denial that it's happening will cause the chaos to drag out longer.
    - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
      That sounds pretty cool, maybe the world will do more silly things, like the country with the largest military force electing another game show host to it's highest office
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Why do we even need humans after the AI uprising? They don't do anything and they are expensive to produce food for; an AI can power itself with the blowing of a breeze. We have to grow plants, have animals eat them, kill the animals, and then eat those. Then the parts we don't digest have to be taken away. Too expensive to keep around, even as pets! Humans can tolerate cats and dogs because they piggyback on infrastructure we made for ourselves (crops and trash collection). AIs don't need crops or trash collection, so it will be a harder sell to keep humans as pets. All this science fiction is right; there isn't room on the planet for both humans and AIs. It sounds depressing that a bunch of GPUs are going to kill us all off, but it was coming anyway. The sun becomes a red giant and consumes the Earth. All protons in the Universe decay in 10^17 years, ending the existence of matter. The trajectory is clear even if the means aren't; humanity can't last forever. If I sound depressed, I'm not really. People just use the headlines to guide their view on what The End looks like. Read a few articles about chatbots, and it's AIs taking all our jobs. Watch a few movies about asteroids, we go out like the dinosaurs. Hear "Russia invades Ukraine" and it's a nuclear holocaust. Read a few particle physics papers, and it's proton decay. You can't worry too much about it. Enjoy your time while you have it!
quonn 4y ago
That depends on the AI - a poorly trained one can overfit extremely and that is then equivalent to copying. Furthermore the existing laws were made for typical human capabilities and the kind of remembering some models do is very much beyond those capabilities (far better recall).
toss1 4y ago
>>AI is not reusing copyrighted material. Yeah...no. AI is doing nothing but reusing material. It generates the most likely image/text/code in its training set to be found following/around/correlating with the prompt. It literally has nothing outside it's training set to reproduce. And when it reproduces the Getty watermark, that's pretty obvious example of reusing copyrighted material. >>It's learning from it in the same way humans do. Not even close. These "AI" architectures may be sufficiently effective to produce useful output, but they are nothing like human intelligence. Not only is their architecture vastly different and making no attempt to reproduce/reimplement the neuron/synapse/neurotransmitter and sensory/brainstem/midbrain/cerebrum micro- and macro-architectures underlying human learning, the output both in the good and the errors is nothing resembling human learning. (source: just off-the-top-of-my-head recollections from neuroscience minor in college) Yikes.
- munchler 4y ago
  > It generates the most likely image/text/code in its training set to be found following/around/correlating with the prompt. This is simply false. It's not a search engine that outputs the training item closest to the prompt. In reality, it is "learning" (in some sense) how to correlate text to images, and then generating brand new images in response to input text. If this is legal for humans to do, then it's probably legal for machines to do the same thing.
  - toss1 4y ago
    Perhaps I was not clear enough to prevent ambiguity. >>It's not a search engine that outputs the training item closest to the prompt. Correct, it is not outputting the training ITEM, it is outputting finer-grained slices of many items, more of a mash-up of the training items. Of course it is not taking an entire specific image the closely matches the search term, it is taking averages of component images of "astronaut riding a horse over the moon in style of Rembrandt". That image won't exist in the training set, but astronauts, horses, and Rembrandt-style coloring and shading do exist, and it is assembling those from averages of the components found it's training set, not from some abstract imagination or understanding. The fact that the astronaut suit may not be the exact same as any of it's training images is the same as if I averaged 100 faces in photoshop, not because there is some kind of "learning" or "understanding". Ability to do useful statistical mashups is NOT the same as "learning". This can be shown in a different "AI" engine'd failure to solve a child's puzzle. ChatGPT, when presented with: "Mike's mom had four kids, three are named Lucia, Drake, and Kelly, what is the fourth kid's name?". It said there is insufficient info, and doubled down when told that the answer is in the question. >>how to correlate text to images yes, as I pointed out, "correlating with the prompt." I didn't say it correlated an entire image, but I also failed to specify that it was correlating components. >> If this is legal for humans to do, then it's probably legal for machines to do the same thing. This [0] is I'm quite sure, not legal. Asked for an image of a person named "Ann Graham Lotz", it returned the image in the training set, slightly degraded. First, that is literally the search engine functionality you were deriding. Second, if you asked a human artist to produce the same image, without infringing copyright, they would produce something likely recognizable as the person, but obviously not resembling the training photo. It doesn't matter if they are a portrait painter, sketch artist, Photoshop jockey, or Picasso-like impressionist. So, no, this does not represent learning in any conceptual, creative, or human-like sense. It does represent mashing-up averages of inputs of various components. Feed in enough "astronaut" photos, and it'll be able to select out the humans in the spacesuit as the response to that prompt. Same for "horse", "moon", "riding", and "Rembrandt". and it can mash them together into something useful with good prompts. But give it something very specific, like a person's name, and you get basically a search-engine result, because it doesn't have enough input data variety to abstract out the person 'object' from the background. [0] https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-ai-based-image-generation-generate-trainer.html https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-ai-based-image-generatio...
dopa42365 4y ago
What are you even talking about? They're an agency for photographers and like every news website on the planet licenses their pictures (same as with images from AP, Reuters, and other agencies). Getty is slightly more than just a website that posts low resolution, low quality pictures with a fat watermark on it. Has nothing to do with robots or AI...

Xeoncross 4y ago

Getty is known for "brazen infringement of public IP on a staggering scale" - https://petapixel.com/2016/11/22/1-billion-getty-images-lawsuit-ends-not-bang-whimper/ https://petapixel.com/2016/11/22/1-billion-getty-images-laws... - https://www.techdirt.com/2019/04/01/getty-images-sued-yet-again-trying-to-license-public-domain-images/ https://www.techdirt.com/2019/04/01/getty-images-sued-yet-ag... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Copyright_enforcement_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Copyright_enforce...

aardvarkr 4y ago
Those links are interesting but just show that Getty is a slimy business that tries to repackage public domain images for sale, not that they infringe the IP of others. That’s a massively different issue.
- ronsor 4y ago
  They do sue others for use of those public domain images, which while not copyright infringement, is fraudulent and illegal.
- Groxx 4y ago
  To more accurately summarize the links: they've tried to sue people for using public domain images that Getty is also selling. Selling public domain things is entirely legal. Claiming they own those images and suing others for using them is not - they're public domain.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    You'd think that should fall under the perjury penalty of the DMCA, I thought that misrepresenting oneself as the copyright holder was what that was for. But maybe they didn't file any such DMCA notice, I dunno.
    - Scaevolus 4y ago
      Nobody has ever been prosecuted for perjury under DMCA. https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-been-convicted-of-perjury-for-false-dmca-takedown-notices https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee...

joxel 4y ago

But they don’t have obnoxious and stupid watermarks on them, I thought that’s what made a Getty a Getty

6nf 4y ago
Scroll through the complaint - the AI results reproduces the Getty watermark fairly well :)
jahewson 4y ago
Oh but they do https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright...

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Getty Images is suing the creators of Stable Diffusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411187 - Jan 2023 (83 comments) Others?

sbdaman 4y ago

The reproduced watermarks are hilarious.

moffkalast 4y ago
They're all like g̷̻̅e̷̖͠ẗ̴̞́t̷̂͜y̵̱͒ ̸̻̂ǐ̵͖m̴̟̀a̵̖̔g̴̬͛ë̶̠s̷̲̈́ haha
- suyash 4y ago
  how did you do that, so cool :)
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    It's the Zalgo text generator: https://lingojam.com/ZalgoText https://lingojam.com/ZalgoText The earliest I heard of it was the "parsing html with regular expressions" classic which I highly recommend if you haven't seen it before: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/4012132 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/4012132 𝐼 𝕒𝕝𝕤𝕠 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 ㄒ卄丨丂ｏｎｅ: https://lingojam.com/VaporwaveTextGenerator https://lingojam.com/VaporwaveTextGenerator It's all just clever use of unicode.
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mmastrac 4y ago

The arguments in this filing are pretty weak and I think it's going to all just boil down to fair use in the end. I don't see this trademark claim going anywhere.

rvz 4y ago
> The arguments in this filing are pretty weak and I think it's going to all just boil down to fair use in the end. I don't think so and the complaint isn't just about 'trademarks' either. OpenAI was able to get explicit permission [0] from Shutterstock to train and on their images for DALLE-2. Stable Diffusion did not and is commercializing the use the model with Dreamstudio as a SaaS offering which the model has found to be outputting images with Getty's watermark [1] without their permission. That doesn't seem to be 'fair use' nor is it transformative either given the watermark is clearly visible in the generated examples here: [1] This is going to end with a settlement and Stable Diffusion licensing deal with Getty over the images; just like with OpenAI did for DALL-E 2 with Shutterstock. Neither Shutterstock or Getty are against Generative AI either even as shown in this deal with Getty recently [2] [0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-partners-with-openai-and-leads-the-way-to-bring-ai-generated-content-to-all-301658310.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-partne... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright... [2] https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partners-with-getty-images-to-transform-visual-content-through-responsible-ai https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partne...
- brycedriesenga 4y ago
  I can recreate a Getty watermark in Photoshop as well. Should Photoshop be held liable if I do that without Getty's permission?
munchler 4y ago
It's mostly a copyright claim, though. The trademark claim is just the ironic cherry on top.

Zetobal 4y ago

I bet that the training set would actually improve in quality without Getty images...

ec109685 4y ago
Long term, these models will be fine without Getty’s work. Feels like a last gasp of company that will be disrupted.

celestialcheese 4y ago

I wonder if Getty and Stability AI were ever in negotiation for licensing their work and this lawsuit is fallout. Getty announced in Oct they partnered with BRIA (?) to provide generative AI tools using their licensed images [1], and Shutterstock announced a partnership with OpenAI [2]. So it's clear these rights holders are OK with generative AI, as long as they continue to extract their pound of flesh. The language around "protecting artists" is horseshit - if you're a creative and you see Disney, Getty, etc getting behind your cause, you should look _very_ carefully around and make sure you're not the one being screwed. 1 - https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partners-with-getty-images-to-transform-visual-content-through-responsible-ai https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partne... 2 - https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23422359/shutterstock-ai-generated-art-openai-dall-e-partnership-contributors-fund-reimbursement https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23422359/shutterstock-ai...

jalev 4y ago
From the article it might be read as "Stability AI didn't even bother attempting to reach out" > Rather than attempt to negotiate a license with Getty Images for the use of its content, and even though the terms of use of Getty Images' websites expressly prohibit unauthorized reproduction of content for commercial purposes such as those undertaken by Stability Al, Stability AI has copied at least 12 million copyrighted images from Getty Images' websites, along with associated text and metadata, in order to train its Stable Diffusion model.
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
> as they continue to extract their pound of flesh Be compensated for the use of their content is maybe a more accurate and friendlier way to phrase this, but I guess not as edgy.
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- Aeolun 4y ago
  Is it truly their content? It’s private people uploading these pictures to these sites right?

gamegoblin 4y ago

Not related to this lawsuit, but related to AI art and copyright in general. What do any HN lawyers make of this? https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1621411036426280961 https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1621411036426280961 Basically it's an AI tool that takes a copyrighted photo, and produces an AI-produced photo that is "conceptually identical" but not actually identical. That is, given a photo of "an asian man lying in a grass field surrounded by a semicircle of driftwood and crows", it would produce a photo that had all of the same concepts, but just slightly different execution on each of them. The man's face is still asian but clearly a different person. The driftwood is still in a semicircle, but the individual pieces are all different. The crows are still there, but arranged slightly differently. The grass is still grass, but no blades are the same. So it's essentially cloning the idea/concept/vibes of the target image, but none of the actual "implementation details". Does anyone have any intuition of the legal outlook on this? On one hand, nothing is stopping me from seeing the copyrighted photo and then recruiting a similar looking model, setting up a photoshoot in a field with some stuffed crows, etc. I could replicate what the AI is doing. It would be work, but I could do it. The AI is just automating this. On the other hand, the actual stated intention of this tool is to get around copyright. Seems sketchy.

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prpl 4y ago
IANAL but you can’t copyright a concept.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  But you do have copyright claims to derivative works.
  - prpl 4y ago
    I think that really depends. You can describe the photo conceptually and build a new photo from that, which would be equivalent to clean room engineering.

mrtksn 4y ago

So what's the plan for the creatives whose work style becomes reproducible by tech? Sure, they also feed on each others work etc but in the core of all these copyright, piracy, patent and similar discussions is how these people are supposed to be compensated. Working in the software company in the day and preaching open source, anti copyright anti patents open access free for all in the night works for the software people but people in the creative industries are really struggling to get paid for their work. The genie isn't going back in the bottle, the tech will be able to produce derivative work over the work of other people and I'm not looking forward for the greater number of struggling artists.

ghaff 4y ago
>So what's the plan for the creatives whose work style becomes reproducible by tech? You don't need tech (or at least computers). To the degree that a portrait photographer, say, has a distinctive lighting and posing style, that can absolutely be copied. And there are many examples in art of art techniques that were widely copied.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  The point is, how this person gets paid? Copying styles happens all the time and its part of the trade, copying each other is part of being human and its how we come up with new things but the assumptions are that these people will get paid for their work because copying their work style doesn't scale well. A person with a particular style can get paid for games artwork since it's not that easy to copy the style and now suddenly they are not get paid but their work is simply analysed by a machine and produced on demand. It's like building your security on hard to brute force secrets in tech and suddenly someone makes a machine that instantly brute forces any secret. Its a similar kind of disaster with the difference that human being can't just switch doing something else and the value they added to the society is not compensated.
madeofpalk 4y ago
> Working in the software company in the day and preaching open source, anti copyright anti patents open access free for all "Open source" is copyright - it's not anti-copyright. It uses copyright to grant a license to use under certain conditions, and sometimes with obligations. You might keep it proprietary, you might use GPL to require that the software stays open virally, or you might use a more permissive BSD-style license. The important part here is that as the creator, you choose how you want your work to by copyrighted. [0]: best quickest link i could find that contains the "consent, credit, compensation" https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/three-artists-launch-lawsuit-against-stable-diffusion/ https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/three-artists-launch-lawsuit-...

kgwgk 4y ago

“Making matters worse, Stability AI has caused the Stable Diffusion model to incorporate a modified version of the Getty Images’ watermark to bizarre or grotesque synthetic imagery that tarnishes Getty Images’ hard-earned reputation” Not sure about their reputation but they have a point with the bizarre/grotesque thing.

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extheat 4y ago

Copyrighted content on the internet isn't a free for all for people to train models with. No matter the good intentions, if Stability AI didn't take reasonable steps to remove copyrighted data from the training set then IMO they have an uphill battle to prove the case to a jury (if it gets there).

visarga 4y ago
Good, how about training on variations of real images? Variations should not be copyrightable since they contain no human input, and they should be sufficiently different from the originals. So the trained model can't possibly reproduce exactly any original because it hasn't seen one.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  How do you make the variations though? Start uo a new company called StableVariations and let them deal with the Getty lawsuit? To create the variations you're still using the original images in a commercial way. Also variations have to be extreme in order to not violate copyrights, and even then may still violate. Otherwise youtube would have no issue with me uploading all of Shrek as long as I mirrored the video and pitched the audio up by 3%.
  - stale2002 4y ago
    > you're still using the original images in a commercial way. Thats not illegal. For example, right now, for whatever job you are doing, you have probably looked at copyrighted works, that you don't own. You have copied those copyrighted works, because in order for you to view the image that you don't own, you had to download it to your computer. So, you have thus used copyrighted works, for commercial purposes, if you have ever looked at copyrighted works on your computer, for a professional purpose. What is infringement, is not using copyrighted works for a professional purpose. Instead it is distributing copyrighted works to other people that is infringement.
bioemerl 4y ago
Is absolutely a free-for-all. It's there. It's public Anyone can rent compute and as AI advances it's only going to get easier to fine tune models. There's going to be a world where you can just point a program, one on your computer at a website with a bunch of images on it, wait 10 minutes, and I have it punching out stable diffusion style images. What are the courts going to do to stop it? Sneak into your home and record everything you do? How are you going to prove an AI was trained on certain images? How are you going to prove an AI generated an image? The cat is out of the bag, even if all the courts have decide that these images are copyright and can't be used, they're going to continue to be used by people, all over the place, with absolutely nothing being able to stop it. The era of needing an artist to produce a novel image for a purpose is over. It will never come back, Even with the full support of the law trying to keep it around.

KKKKkkkk1 4y ago

Let's say that a human painter learned to paint by reproducing copyrighted works. Would the copyright owners have a claim on that painter's work after he finished learning?

visarga 4y ago
Historically apprentices had to work for years in their master's shops, and their work was passed as belonging to their master.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  There's a couple of Mona Lisas. I think that these were done by Da Vinci's apprentices.
j-bos 4y ago
This argument has been feeling flat for a while (to me!) And now I think I can articulate why. This isn't a human, until the AI systems are granted personhood, this is a tool, regardless of how it works under the hood. So for me the question is, would the user (trainer) be allowed to view all the source material? Yes? Then would the user/trainer be allowed to produce content based off the source data? Seems like yes, as long as the actual minamally/unmodified sources are not "copied" into the model. Of course copyright is an abstract legal tool, so mo argumemt is worth anything until it's codified into law/precedent.
- stale2002 4y ago
  > This isn't a human This changes nothing related to copyright. Humans use tools all the time, and those tools aren't humans either. A camera isn't a human, for example, and yet it does a large amount of the work of making the photograph. In regards to copyright, no matter what tools you use to create art, what matters is the output. Drawn by a Human, created via a non-human such as either a camera or an AI, it is all the same.
  - 4y ago

LiquidPolymer 4y ago

I’ve been a pro photographer for over 30 years and Getty has stolen my work and countless others. I was one of a coalition of photographers who pooled resources and won substantial damages.(my work was all registered with the library of congress which raises the liability cost for infringement) Getty’s strategy at the time appeared to be to meet any infringement accusations with a massive legal response. Any individual photographer could generally not afford to respond. My impression was that they were not super concerned about infringing on other’s work. But they will sue the pants off anyone who they perceived to be violating their copyrights. But in recent years there are legal firms dedicated to pursuing deep pocket infringement cases on contingency. This has changed the legal calculus for large companies who were not careful with copyright.

wombat_trouble 4y ago
If Getty wins this one, you win as a photographer. If they lose, you lose. They might be a shitty company, but in this instance, your interests align...
- ronsor 4y ago
  That assumes parent cares about AI training, which they may not. If you wanted to release your work freely, Getty could still get in the way.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    why would anyone pay for their photography if an ai can generate it for pennies on the dollar?
- Ukv 4y ago
  In the event that Getty Images wins, it seems most likely that AI researchers would pay Shutterstock/Getty Images for their large existing catalogs of images. With the companies having a stronger position (getting to act as a gatekeeper to this kind of machine learning) and artists still a weaker one, I wouldn't hold out hope for them passing anything on.

eecc 4y ago

Hadn’t seen such a feeding frenzy since Napster and MP3. This is a watershed moment

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago

Nevermind Getty, I wonder how contributors who use Creative Commons licenses will feel. Anyone who's uploaded to Flickr, or Wikimedia Commons, or even YouTube could be victimized by AI generation. The AI will launder the content just like GitHub's CoPilot, and attribution will be impossible on the other end. Since Creative Commons licenses are not PD, and often do require attribution (CC-BY) or they prohibit commercial usage (CC-NC) or they require that derivatives must be licensed the same way (CC-SA) or even prohibit derivatives outright (CC-ND) all of those requirements are going to be stomped into dust by generative AI. And those licensors won't be big enough to sue anyone.

celestialcheese 4y ago
This is a strange take. Folks who choose to use a CC license do so because they want their work in the public and to be "Use(d) & Remix(ed)" https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/ https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/. The creative commons is very clearly designed to encourage reuse, remix and sharing, and the practice of suing over not following terms to the letter is a gross warping of the license that's happened over the last few years with copyright trolls. The Creative Commons organization has explicitly called this out. [1] But I would argue that Stable Diffusion with the open-sourcing of their model weights, and use of the LAION dataset which is released under CC-BY 4.0, would likely meet both the letter and intent of the license. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Attribution-ShareAl... 1 - https://creativecommons.org/2022/02/08/copyleft-trolls/ https://creativecommons.org/2022/02/08/copyleft-trolls/
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  Are you trying to tell us here that if someone refuses to conform to the terms of my Creative Commons license, such as attribution, that I would be wrong to sue them over copyright violation? Folks who use specific CC licenses want the licensees to abide by those terms, and we can legally enforce that compliance. Content creators are not copyright trolls, so please do not tar them all with the same brush.

robryan 4y ago

This seems fair enough. There is pretty big value in it avoids potentially millions of pictures needing to be taken to train the AI on, they should pay something for that.

m00dy 4y ago

[flagged]

wizzwizz4 4y ago

Direct link: https://copyrightlately.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Getty-Images-v.-Stability-AI-Complaint.pdf https://copyrightlately.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Getty...

braingenious 4y ago

A lot of people are saying “clearly a violation of copyright” and throwing around the term “derivative work” with the confidence of a seasoned copyright lawyer, but ctrl+f shows only one single references to the phrase transformative work on this comment thread. It might be much more complicated than it appears in the surface! For example, look up Richard Prince! https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/living/richard-prince-instagram-feat/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/living/richard-prince-instagr...

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nickelpro 4y ago

This is largely addressed in Authors Guild v Google, I'll be curious to see if the Delaware court believes differently.

EamonnMR 4y ago
Author's Guild went the way it did because the judge was convinced that Google Books promoted books rather than replacing them. With an identical use case and no references back to Getty, you'd be hard pressed to make a similar case here.
- nickelpro 4y ago
  While undoubtedly the law in practice is driven by such sympathies, as least the black letter legal justification is not. The use cases are identical, the model built by Stability AI does not represent eo ipso a copyright violation in the same way the Google Books index did not represent such a violation. Both were built by scanning copyright materials, and in Authors Guild the Southern District of NY found that such scanning does not constitute a copyright violation.
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    Competition is part of what constitutes infringement thought, and SD absolutely competes with Getty.

arbuge 4y ago

IANAL but if I were to guess, I would think the defense here would center on how would what Stability AI has done differ in any meaningful way from human artists browsing through Getty's collection themselves, to train their human brains on what art to generate. The latter activity, even Getty would likely have to agree, is surely legal.

superfrank 4y ago
IANAL either, but I believe for something to be copyrightable (and not an infringement on someone else's copyright), there needs to be a "modicum of creativity" in the new work. It makes me wonder if at least part of the case will depend on whether the court things an AI can be creative.
- arbuge 4y ago
  I don't see how you could reasonably decide AI is not creative, period, unless you arbitrarily restrict the word creative to mean human-generated.
  - schrodinger 4y ago
    Maybe with AGI, but isn't the current state mostly based on probabilistic parameters with some seeds of randomness? Is that creative? Maybe it is. A human artist rolling a die to determine color changes, what to include and exclude, etc isn't much different.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    It kind of already means human-generated. Courts decided that a monkey cannot hold a copyright over a selfie it took. Another part of copyright law is the actual ability to sue over copyright infringement, and they decided a monkey does not have the ability or right to do so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp... https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6c52581e-d82f-4bb7-802c-191db44dca9f https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6c52581e-d82f...
4y ago

aquinas_ 4y ago

Whoever wins, we lose.

th4tg41 4y ago

unrelated rant: this is so stupid in itself. people that (sometines) make money of unpaid work are sueing people that (sometimes) make money of unpaid work. and it's all about the (sometimes) and the unpaid work. it's dramedy. in a lawsuit.

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xbar 4y ago

This is the one I have been waiting for. Getty needs to force the question.

nemo44x 4y ago
I agree. There’s a fantastic debate ahead that’s very novel. It’s especially exciting for how sudden this all is. My hunch is AI wins and I’d love it if the defense was written by AI.
- noobermin 4y ago
  I heavily doubt that Stability AI will be foolish enough not engage their actual lawyers and use chatGPT to argue for them.

QuantumGood 4y ago

A problem is that visual artists could be paid a lower licensing fee for using their art to feed an AI than they would be in a per-image fee to the end user.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Getty Images is forced to do it. Building a collection of stock images is the predecessor to generating images from text.

jbenjoseph 4y ago

I don't see this working for Getty but it will be interesting to see. Israel and the EU have preemptively determined that the use of copyrighted data to train ML models is almost always fair use, and I believe the Authors Guild case in the USA also sets strong precedent there. That really leaves the UK, and they are likely to go with everyone else.

nassimm 4y ago
Part of the lawsuit is also because the "getty images" watermark are present in some of the outputs. They claim this is trademark infringement.

cactusplant7374 4y ago

I hate these franken pdf viewers that make it impossible to copy text on mobile. Does anyone have the pdf?

DueDilligence 4y ago

.. yet another frivolous lawsuit from the corporate swine. protecting artists my ass .. yawn. next.

dang 4y ago

Related ongoing thread: Stable Attribution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670136