9 ms·

Adobe is buying videos for $3 per minute to build AI model

145 points by thm 3y ago

SilverBirch 3y ago
I'm kind of surprised by this. I understand there's basically two views: Content creators say "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you need to pay me" and there's Silicon Valley: "I'm allowed to look at your images, feeding your images into my machine is the same thing". Legally, the first view seems probably correct, but from a "history of silicon valley" view, breaking the rules in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market has always been the better strategy. It'd be like if Uber launched by applying for NY taxi medallions. So this seems like a crazy risk:reward ratio here. Adobe is going to end up with a massive bill, a weak model and the hope that the guys who steal everything will face consequences. We've never seen Silicon Valley face consequences like that in the past so i don't see why you would bet it's going to happen this time.
- artninja1988 3y ago
  The whole differentiator between firefly, the adobe image generator, is that it's trained on their licensed stock image library and commercially safe. Besides that, even openai is licensing some proprietary high quality content from proprietary sources. Even if the open Internet is deemed fair use, there's still a lot of content locked away to license
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Adobe is an established player with real customers who don't want to deal with copyright issues. Telling them "this is safe to use because we paid for it" solves that issue. With Uber, no one's suing individual riders or drivers over an illegal taxi ride.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    This is such a tectonic shift for what the concept of media even means that any assumptions are on uncertain ground. The courts could find that it isn't possible to sign away these rights. There are many other rights that the law does not permit to be signed away for much more tame reasons than "enables further creations of 'your' work (or in the case of actors, literally 'you') not only without your actual involvement, but even long after your death". I would expect that it at least comes with a time limit. "Artists can sign a license to use these rights but only until their death + 10 years, after that the licensee can't use anything trained on their work. Artists also have an unrevokable right to cancel the license at any time with 90 day notice." might be one possible outcome.
    - alemanek 3y ago
      That seems like a crazy stretch to me. Not a lawyer but the rights courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. Signing away your right to profit or control a video you created is super common already. Content licensing is really well established and already allows for licensing for specific use and different royalty structures based on usage. An example of this is streaming vs theater vs syndication. So, now there is a new venue to take into account and have the lawyers add a few pages to their contracts moving forward.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
        >courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. This is exactly my point. An AI that can replace you, personally, is closer to signing away your identity or freedom than the rights to display a specific already completed work.
        spaced-out 3y ago
        The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to pay for this person's videos except for an AI company? You're basically telling them they're not allowed to profit off of their work.
        bongodongobob 3y ago
        You can't just make up new definitions of freedom, that's not what freedom is.
  - tylerchilds 3y ago
    i was at adobe summit a couple weeks back, the push was ai heavy— the strategy is 100% around no copyright issues. observationally they’re in an interesting position, balancing their artistic clients and their executive clients. a clean model is the easiest way to hedge their portfolio and reputation.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Artist don't want their work taken for free. And executive clients can know that court systems can be extremely fickle... It can go one way or an other depending jurisdiction and even one big enough going wrong can be expensive.
      - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
        The Artists it was trained on already signed rights away to Adobe when they put their work for sale on Adobe Stock so they’ll get what they’re given really.
        Ekaros 3y ago
        That is fair. But I was talking in general, mostly about material that was not sold on Adobe Stock...
  - SJC_Hacker 3y ago
    They would have to do the leg work to ensure that the seller is the legitimate rights holder.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    > we paid for it *you paid for it.
- surfingdino 3y ago
  I am struggling with the Silicon Valley's latest business model that seems to be based on stealing all content in order to train AI to replace the very creators who created that content. If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... and most of the population are jobless who's going to be able to pay for the content, the services, and the goods produced by AI and robots? Is it why the VC are in favour of universal basic income? But if we all go on UBI then what's the point to selling to us if that money could go to the VCs... but then... what do they do with the money if it ceases to circulate and incentivise people to work and trade?
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... ...we would be living in post-scarcity and everything would be free. But that doesn't happen in the absence of AGI, what actually happens is that technology replaces some jobs and then people do the remaining jobs, which are now in higher demand because the things done by technology become cheaper and the money that had gone to pay for labor there now gets spent on something else, increasing demand for the other thing. Technology has been replacing jobs for hundreds of years and we still have low unemployment.
    - bluefirebrand 3y ago
      > we still have low unemployment We have more bullshit jobs than ever before in order to maintain that unemployment rate though
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The bullshit jobs are allowed by automation, not required. If you had that many bullshit jobs in the old days, everybody would starve because there wouldn't be enough labor going to producing and distributing food. Many of the bullshit jobs are, in fact, destroying the cost/efficiency benefit of automation by imposing bureaucratic waste on things that would otherwise have become less expensive. If someone is doing a job which is useless, we could just give them a portion of someone else's productive work to do, have them each work less and reduce prices by the same amount and then average purchasing power would be the same but there would be less busy work and more recreation/creativity/entrepreneurship.
- numpad0 3y ago
  > "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you need to pay me" I see a lot of the first and second parts, but nowhere near as often the third part: The rights holders aren't seeking financial growth, just wants control in perpetuity. I suspect that's the part proving difficult to solve.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > Legally, the first view seems probably correct It's not obvious why that would be. Artists aren't going to like this technology because it competes with them, but it competes with them regardless of whether it was their work or someone else's in the training data. This leads to a visceral response where they want to call this "stealing" and hope that the creators of the technology can be sued into non-existence so their competition can be eliminated. But as Adobe is demonstrating, that isn't going to happen anyway. So the question isn't whether the technology will exist, it's if it will be locked up behind the walls of major corporations. The latter doesn't do artists any good but harms the public -- including artists who want to leverage the technology in their art. So why should the law protect Adobe's moat from the public?
  - SilverBirch 3y ago
    The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? And the answer is actually because they do assign some value to that training data, and there's not an infinite supply and it's actually quite difficult to get large sets of quality data. I think it's a pretty open question how this will resolve, it could be like stremaing music where companies like spotify are little more than puppets for the major record labels. It could end up like youtube where the model started with "We're going to steal stuff" and ended up "We're going to strongly enforce copyright now we're the encumbent" or some other third way. But I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy, which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides no indication of what the law should be. You could just as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod, which the record companies might not like to be allowed, but that doesn't mean that it isn't. > It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are trained on arbitrary content from the internet. As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots of competitors because anyone can create one and many of them are free and can be run locally. > I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term. Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or should be illegal. Also, laws are created through the political process, which is not always great. The outcome "individual artists somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there. The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies" win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and then this technology gets locked up as a service from only megacorps and the artists still don't get anything meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the second is clearly worse.
troq13 3y ago
Weird spot. $3 per minute seems like a lot more than most AI companies are willing to pay, and a lot less than most creators who are not making slop would be willing to take.
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  If I’d posted 10 minute videos weekly for 5 years and someone offered me $7500-ish to use them as training data, I’d think that was a pretty good deal. YMMV.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Depending on the content that’s a terrible deal. Low ball is it takes an hour to produce a single minute of video. You’re being paid 3 bucks an hour. If it’s animation it could take a day to animate a single minute, in which case you’re being screwed even harder. Suckers who don’t properly value their time is why BigCo generally wins.
    - altdataseller 3y ago
      Did they say they’re buying only high quality videos? What if it’s just a video of me talking through my coding sessions? It would be rather low effort and sounds like “free money” to me
      - doublerabbit 3y ago
        Would it though? If they train your video, produced future videos based off that video, charged for the next. That then takes away your next video. So you got paid a low ball amount only to be ripped off.
        replygirl 3y ago
        would it though? nothing would be stopping them. the idea something would relies on an assumption that we'll soon be able to generate long, coherent, and useful instructional videos with fully resolved text on demand, with such high quality and low cost that no one will be able to compete. but we already have people out there who can do this instruction/review live and off the cuff, and who would certainly be able to make use of this stuff in their own work
htrp 3y ago
have they fixed the image generation in their firefly models yet?
retskrad 3y ago
So are we just going to let OpenAI, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others to just steal the whole internet, including videos on YouTube, and train their models for free without compensating creators? Or will they get away with it because there were no laws that prohibited their behaviour?
- jsheard 3y ago
  Adobe is pretty much banking on the "scrape everything" approach getting too bogged down in legal problems to be commercially viable in the long term. They're going out of their way to only train on licensed material so they (and Getty Images) will be the last ones standing if the worst case scenario happens for the companies who thought they could just take everything, and in the meantime they get the business of risk-adverse customers who don't want to chance it until it's settled one way or the other. It's a decent lobbying tactic too - companies like OpenAI claim their technology can only exist with unrestricted scraping, and requiring them to license training data would kill the whole industry in the crib, but Adobe and Getty can point to their own products as existence proofs that it can be done but OpenAI just doesn't want to.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I applaud their approach, since it's obviously in line with traditional concepts such as fucking paying someone for their time and work.
    - pavlov 3y ago
      Still, it's possible to end up in a situation where people are getting paid and in theory it's an improvement over a previous lawless IP situation, but in practice it still leaves creators in the cold. That's basically what happened with Spotify. Artists are getting paid something for streaming, but it's fractions of pennies on the dollars they used to make from music sales.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
I demand adobe buy ALL copyrighted material at $3/minute. Disney, WB,etc etc That'll show them
LightBug1 3y ago
Times like this, I'm glad a lot of my shit is still on hard drives!
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Personally, Photoshop’s AI tools are the weakest among all that I’ve tried. Even free tools like Remove.bg and Canva are running circles around Adobe’s background removal Lenoardo’s AI tools are even better and the native background removal is just 10x better than Adobe
- ackbar03 3y ago
  yea those guys completely missed the bus. I worked on some AI image editing tool a few years back with a partner and we were constantly worried Photoshop was going to suddenly make us obsolete, which is now kind of funny looking at where they're at
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
$3/min = $180/hr. Pretty good pay! Do they care what the content is?!
- sentfromrevolut 3y ago
  They're not buying slop. they're buying high quality content like animations. It can take hours to create one minute so it's really the other direction , division from 3/min down to something like 0.50c/hour of work, not multiplication from 3/min to 180/hr .......
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Biggest source of video on the net is maybe porn. Is that the path to AGI?
- ackbar03 3y ago
  That is beyond dystopian
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    It's also not true so the whole idea is nonsense. Youtube alone in 2022 was taking in 30,000 hours of video per hour. Every day youtube receives more video than anyone could watch in their entire lifetime.
    - ackbar03 3y ago
      Says cyberdildonics
marcodiego 3y ago
Would they be interested in buying a video of paint drying[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Drying?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Drying?useskin=vector
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  Thank you for introducing me to `useskin=vector`!
- sebastiennight 3y ago
  > it costs "£101.50 plus £7.09 per minute of runtime to have a film reviewed by the BBFC" for age-rating So I guess Adobe needs to raise their bid before filmmakers can afford the arbitrage!
callamdelaney 3y ago
Tbh AI is a derivative thing, a human can read something and be inspired in exactly the same way, I don't see how copyright is enforceable.
- lionkor 3y ago
  The difference is that it's not a human, it's a machine designed to do that. There was a choice, that's the difference.
  - everforward 3y ago
    I don’t think this is a great line of argument. It hinges on choice, which rapidly degrades into an argument about free will and the nature of whether anyone truly makes a choice or if our apparent “choices” are just a rationalization of deterministic response to external stimuli. I don’t think there’s a subjectively true answer to that question, so we just end up bickering over free will instead of AI. If you just want to declare humans to be special, I would just go straight to that. Humans are already legally special in all kinds of ways.
    - graypegg 3y ago
      I think making humans legally special is a good argument though. The whole point of copyright, is to allow artists to be able to generate a little income with exclusive rights to the works they produce. It's not just there because it's some inherent property of artwork: us humans decided that courts should punish people that threaten the livelihood of artists (in a very narrow scope of ways) via the judicial system. Of course the "spirit" of the law is meaningless, but I at least don't think understanding copyright law as a purely legal tool, divorced from the human element, is participating in the same conversation artists are having. Should people that just make art, eat? Early human history the answer was no. Then we advanced to a point where people can specialize in skills, and art made life worth living, so the answer was yes. Now where are we?
      - visarga 3y ago
tgbugs 3y ago
Amusingly this policy might end up meaning that the AI model they produce by training on this data will never be able to produce video that will ever be worth more than 3$ per minute. They are probably unintentionally filtering for content created by people willing to sell for that price or below, and that bias will be present in any downstream model. You get what you pay for I guess?
- summerlight 3y ago
  I wonder if this is an exclusive deal for Adobe? If not, it's just an additional $3 per minute. Though I agree that they need to be flexible on the pricing.
- cheriot 3y ago
  Free money for people that already have video lying around. They're not asking for exclusivity.
graypegg 3y ago
How much will AI generated video cost per minute? Not from Adobe, just generally, where it's obtainable. There's a good scam if you can automate video generation and pass it to Adobe. Them setting a price of AI training video, may have just set the floor price for buying AI generated video. As people with more money than me say: arbitrage!
whycome 3y ago
What if users started poisoning the data set by automating and submitting AI-created videos? lol What's the price for production? Set up a pipeline right through to Adobe. AI-laundering?
JieJie 3y ago
Alternate non-paywalled link from MSN^0: "The software company is offering its network of photographers and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and anger, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The goal is to source assets for artificial intelligence training, the company wrote." 0: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/adobe-is-buying-videos-for-3-per-minute-to-build-ai-model/ar-BB1lpLHi https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/adobe-is-buying-videos...
mohitchaprana 3y ago
but how to submit?
upsidepotential 3y ago
Seems a bit steep? But maybe the idea is that as the models improve in quality and sophistication, price will go down. Still, creators might jump at the chance, but Adobe shareholders will probably have plenty of questions.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
I was just at a party where a guy told me he was hired by a SF startup to covertly download many hours of YouTube videos without paying either Google or the original creators. When he mentioned the word "copyright", they fired him, but only after assuring him that they had worked at Google before the startup and it was completely legal.
cdme 3y ago
Who wants to watch the video these models produce?
Gcarter08 3y ago
There will be some creators who will take this deal…tends to be the high volume producers who will see this as a pure numbers game. As a creator myself who licenses content for AI, this would be a lot lower than our going rate, so I’d pass.
dinfer 3y ago
Where can i submit videos?

145 points by thm 3y ago

I'm kind of surprised by this. I understand there's basically two views: Content creators say "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you need to pay me" and there's Silicon Valley: "I'm allowed to look at your images, feeding your images into my machine is the same thing". Legally, the first view seems probably correct, but from a "history of silicon valley" view, breaking the rules in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market has always been the better strategy. It'd be like if Uber launched by applying for NY taxi medallions. So this seems like a crazy risk:reward ratio here. Adobe is going to end up with a massive bill, a weak model and the hope that the guys who steal everything will face consequences. We've never seen Silicon Valley face consequences like that in the past so i don't see why you would bet it's going to happen this time.

artninja1988 3y ago
The whole differentiator between firefly, the adobe image generator, is that it's trained on their licensed stock image library and commercially safe. Besides that, even openai is licensing some proprietary high quality content from proprietary sources. Even if the open Internet is deemed fair use, there's still a lot of content locked away to license
dehrmann 3y ago
Adobe is an established player with real customers who don't want to deal with copyright issues. Telling them "this is safe to use because we paid for it" solves that issue. With Uber, no one's suing individual riders or drivers over an illegal taxi ride.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  This is such a tectonic shift for what the concept of media even means that any assumptions are on uncertain ground. The courts could find that it isn't possible to sign away these rights. There are many other rights that the law does not permit to be signed away for much more tame reasons than "enables further creations of 'your' work (or in the case of actors, literally 'you') not only without your actual involvement, but even long after your death". I would expect that it at least comes with a time limit. "Artists can sign a license to use these rights but only until their death + 10 years, after that the licensee can't use anything trained on their work. Artists also have an unrevokable right to cancel the license at any time with 90 day notice." might be one possible outcome.
  - alemanek 3y ago
    That seems like a crazy stretch to me. Not a lawyer but the rights courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. Signing away your right to profit or control a video you created is super common already. Content licensing is really well established and already allows for licensing for specific use and different royalty structures based on usage. An example of this is streaming vs theater vs syndication. So, now there is a new venue to take into account and have the lawyers add a few pages to their contracts moving forward.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
      >courts typically don’t let you sign away are things like your freedom. This is exactly my point. An AI that can replace you, personally, is closer to signing away your identity or freedom than the rights to display a specific already completed work.
      - spaced-out 3y ago
        The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to pay for this person's videos except for an AI company? You're basically telling them they're not allowed to profit off of their work.
      - bongodongobob 3y ago
        You can't just make up new definitions of freedom, that's not what freedom is.
- tylerchilds 3y ago
  i was at adobe summit a couple weeks back, the push was ai heavy— the strategy is 100% around no copyright issues. observationally they’re in an interesting position, balancing their artistic clients and their executive clients. a clean model is the easiest way to hedge their portfolio and reputation.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Artist don't want their work taken for free. And executive clients can know that court systems can be extremely fickle... It can go one way or an other depending jurisdiction and even one big enough going wrong can be expensive.
    - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
      The Artists it was trained on already signed rights away to Adobe when they put their work for sale on Adobe Stock so they’ll get what they’re given really.
      - Ekaros 3y ago
        That is fair. But I was talking in general, mostly about material that was not sold on Adobe Stock...
- SJC_Hacker 3y ago
  They would have to do the leg work to ensure that the seller is the legitimate rights holder.
- scotty79 3y ago
  > we paid for it *you paid for it.
surfingdino 3y ago
I am struggling with the Silicon Valley's latest business model that seems to be based on stealing all content in order to train AI to replace the very creators who created that content. If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... and most of the population are jobless who's going to be able to pay for the content, the services, and the goods produced by AI and robots? Is it why the VC are in favour of universal basic income? But if we all go on UBI then what's the point to selling to us if that money could go to the VCs... but then... what do they do with the money if it ceases to circulate and incentivise people to work and trade?
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > If we then replace white-collar workers with AI and blue-collar workers with robots... ...we would be living in post-scarcity and everything would be free. But that doesn't happen in the absence of AGI, what actually happens is that technology replaces some jobs and then people do the remaining jobs, which are now in higher demand because the things done by technology become cheaper and the money that had gone to pay for labor there now gets spent on something else, increasing demand for the other thing. Technology has been replacing jobs for hundreds of years and we still have low unemployment.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    > we still have low unemployment We have more bullshit jobs than ever before in order to maintain that unemployment rate though
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The bullshit jobs are allowed by automation, not required. If you had that many bullshit jobs in the old days, everybody would starve because there wouldn't be enough labor going to producing and distributing food. Many of the bullshit jobs are, in fact, destroying the cost/efficiency benefit of automation by imposing bureaucratic waste on things that would otherwise have become less expensive. If someone is doing a job which is useless, we could just give them a portion of someone else's productive work to do, have them each work less and reduce prices by the same amount and then average purchasing power would be the same but there would be less busy work and more recreation/creativity/entrepreneurship.
numpad0 3y ago
> "Hey, this is my stuff, you don't have permission to use it, you need to pay me" I see a lot of the first and second parts, but nowhere near as often the third part: The rights holders aren't seeking financial growth, just wants control in perpetuity. I suspect that's the part proving difficult to solve.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Legally, the first view seems probably correct It's not obvious why that would be. Artists aren't going to like this technology because it competes with them, but it competes with them regardless of whether it was their work or someone else's in the training data. This leads to a visceral response where they want to call this "stealing" and hope that the creators of the technology can be sued into non-existence so their competition can be eliminated. But as Adobe is demonstrating, that isn't going to happen anyway. So the question isn't whether the technology will exist, it's if it will be locked up behind the walls of major corporations. The latter doesn't do artists any good but harms the public -- including artists who want to leverage the technology in their art. So why should the law protect Adobe's moat from the public?
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? And the answer is actually because they do assign some value to that training data, and there's not an infinite supply and it's actually quite difficult to get large sets of quality data. I think it's a pretty open question how this will resolve, it could be like stremaing music where companies like spotify are little more than puppets for the major record labels. It could end up like youtube where the model started with "We're going to steal stuff" and ended up "We're going to strongly enforce copyright now we're the encumbent" or some other third way. But I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > The reason I think the first view seems more correct is that it's like downloading a song from spotify. Yes you would think streaming a song from spotify is technologically identitical as downloading it, but legally there is a distinction. If you found a way of ripping a copy of a song from spotify there would be a record company ready to sue you and a law they could use to do it. But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy, which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides no indication of what the law should be. You could just as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod, which the record companies might not like to be allowed, but that doesn't mean that it isn't. > It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are trained on arbitrary content from the internet. As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots of competitors because anyone can create one and many of them are free and can be run locally. > I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term. Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or should be illegal. Also, laws are created through the political process, which is not always great. The outcome "individual artists somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there. The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies" win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and then this technology gets locked up as a service from only megacorps and the artists still don't get anything meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the second is clearly worse.

troq13 3y ago

Weird spot. $3 per minute seems like a lot more than most AI companies are willing to pay, and a lot less than most creators who are not making slop would be willing to take.

devoutsalsa 3y ago
If I’d posted 10 minute videos weekly for 5 years and someone offered me $7500-ish to use them as training data, I’d think that was a pretty good deal. YMMV.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Depending on the content that’s a terrible deal. Low ball is it takes an hour to produce a single minute of video. You’re being paid 3 bucks an hour. If it’s animation it could take a day to animate a single minute, in which case you’re being screwed even harder. Suckers who don’t properly value their time is why BigCo generally wins.
  - altdataseller 3y ago
    Did they say they’re buying only high quality videos? What if it’s just a video of me talking through my coding sessions? It would be rather low effort and sounds like “free money” to me
    - doublerabbit 3y ago
      Would it though? If they train your video, produced future videos based off that video, charged for the next. That then takes away your next video. So you got paid a low ball amount only to be ripped off.
      - replygirl 3y ago
        would it though? nothing would be stopping them. the idea something would relies on an assumption that we'll soon be able to generate long, coherent, and useful instructional videos with fully resolved text on demand, with such high quality and low cost that no one will be able to compete. but we already have people out there who can do this instruction/review live and off the cuff, and who would certainly be able to make use of this stuff in their own work

htrp 3y ago

have they fixed the image generation in their firefly models yet?

retskrad 3y ago

So are we just going to let OpenAI, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others to just steal the whole internet, including videos on YouTube, and train their models for free without compensating creators? Or will they get away with it because there were no laws that prohibited their behaviour?

jsheard 3y ago
Adobe is pretty much banking on the "scrape everything" approach getting too bogged down in legal problems to be commercially viable in the long term. They're going out of their way to only train on licensed material so they (and Getty Images) will be the last ones standing if the worst case scenario happens for the companies who thought they could just take everything, and in the meantime they get the business of risk-adverse customers who don't want to chance it until it's settled one way or the other. It's a decent lobbying tactic too - companies like OpenAI claim their technology can only exist with unrestricted scraping, and requiring them to license training data would kill the whole industry in the crib, but Adobe and Getty can point to their own products as existence proofs that it can be done but OpenAI just doesn't want to.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I applaud their approach, since it's obviously in line with traditional concepts such as fucking paying someone for their time and work.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Still, it's possible to end up in a situation where people are getting paid and in theory it's an improvement over a previous lawless IP situation, but in practice it still leaves creators in the cold. That's basically what happened with Spotify. Artists are getting paid something for streaming, but it's fractions of pennies on the dollars they used to make from music sales.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

I demand adobe buy ALL copyrighted material at $3/minute. Disney, WB,etc etc That'll show them

LightBug1 3y ago

Times like this, I'm glad a lot of my shit is still on hard drives!

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Personally, Photoshop’s AI tools are the weakest among all that I’ve tried. Even free tools like Remove.bg and Canva are running circles around Adobe’s background removal Lenoardo’s AI tools are even better and the native background removal is just 10x better than Adobe

ackbar03 3y ago
yea those guys completely missed the bus. I worked on some AI image editing tool a few years back with a partner and we were constantly worried Photoshop was going to suddenly make us obsolete, which is now kind of funny looking at where they're at

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

$3/min = $180/hr. Pretty good pay! Do they care what the content is?!

sentfromrevolut 3y ago
They're not buying slop. they're buying high quality content like animations. It can take hours to create one minute so it's really the other direction , division from 3/min down to something like 0.50c/hour of work, not multiplication from 3/min to 180/hr .......

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

Biggest source of video on the net is maybe porn. Is that the path to AGI?

ackbar03 3y ago
That is beyond dystopian
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  It's also not true so the whole idea is nonsense. Youtube alone in 2022 was taking in 30,000 hours of video per hour. Every day youtube receives more video than anyone could watch in their entire lifetime.
  - ackbar03 3y ago
    Says cyberdildonics

marcodiego 3y ago

Would they be interested in buying a video of paint drying[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Drying?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Drying?useskin=vector

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
Thank you for introducing me to `useskin=vector`!
sebastiennight 3y ago
> it costs "£101.50 plus £7.09 per minute of runtime to have a film reviewed by the BBFC" for age-rating So I guess Adobe needs to raise their bid before filmmakers can afford the arbitrage!

callamdelaney 3y ago

Tbh AI is a derivative thing, a human can read something and be inspired in exactly the same way, I don't see how copyright is enforceable.

lionkor 3y ago
The difference is that it's not a human, it's a machine designed to do that. There was a choice, that's the difference.
- everforward 3y ago
  I don’t think this is a great line of argument. It hinges on choice, which rapidly degrades into an argument about free will and the nature of whether anyone truly makes a choice or if our apparent “choices” are just a rationalization of deterministic response to external stimuli. I don’t think there’s a subjectively true answer to that question, so we just end up bickering over free will instead of AI. If you just want to declare humans to be special, I would just go straight to that. Humans are already legally special in all kinds of ways.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    I think making humans legally special is a good argument though. The whole point of copyright, is to allow artists to be able to generate a little income with exclusive rights to the works they produce. It's not just there because it's some inherent property of artwork: us humans decided that courts should punish people that threaten the livelihood of artists (in a very narrow scope of ways) via the judicial system. Of course the "spirit" of the law is meaningless, but I at least don't think understanding copyright law as a purely legal tool, divorced from the human element, is participating in the same conversation artists are having. Should people that just make art, eat? Early human history the answer was no. Then we advanced to a point where people can specialize in skills, and art made life worth living, so the answer was yes. Now where are we?
    - visarga 3y ago

tgbugs 3y ago

Amusingly this policy might end up meaning that the AI model they produce by training on this data will never be able to produce video that will ever be worth more than 3$ per minute. They are probably unintentionally filtering for content created by people willing to sell for that price or below, and that bias will be present in any downstream model. You get what you pay for I guess?

summerlight 3y ago
I wonder if this is an exclusive deal for Adobe? If not, it's just an additional $3 per minute. Though I agree that they need to be flexible on the pricing.
cheriot 3y ago
Free money for people that already have video lying around. They're not asking for exclusivity.

graypegg 3y ago

How much will AI generated video cost per minute? Not from Adobe, just generally, where it's obtainable. There's a good scam if you can automate video generation and pass it to Adobe. Them setting a price of AI training video, may have just set the floor price for buying AI generated video. As people with more money than me say: arbitrage!

whycome 3y ago

What if users started poisoning the data set by automating and submitting AI-created videos? lol What's the price for production? Set up a pipeline right through to Adobe. AI-laundering?

JieJie 3y ago

Alternate non-paywalled link from MSN^0: "The software company is offering its network of photographers and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and anger, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The goal is to source assets for artificial intelligence training, the company wrote." 0: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/adobe-is-buying-videos-for-3-per-minute-to-build-ai-model/ar-BB1lpLHi https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/adobe-is-buying-videos...

mohitchaprana 3y ago

but how to submit?

upsidepotential 3y ago

Seems a bit steep? But maybe the idea is that as the models improve in quality and sophistication, price will go down. Still, creators might jump at the chance, but Adobe shareholders will probably have plenty of questions.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

I was just at a party where a guy told me he was hired by a SF startup to covertly download many hours of YouTube videos without paying either Google or the original creators. When he mentioned the word "copyright", they fired him, but only after assuring him that they had worked at Google before the startup and it was completely legal.

cdme 3y ago

Who wants to watch the video these models produce?

Gcarter08 3y ago

There will be some creators who will take this deal…tends to be the high volume producers who will see this as a pure numbers game. As a creator myself who licenses content for AI, this would be a lot lower than our going rate, so I’d pass.

dinfer 3y ago

Where can i submit videos?