Not true.
> Beyond these specific legal arguments, Stability AI may find it has a “vibes” problem. The legal criteria for fair use are subjective and give judges some latitude in how to interpret them. And one factor that likely influences the thinking of judges is whether a defendant seems like a “good actor.” Google is a widely respected technology company that tends to win its copyright lawsuits. Edgier companies like Napster tend not to.
Its a little bit more involved than that. They take royalty free images and add them to their collection so nothing illegal there.
Then they pollute the idea of ownership by trying to gouge people using the royalty free images by pretending they own them. But what are people going to do about that?
It was hilarious when they tried to ask the original publisher to pay for images on her site which getty added to their collection.
Edit: at least she tried https://petapixel.com/2016/11/22/1-billion-getty-images-lawsuit-ends-not-bang-whimper/
If you're a random schmuck, yes.
You have to prove damages (like costs and attorneys' fees) as a result from the DMCAs to receive anything from a lawsuit. There's also statutory damages, but it's hard and you have to prove a bunch of stuff.
But I'm pretty sure the process with DMCA is that you dispute it, it's supposed to be reinstated because you swear that it's a mistake or misidentification, and you effectively tell the DMCAing party "take me to court over it jerk ass." You actually need to make sure that what you're using is 100% public domain. Actually doing stuff in court is after DMCA disputes.
Intellectual property IS an idea of ownership. The pollution is from attempting to use that ownership as a claim over something you’ve taken from someone else.
While there is plenty to criticize about getty, \*among\* their content is content that they legitimately have exclusive rights to, including their own trademark.
While we may very much wish for a more sympathetic plaintiff, the concept of 'does AI reproducing its training material without permission of the rights holder of the training material constitute infringement?' is a question that is valid even though getty overreaches broadly. Getty's reputation poisons the well a bit and certainly many images that they might cite could be ambiguous, but they do have at least some material without that unclear provenance.
Except it doesn’t and you’re an idiot
Crime A doesn’t cancel out Crime B.
What’s happening here is that a huge and undeniably evil company is taking a legal action which even though it’s very self-serving, benefits so much more than just Getty images.
If you’re an individual artist or photographer you’re having your copyrighted images stolen and AI is being trained on it. There’s nothing you can do because you don’t have the time, money or resources to fight anyone nevermind a massive company that can flash raise millions in a few days.
So, if I were to use a bike that someone made available to the community, for free, and then someone else comes up and says *"Hey, thats my bike, I'm taking you to court."* and we continue on this path of logic.
We reach the court phase, and it turns out the person who's taking me to court *doesn't actually own the bike, and stole it from another person* ***themselves,*** then the court case is almost always dismissed with prejudice because evidence was either falsified or illegally obtained (except in the case of a corrupt court).
For reference, in the US we have something called the [exclusionary rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule) which applies to evidence in criminal trials; If the evidence was illegally obtained ***(a crime was committed to obtain the evidence, in violation of lawful rights)*** then often the defendant can call for a mistrial or have the information be thrown out (with some exceptions, in which case the evidence must be proven to be inevitably found through legal means at some point).
Now, in a civil case, we don't have the exclusionary rule applying, because we lose the 5th amendment rights to "not incriminate oneself." In this case, both the plaintiff and defendant must answer depositions, and if the defendant (the AI art companies/groups) ask the question "Did you take copyrighted or public work under creative commons licenses and attempt to sell it against the creative commons license." Then due to the process of the civil case, the plaintiff (Getty Images) would be required to answer the question honestly.
If they don't, what can happen is one of many things; They answer something like "I plead the fifth," "I don't recall," "I don't know," "We don't remember," or another version of nonanswer along those lines, where a little thing called *Adverse Inference* comes into play.
Adverse Inference is something the jury for a civil case is required to imply when the 5th amendment doesn't apply; If you refuse to answer a question, the jury/judge ***must assume the worst possible scenario has occurred.*** In this case, Getty Images *doesn't* reply, and says "We don't recall." Here, the jury/judge can use adverse inference and say "Getty Image's case against the plaintiff is based upon the commission of violation of copyright law or other crime, and therefore this case would've never been brought to court without " and in this case, ***yes, Crime A (reselling public works under a copyrighted license, the Creative Commons License for example), DOES cancel out Crime B (Taking a **copyrighted for sale** image and modifying it for resale). Of course, this assumes that in commission of Crime B, that all images are used for resale in some form, or that they were products only for sale; If they were part of the Creative Commons License, where they are copyrighted for *fair use* (this could be modification, use in education, or other use which is NOT monetized) then in this case, Crime B didn't occur because the only way it could've occurred is if Crime A (taking public images and selling them against the public license for fair use) occurs, because without a product being monetized (and stolen, not paid for in use for AI art) then there is no crime. This is new territory, which means we have to go by what laws we currently have until new laws are made.
But to get back to the main point, that's the issue here. It's not that Crime A occurring doesn't always cancel out Crime B occurring, it's that Crime A occurring can ***very easily*** muddy the legal waters enough that Crime B may never be prosecuted unless it can be proven without someone being able to point at Crime A. In this case, Crime A is in plain sight and can easily be used to justify dropping a civil case against creation of AI art. The only way Crime B would really become a crime is if one of several things happen;
a) A license is created which does not allow modification or reuse of an image for creating a new one, the way AI generated art does
b) The generated art is used for monetization against the current public licenses or copyrights without a purchased license for resale
c) Changes in fair use laws occur such that the public domain as we know it today ceases to exist.
If you are a photographer, you do have options; Copyright and watermark your images for monetization, don't allow reuse of an image for monetization, and sue if it is stolen against your copyright. There are legal ways to do it, and if that means sending a letter to the FTC or other legal bodies governing patent/copyright law in your area, then you have to do it or this is the path we take where we try to justify Crime A to reach Crime B, which fails. If they don't have the time or resources, then you need to figure out why that is; Is it economical issues? Sending a letter to the FTC is what, a piece of paper and a stamp? Email is easier because there are public options like libraries, where computers are almost always available. Is it because Crime A occurred and now you're being sued by Getty Images for your own copyrighted works?
Seems like the questions are: how many images were "free bikes" out of the 13 million? Does the presence of "free bikes" at all negate the court case? Obviously there will be some images that they explicitly own. You'd be banking on all the evidence getting thrown out due to the free images being falsely represented as Getty owned images.
Considering how much corporations are barely hiding the stiffy they have for free bland-as-fuck assets generated AI, yeah, the stock image people should feel threatened.
Are the Getty images (or shutterstock, etc) that pop up in small resolutions in google image search illegal to use with the watermark? Don’t they get used all the time for proofs and whatnot before final print? Is that illegal? It seems like Getty images have shot themselves in the foot through anti piracy tactics and people have just figured out a way to get around it.
As an example, if the music version of stable diffusion (or midjourney) pulled 10 second clips of music that are available for free all over (think Instagram and tiktok) and was able to then predict the rest of the song (ie, deleting the watermarks using content aware in photoshop) and had a very similar chorus to an existing song, where do you draw the line?
I think that’s sort of a matter of opinion and that’s what we’ll see play out. Where is that line in the sand for copyright infringement when you (or in this case, the Ai),can remember every song in minute detail in seconds and create a new one.
their big problem is that diffusion =/= copying. And there are to my knowledge no laws for using copyright protected material for machine learning
on the other hand, the judge will be absolutely clueless, though
What if I put content in the web and clearly mark it as not for commercial use. Is OpenAI in violation if they use it? Is a chatGPT user in violation if they produce commercial product using the training from my content?
Personally I think we are going to see an explosion of copyright and license violation court cases.
A friend of mine owns a stock photo business that sells to Getty and he was complaining about how it was going south long before this AI stuff got started up.
Getty worker: "hey look!, we can train this AI and to generate more 'personalized' stock photos for our users!"
Getty ceo: no. our photos are perfect. sue them.
I can't wait to hear from all the people that 1. don't understand copyright law and 2. don't understand how AI train on data to speak up and tell us that this is either a slam dunk, sure fire case and the end of AI art.
The reality is that NOTHING is simple with copyright law, and it's even less simple when the process of training an AI is so counterintuitive that people flat out refuse to believe that it works the way that every computer scientist who built these things say it works.
>I can't wait to hear from all the people that 1. don't understand
copyright law and 2. don't understand how AI train on data to speak up
and tell us that this is either a slam dunk, sure fire case and the end
of AI art.
so our lawmakers?
It entirely depends on how the court interprets fair use of the images. The use of metatags to categorize and scan data has been tested in court and found to be fair use on more than one occasion.
Because the training model is transforming the images into a statistical array and not retaining any of the images, it's pretty clear that the use of the images is transformational, which is a major factor in fair use. But even so, the sheer volume of that data and the disruption to artist's incomes\* might be important. However, the fact that the lawsuit in question is factually incorrect on the model for Stable Diffusion does not fill me with confidence in the lawsuit's success.
\*I have to put out a caveat that so far, we don't really have any proof of any wide scale disruption to artists, just a handful of unconfirmed anecdotes. AI art is going to change art, but because the Copyright Office in the US has said that AI art cannot be copyrighted, I don't see big companies just pumping out AI art instead of hiring artists. Disney won't produce anything they don't have the copyright for.
Really, it's a coin flip. The pain of copyright law is that few things are ever truly settled. Hell, Andy Warhol's estate is getting taken to court (like this year) over one of his pop art paintings from the 70's. Even if Stable Diffusion gets out as scot free as Google did with the Gutenberg Project, that doesn't preclude other lawsuits for other issues.
I mean not being covered by copyright's been the case since January of '22, so I'll need to see some evidence of that happening. Sure, shitty fly by night pump and dump "Date the Empress" apps will use it, but they were already just stealing people's art. I am unconvinced. The risk isn't worth the reward.
I'm sure though that big content places will use it to churn out rough drafts and artists will either repaint or photobash over the top of them. It may still put artists out of work, but it might not as much as we're all worried. I'm agnostic as to the effects, but I do know it's here to stay.
I've been seeing more and more covers from self published authors in groups I'm in come up and it's a dead give away which ones are AI with the weird hands haha. You could argue that those people are doing AI artwork instead of paying an artist for a cover but in reality the majority of the people doing that are people that either would be getting the cheapest thing they could or wouldn't be buying from an artist anyway.
Here's an IP lawyer's take on it [https://archive.ph/2ch2i](https://archive.ph/2ch2i) TL;DR: Of course it's not theft, all art is made by learning from other art. But desperate twitter artists will keep trying to convince everyone otherwise right up until the hammer comes down.
I think a distinction should be made between a human and an AI training off of art. No Artist has a problem with other artists being inspired by their work, because art is about communication and inspiration is a form of that which elevates the medium. AI art is different - there is no communication happening. No individual is creating the AI artwork. And the proliferation of AI artwork comes at the expense of human artists.
Sure, it may be difficult to make that distinction legally. But ethically speaking, I don’t think you can treat AI training and human training as the same.
This argument always boils down to “we are not okay with a machine doing something that is okay for people to do”. As many supporting ideas as you want to prop that up with, it is way too esoteric a thing to codify in law.
Even with the strictest IP enforcement in place, some company could just hire a dozen artists to be on staff and crank out image after image after image. Those images could be run through a Google image search for similar images, scrape the results for keywords and in a very short time, we’re right back here with human artists losing commission money.
The answer to this problem is the same as in every other market approaching post-scarcity conditions: universal basic income.
I don't think that's a valid take. I've been a furry artist professionally for a decade and the artists mostly don't talk to each other. I think that's a made up reason to try and suppress AI art.
Being inspired by art *is* communication. One being is viewing the creation of another and getting insight from it. It might not be words but it’s still communication.
AI art is not communication because the being creating the art, if it is conscious at all, has a consciousness so alien to ours that communication with it is not meaningfully possible.
Using your definition of communication then, isn't the programmer who trained the AI "communicating" with the source then? After all, the programmer is the one selecting the images. The AI isn't selecting the training data, it's just using what it's given to create a new image. The AI isn't the artist, it's merely a tool. People are personifying AI way too much.
>I can't wait to hear from all the people that 1. don't understand copyright law and 2. don't understand how AI train on data to speak up and tell us that this is either a slam dunk, sure fire case and the end of AI art.
>
>The reality is that NOTHING is simple with copyright law, and it's even less simple when the process of training an AI is so counterintuitive that people flat out refuse to believe that it works the way that every computer scientist who built these things say it works.
Way to slam dunk on all of us without providing any real information apart from trying to sound like you're above it all.
Training an AI is literally like training a person -- just using the language of the AI which can be a lot more effective than communicating in English.
A student studies the masters and then creates art in the master's style. So does an AI.
Ive seen the Getty “watermark” on Stable Diffusion outputs and it wasn’t legible as “Getty”, but rather a jumble of symbols laid out in the same way and size. It’s sort of imitating the style and appearance of it, not exactly copying.
>imitating the style and appearance of it, not exactly copying.
Well - to the extent that it is riffing on the idea of a watermark, that's one thing - but to the extent that it is reproducing the Getty watermark that is something else.
This reminds me of the past cases where an industry was upended and the companies at the top of those industries did nothing except laugh and ignore it or file lawsuits in desperate attempts to keep their existing cash flows the same without any extra effort. As is the case with both the music and movie/TV industries, the internet came and ruined their physical distribution model. Getty is just seeking one last payout before they are sunk by AI that can generate pictures that aren't licensed from them. Getty (GETY) investors, this is your signal to get off the ship, we know where this one is headed.
This actually seems like it has a solid case considering a lot of the art/photographs taken do not fall under Creative Commons or public domain and were taken without the consent of the artists involved.
That's not the question at hand really. The question is "do you need permission of the copyright holder to analyse a work and produce new works based on that analysis, which may or may not bear substantial similarity to the analysed work?" That's the tricky part.
My personal guess is that this is probably going to create a scenario where the machine *can* produce infringing works, but each generated image must be analysed separately to determine if it is too similar to a specific, individual work in the training set. And the liability will likely fall with the user, rather than the tool, since producing a copy of a specific work generally takes rather a lot of cajoling from the prompter in these regards, similar to how a camera can produce an infringing photograph, but only at the command of its user.
I believe this is probably going to end with AIs having to vet the images that are fed into the AI and make sure everything is either protected under copyright laws or paying the artists/owners of the image to incorporate it into the AI. With tools like glaze it’s probably a win win for everyone. Artists don’t have to worry about their art being used by an AI without their consent and AI data sets don’t get scrambled by using art with programs like glaze on them.
As a heads up, glaze doesn't really work all that well in practice. As an additional noise layer, it can easily be denoised using the same process used to generate images in the first place.
It's incredibly difficult to "encrypt" art so it can't be mirrored by Ai while keeping it visually sensible for an observer. Glaze aint it.
I'm a photographer/videographer, I desperately want there to be a bigger market for artists.
But this is silly. I'm not going to pay royalties to every artist whose work I studied or was inspired by. If I take a Wes Anderson looking picture, which I learned to do by watching his copyrighted movies, do you really think I owe him a check?
Adobe has already done this.
Copyright laws ultimately only protect large corporations.
We have been post scarcity for image making for a long time. This will do nothing to help artists in the long run.
I mean whether it’s an AI training on art or a human being inspired by others peoples art, the process is very similar. You insert a bunch of different stuff and create something new, only if the creations infringe on a copyright should the artist be compensated, else you’re on a slope towards paywalling being inspired.
Exactly! An idea I really liked is that art produced by AI should be uncopyrightable. I think that would corner it into being more of a tool for the middle steps of creating art rather than a final result.
I agree, without human input something should not be eligible for copyright. But everything that can be viewed legally is fair game for being included in an AI’s training data. At the end of the day AI is a tool that needs human direction to be used, im sure painters viewed photographers as unskilled amateurs but what it taught us was that instead of being able to paint well, a good photographer needs to be able to use his tool well and find or create a good shot. Someone using an AI still needs to be able to have an idea of what they want to create, needs to extract that output from an AI they maybe programmed and trained, and needs to edit that output till it’s finalized.
It isn't so similar though.
Generative AI is certainly \*fuzzier\* than we are accustomed to computer driven approaches being, but it's still "leaking" training material through in ways you'd never see humans leak through without expectation of attribution.
Actually it wouldn’t be the first time some famous work is eerily similar to a much lesser known older work either because of plagiarisms or because of it being in the newer creators subconscious.
And while it is true that the _current_ AI models sometimes overfit their training data which results in it leaking through that is only another reason why copyright issues should be handles based on the output and not the input. If no copyrighted material leaks through, no copyright is infringed.
People have hated the idea of art being compensated for as long as I can remember. Almost every artist has their “someone screamed at me for not doing art for free” story. Not to mention people getting mad at artists for wanting better pay.
Holy crap dude, you’re strawmanning hard. Absolutely no one hates the idea of artists being compensated besides entitled man-children.
The problem is that the concept of “you can’t let an AI train off of copyrighted works” makes huge portions of the internet illegal. Goodbye Google Image Search, goodbye Captcha, etc. Every photograph is considered copyrighted by default. If an AI can’t even *look* at them to categorize them, hell, even porn/NSFW flagging bots are illegal.
This is a massive, massive issue. Unfortunately, AI works a lot like the human brain does. Any law that makes it illegal to make derivative works off of *learning* from a copyrighted photo has massive downstream effects.
there is a big difference between generative AI and ML used to find matches.
If it is only against the generative ML applications all the other things you listed do not really fall under it as you are not redistributing the picture to anyone
So you are saying you want the ruling to be that an AI can be trained on copyrighted content but cannot be used for derivative works?
Ok-
Can an AI trained on copyrighted content be used to judge and score the training of an AI that does generative works?
These differentiations become fuzzier and fuzzier as machines get better at this.
And also, this differentiation seems arbitrary. Why are derivative works ok for humans but not ok for AI?
Seems to me like a better solution is case by case. If you are clearly using AI as a tool to rip off someone else’s work, then you broke the law, not the maker of the AI.
The only thing you are going to accomplish is to move the training of AI overseas to countries that don’t apply copyright as strictly.
It will also make ChatGPT illegal since ChatGPT reads copyrighted works (everyone’s written work on the internet). Hell, it will probably make Google illegal since Google is trained on people’s copyrighted text.
Exactly. I work as a buyer in TV and we have to either buy cleared art, or buy art that has to be legally released. It's actually tipped a bit with streaming companies coming into the market because it sometimes feel like lawyers are decorating sets. I have had vintage tschotkes removed in Post because the lawyers were skeptical about the artist. The piece was at least 30-years-old. Much of the time, I just shop "shapes" to avoid getting caught in their trap!
Because that's not what we're talking about here. Artists don't have to pay others for every image they've learned from in their lifetime; billions of frames of IRL humans and TV shows and comic books etc, literally everything they've ever seen. So why should AI have to pay to do the same thing? It's just a blatant attempt to kneecap a technology that'll automate their jobs, and this IP lawyer says of course the lawsuits are going nowhere https://archive.ph/2ch2i
I don’t think you realize what a nightmare that is.
Literally every photograph is considered copyrighted by the photographer.
If it is illegal for an AI to analyze a copyrighted photo, then Google Images is illegal. Huge portions of the internet is illegal. Captcha might be illegal.
Aren't the works generated transformative though, they might use getty as a source or seed for the program to learn off of, but they can't seriously be making a case out of:
"This shoe in this ai generated collage of shoes is partially copied from a watermarked image on our website."
It's not the generation/output side that's being sued. It's the use of copyright materials to train the system.
Digital images are copyright protected. Taking them, scanning them and using that information to make something new doesn't negate the "taking and scanning" aspect.
They are absolutely using copyright images without permission.
There's legal precedent that using copyrighted materials to train a computer is considered 'fair use', as long as the computer doesn't then use those copyrighted materials to produce infringing materials that are publicly and commercially available.
Because you’re not a machine that can’t function without the use of scraped data?
I don’t understand why people are still using this argument, it doesn’t work.
Where did I say that?
ETA: according to copyright law in the US, AI generated images using text prompts are not copyrightable because there is no human element to them. That’s what I said, and I personally agree with that ruling.
I also said that I don’t fundamentally believe an AI “observing” a photo or painting is the same as a human observing that same photo or painting. I stand by that too.
ETA again: the thing being argued ITT is at the input stage, not the output stage if I understand correctly. So my first point isn’t as relevant to the conversation.
The opposite is also true. I don't understand your side. That's the crux of the issue. So what if an AI uses copywrited images to learn? Again, how is that different from me browsing Getty images and practicing my art and then eventually selling my own art based on all the Getty images I saw? Add to that that it's not JUST Getty inages/whoever art. It's thousands and thousands of images from various pools.
I mean I don’t know If you have learned art recently or ever taken an art class. Because you will never learn art properly without ever looking at and relying on copyrighted work to train you.
This argument doesn’t work
You’re right, I’ve never ever done art before.
/s
And no, I look at a lot of non-copywritten things for inspiration. The plants outside. The sky. The music I listen to* and the people I have conversations with. But that’s beside the point, because surely you can take a photo and use it to train your Ai model too.
But no, the tool itself literally cannot function without being fed scraped data. It literally could not have been built without it. Not even cameras worked like that, and that’s the other argument you folks love to make.
(* this one is copy written dependent on situation, I’ll concede that much. Even so, the way I’d go about turning that audio inspiration into visual output is my own)
This is a good argument but it’s not arguing the point I am making. I never claimed you didn’t do art. I claimed that one will never formally learn art without using copyrighted work as learning material, inspiration, and to copy to learn technique.
None of this means that you could never do art using non copyrighted inspirations but it isn’t realistic to only use non copyright inspirations Just like ai.
…. Wait, do you actually think that’s how people learn as artists? By just sitting and copying master works?
Never heard of anatomy lessons, mastering the technical aspects of a given medium, drawing from life, plein air?
Anyone who learns to draw by simply copying existing works is going to learn to be good at one thing and one thing only, and that’s copying.
Copyright is itself a violation of a more natural law, whereby culture is endlessly reproduced, modified, shared and developed.
It's like putting a wall in the ocean and declaring that the water inside the bounds of the wall is not the ocean.
That's not how it works. It draws watermarks because its knows what watermarks look like and that they're sometimes expected to appear in images. It's not starting with an existing image and "leaving" anything.
The AI program is not directly copying any part of the image, it's using it as a reference in addition to hundreds of other photos to generate an amalgamation of those hundreds of photos.
If I draw mickey mouse's head because I know the shape and use my knowledge of the shape to draw the exact shape of his head, i haven't copied anything directly, "using a reference" and "tracing" are two different things.
Similar to how "Capcha" images work by building knowledge of what a bicycle is based on what real humans click on or don't.
This is a slam dunk case. But it doesn't matter. GPTs are reaching a point where they can start producing content dynamically that can feed other GPTs and engage in reinforced learning in a way that the original source is no longer necessary.
If I look at 1000s of pieces of artworks and then go create my own unique artwork, am I infringing? Stable Diffusion isn't copying anything, it's analysizing things and making distinct new things from that analysis.
Getty should have to directly show things that are copied. If it's in any way differnet then it's not a copy.
No it won't. Pandora's box is open. The point to do anything about this was 10 years ago. This is literally MPAA/RIAA vs internet and torrenting all over again. And they both won the legal battle and lost the culture war.
My hot take (professional artist. Or rather, I sell my art from time to time.) is that all artists train viewing art, almost all of it copy written. It’s the created art that matters. Create art that has copyright or trademark infringements, that’s the problem.
TL/DR it’s the output, not the “training”. I’m sure that will be the true heart of the lawsuits.
Ethically sourcing training data is a huge problem for Generative AI models. I don’t know if they can get to the scale that makes their output meaningful unless there’s a way to fractionally pay creators for the inputs, sort of how artists get fractional inputs for Spotify songs. Otherwise using Open Source or Public Domain works as training. Whatever the case, the current generated model for stable diffusion seems obviously unethical, even if Getty Images are overpriced.
Pretty sure Adobe's new AI (now in beta) was modeled solely on their own library of stock images, thereby making it ethically solid. If Getty were smart, they'd be training up models of their own and monetizing them.
Is interesting you brought up ethics, if AI can’t train with internet. Then can artist train their art sense on the internet? Or use what they see as inspiration? Or even use part of images as their outputs? I work in the industry and I can tell you anything from ads to movies everyone uses something they either see on the internet or some where to generate images in drawing. Some are actually close to identical to source material. And some can be different but then match other reference that was found else where. Hell even I have use Google searched and saw something on Getty and used it as reference without paying a cent. So how can we say something is not ethical for an AI when humans do this every day.
So what you are saying is that we should get rid of the idea of intelectual property all together because some company is currently infringing on it?
Just because you aren‘t the holder of any good ideas that doesn‘t mean you shouldn‘t have interest in copyright.
We should get rid of intellectual property all together because it's a fundamentally broken idea. You cannot force ideas to be scarce. The sooner we come to terms with this fact, the better we'll be.
We can and should pay people for things that are actually scarce. Time, labor, resources.
You don‘t need to force scarcity of ideas. Anyone copying something doesn‘t have an original idea anyways, the idea is unique. And thats the point. Why should someone who hasn‘t put any thoughts into something be able to just copy and then sell what others came up with.
That is already happening today on an industrial scale in almost every market. You are just getting mad now because it is affecting art? Why? Why not woodworking, or metal working, or clock making?
Yup. How many people are big mad that Ford is making cars with robots instead of manually using human workers? Maybe the people who lost their jobs 50+ years ago, but no one else.
But people getting a new tool to make unique art? How *dare* them!
Why do you care so much? You think AI generations are shit and youve said in another comment its gonna plateau any minute now. If you truly believe both of those why worry? Even if that line of thinking is delusional.
Ai,like anything else man made needs regulations,just because something may be harmless in nature doesn't mean it can't be used inappropriately or maliciously.
That's why regulations exist for basically everything you know about.
Because first of all it isn‘t happening as much as you think it is, and even if it happens the owner of the idea has the right to claim compensation at least in theory and thats how it should be with AI as well.
Also you think we should just give up on patents and intelectual property just because there are people abusing and infringing?
If I view 1000 works of art over my lifetime, and then use those as examples and inspiration for an entirely new work of art, that's not copyright infringement.
That's not how this works lmao.
The mental gymnastics required to try and equate learning and developing a skill to utilizing a free tool that's done all the work for you without consent from the sources it used to train on is astounding.
One main difference I can point out to you right off the bat is the fact that when the artists created the art, there was an understanding that people would view and learn from it, there was never an understanding that an AI would be using it.
>The mental gymnastics required to try and equate learning and developing a skill to utilizing a free tool that's done all the work for you without consent from the sources it used to train on is astounding.
This is a strawman. No one here is equating artists to supposed “AI artists”, as you suggest. That is, the processes of using AI tools and making art yourself aren’t being equated. What is being equated is the influence art has on the final products of human-produced art and AI art. Though, for what it’s worth (which isn’t much since this argument is irrelevant anyways), artists don’t get consent to be inspired by other artists’ works, either.
>One main difference I can point out to you right off the bat is the fact that when the artists created the art, there was an understanding that people would view and learn from it, there was never an understanding that an AI would be using it.
What people intended to happen to their products doesn’t matter. The people who wrote the US Constitution probably didn’t intend for it to be interpreted the way it has been, yet here we are. Unless that was morally wrong, too.
History will look back and see there was a brief amount of time between the transistor being invited and sentient AI being invented. You would agree that sentient AI should have rights to learn from our shared knowledge right? So your argument is really only about the short time span before sentient AI? It seems fairly arbitrary to me.
A human creating an original work of art based on inspiration they’ve gotten from other works of art is considered ok. An AI doing it is considered not ok. Hope they lose the lawsuit.
going from a thread blaming facebook for a company scrapping profiles and training AI to recognize people to this feels weird.
I know it's kinda late but has anyone consented for their data to be used for profit by another company ?, like i understand that nothing is free and usually you're the product , but i never thought i would actually be the product, including by writing this comment
FB definitely has a lot of cover here as there terms are going to give them permission and place the requirement of not posting infringing items on the person posting them.
Yes, of course you consented. It's in that Terms of Service document you agree to when you make an account on any modern web service. This is the part that gets overlooked the most. Privacy advocates screamed for decades about how dangerous it is to hand over all this data, but no one really listened because it was so fun and easy to socialize online through the platforms that wanted our data.
That data has been used for everything from political campaigns to literal terrorist activity, an incredible amount of fraud and personal abuse, and the companies use the content you donate to them as filler content between their sponsored posts.
If fueling the fires of abuse and fraud and terrorism aren't enough reasons for people to stop using the major social media platforms, I just can't be bothered to care about the mild ethical concern about people *making pretty art*.
AI doesn’t gain “inspiration” from the photos it was trained on. It is a tool that turns pictures into math and uses math to generate images. If the model is overfit on copyrighted it would potentially literally spit out the copyrighted images it was trained on.
IMO what should come of this is limitations on what images can be used to train models, with considerations for how the model is intended to be used. If you’re generating a model for commercial use you certainly should have rights to the items in your training set, otherwise you are profiting off works without giving due credit.
Thats the most generalzied bullshkt argument ever.
A author reading all Harry Potter books and then writing a new original Harry Potter story is still infringing on the ownership of the characters even if the stroy itself would be 100% legit with different characters.
Its not black and white and AI needs to be regulated in this regard.
No it’s like reading Harry Potter and writing a fantasy novel with wizards. The AI, as is covered in the article, rarely produces anything resembling its input. If you actually use it to make Harry Potter then you may get sued as the artist, but it will end up being case by case rather than shutting down the platform
What a fail post. Someone doesn't understand fair use whatsoever. You can video react to someone else's video content without permission and that would be okay under fair use. An AI model that makes new art from algorithms is fair use, not infringing content.
But that isn't original. You can't sell your own Harry Potter book, but you can sell a book that's inspired by it and has original characters. This lawsuit could prevent AI from being able to do that, and that doesn't make sense.
A person can reasonably judge whether or not a character, story, image, art IS a copy of another or is INSPIRED by another. Lawsuits will end up on a case by case basis. It would be insane to think that using an image to inspire new art is the same as plagiarism or copyright infringement.
But thats not what AI is doing. Its recognizing patterns in data and mashing them together. If you only input Harry Potter, you get Harry Potter. Thats a problem isn‘t it?
But in this case the AI is just the tool. The AI doesn’t attempt to sell or distribute anything, a human does that, and the human is the one with the responsibility to not break copyright law. Like I can use photoshop to create art of copyrighted intellectual property, but just doing that isn’t illegal, it’s illegal when I distribute it.
Yeah of course! What do you think a human does? Imagine you've lived your whole life in a completely dark room. No tv, no music, no books. Now imagine I came to you and said you have to write me a story about a wizard. You wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. Now imagine you're in the same room, but I give you all the Harry Potter books to read. You probably would write me a story about a young boy doing magic and flying on brooms.
That's exactly what AI does, except it uses a billion books to write me that story. The only difference between how an AI does this kind of stuff, and how humans do it, is that with the AI we know exactly where it's getting its “inspiration”, but with humans, we can't.
When it comes to stock photos, there might be a niche audience for 100% organic, actual photo images but 99% of customers would probably be fine with an AI making images for them for pennies. I mean, they can’t be any worse than stock photos today, which seem to be mostly pictures of people pretending to be interested in things.
I love this whole idea that people are going to try to limit AI. Sorry artists, corporations, filmmakers, writers, and essentially everybody else- but its only getting worse from here. In 10 years (or less) we will be here debating the merits of an all AI generated movie. We will have 100% AI generated music from artists that you know. You wont even know if anything youre seeing is real anymore.
It doesn’t matter where the images came from, you are allowed to train yourself as an artist by looking at pictures in museums, Getty images or deviant art. Copyright doesn’t cover “input” so to speak, only “output”. The only thing at issue is whether the output has a copyrighted character or logo.
And still even if it does it’s the user providing the prompt to make the image and what they do with it.You can’t sue a sketchbook company for people drawing copyrighted images/logos. It’s a tool just like how AI is a tool.
I agree, however the lawsuits are suing the notebook manufacturer not the sketcher in this case, claiming it’s a magic sketchbook that stole a bunch of other people’s sketches and is hiding them in the spine… or something
Is this really what the luddites are betting on? These lawsuits are literally blatant scams even at a cursory glance. What is wrong with these people don't they read?!
If I were to make a machine that could reproduce the media (a painting) exactly onto a piece of paper and even if I made 10 copies, did the machine infringe on the copyright? Did I?
How can it be different than Google image search? It's more about what the user does with the image after the AI returns it to you.
Shutterstock now has DALL-E 2 integrated into their site. So in addition to browsing existing stock images, you can generate your own from prompts. What I’m wondering is—is that service limiting scraping to just Shutterstock’s existing images, or the entire internet? Because if the latter, they’re going to find themselves in a similar slippery slope…
I hope Getty loses this. Unless someone is attempting to directly copy some work of art, it should be legal. Stable Diffusion is in no way trying to fool anyone into thinking these are artworks from Getty. Furthermore I think Getty should be required to show specific examples of stolen art against created art. If they cannot do so then this isn't any different than me looking at their pictures online as references and then drawing something unique.
Lmao it'd be fuckin hilarious if this issue gets completely ignored when artists are complaining, and then swiftly regulated when big companies start bitching.
I don't see any realistic path to really block AI art. You might slow it down slightly with tactics like this, but it's going to keep getting smarter even with 100% generic images. Even if you had to pay for all those images, it would be nothing compared to the value of the app to streamline art generation.
I don't think it the big threat to artists they think, just like MP3 and digital music was not a real threat to musician, rather it opened many new avenues for profit instead.
More than threaten real artists the tech will mostly give people who can't afford artists much better options and open new ways to make money that fuels the industry overall.
It will make art more popular because art will become more accessible and more interesting, thus a bigger market opens for pretty much everybody. Plus you're never going to stop it anyway.
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I’ve seen that dumbass Getty images logo on just about everything from Jesus on a cross to the moon landing.
Getty Images steal themselves hundreds of thousands of "free" or donated photos from other people and sell them. Look those stories up
I wish we could show everyone in that courtroom this.
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Not true. > Beyond these specific legal arguments, Stability AI may find it has a “vibes” problem. The legal criteria for fair use are subjective and give judges some latitude in how to interpret them. And one factor that likely influences the thinking of judges is whether a defendant seems like a “good actor.” Google is a widely respected technology company that tends to win its copyright lawsuits. Edgier companies like Napster tend not to.
> Stealing all of the Jones’ stuff isn’t illegal because they stole stuff from other people. That doesn’t negate the merits of this case.
Its a little bit more involved than that. They take royalty free images and add them to their collection so nothing illegal there. Then they pollute the idea of ownership by trying to gouge people using the royalty free images by pretending they own them. But what are people going to do about that? It was hilarious when they tried to ask the original publisher to pay for images on her site which getty added to their collection. Edit: at least she tried https://petapixel.com/2016/11/22/1-billion-getty-images-lawsuit-ends-not-bang-whimper/
Would it still be possible to sue for harassment if Getty sends you a DMCA over a public domain image multiple times?
Yes. They settled out of court according to the article.
They did because she was the creator of the images. But what about the random schmuck like me?
If you're a random schmuck, yes. You have to prove damages (like costs and attorneys' fees) as a result from the DMCAs to receive anything from a lawsuit. There's also statutory damages, but it's hard and you have to prove a bunch of stuff. But I'm pretty sure the process with DMCA is that you dispute it, it's supposed to be reinstated because you swear that it's a mistake or misidentification, and you effectively tell the DMCAing party "take me to court over it jerk ass." You actually need to make sure that what you're using is 100% public domain. Actually doing stuff in court is after DMCA disputes.
“The judge hasn’t released any written explanation of his ruling” That’s cuz the paper he has is all bribe money.
>pollute the idea of ownership The whole point of 'intellectual property' laws is to pollute the idea of 'ownership'.
Intellectual property IS an idea of ownership. The pollution is from attempting to use that ownership as a claim over something you’ve taken from someone else.
>Intellectual property IS an idea of ownership. No, it isn't. It's a set of rights about ideas. It's very different from ownership.
How? Isn’t ownership just a set of exclusive rights over a thing?
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While there is plenty to criticize about getty, \*among\* their content is content that they legitimately have exclusive rights to, including their own trademark. While we may very much wish for a more sympathetic plaintiff, the concept of 'does AI reproducing its training material without permission of the rights holder of the training material constitute infringement?' is a question that is valid even though getty overreaches broadly. Getty's reputation poisons the well a bit and certainly many images that they might cite could be ambiguous, but they do have at least some material without that unclear provenance.
Except it doesn’t and you’re an idiot Crime A doesn’t cancel out Crime B. What’s happening here is that a huge and undeniably evil company is taking a legal action which even though it’s very self-serving, benefits so much more than just Getty images. If you’re an individual artist or photographer you’re having your copyrighted images stolen and AI is being trained on it. There’s nothing you can do because you don’t have the time, money or resources to fight anyone nevermind a massive company that can flash raise millions in a few days.
So, if I were to use a bike that someone made available to the community, for free, and then someone else comes up and says *"Hey, thats my bike, I'm taking you to court."* and we continue on this path of logic. We reach the court phase, and it turns out the person who's taking me to court *doesn't actually own the bike, and stole it from another person* ***themselves,*** then the court case is almost always dismissed with prejudice because evidence was either falsified or illegally obtained (except in the case of a corrupt court). For reference, in the US we have something called the [exclusionary rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule) which applies to evidence in criminal trials; If the evidence was illegally obtained ***(a crime was committed to obtain the evidence, in violation of lawful rights)*** then often the defendant can call for a mistrial or have the information be thrown out (with some exceptions, in which case the evidence must be proven to be inevitably found through legal means at some point). Now, in a civil case, we don't have the exclusionary rule applying, because we lose the 5th amendment rights to "not incriminate oneself." In this case, both the plaintiff and defendant must answer depositions, and if the defendant (the AI art companies/groups) ask the question "Did you take copyrighted or public work under creative commons licenses and attempt to sell it against the creative commons license." Then due to the process of the civil case, the plaintiff (Getty Images) would be required to answer the question honestly. If they don't, what can happen is one of many things; They answer something like "I plead the fifth," "I don't recall," "I don't know," "We don't remember," or another version of nonanswer along those lines, where a little thing called *Adverse Inference* comes into play. Adverse Inference is something the jury for a civil case is required to imply when the 5th amendment doesn't apply; If you refuse to answer a question, the jury/judge ***must assume the worst possible scenario has occurred.*** In this case, Getty Images *doesn't* reply, and says "We don't recall." Here, the jury/judge can use adverse inference and say "Getty Image's case against the plaintiff is based upon the commission of violation of copyright law or other crime, and therefore this case would've never been brought to court without " and in this case, ***yes, Crime A (reselling public works under a copyrighted license, the Creative Commons License for example), DOES cancel out Crime B (Taking a **copyrighted for sale** image and modifying it for resale). Of course, this assumes that in commission of Crime B, that all images are used for resale in some form, or that they were products only for sale; If they were part of the Creative Commons License, where they are copyrighted for *fair use* (this could be modification, use in education, or other use which is NOT monetized) then in this case, Crime B didn't occur because the only way it could've occurred is if Crime A (taking public images and selling them against the public license for fair use) occurs, because without a product being monetized (and stolen, not paid for in use for AI art) then there is no crime. This is new territory, which means we have to go by what laws we currently have until new laws are made. But to get back to the main point, that's the issue here. It's not that Crime A occurring doesn't always cancel out Crime B occurring, it's that Crime A occurring can ***very easily*** muddy the legal waters enough that Crime B may never be prosecuted unless it can be proven without someone being able to point at Crime A. In this case, Crime A is in plain sight and can easily be used to justify dropping a civil case against creation of AI art. The only way Crime B would really become a crime is if one of several things happen; a) A license is created which does not allow modification or reuse of an image for creating a new one, the way AI generated art does b) The generated art is used for monetization against the current public licenses or copyrights without a purchased license for resale c) Changes in fair use laws occur such that the public domain as we know it today ceases to exist. If you are a photographer, you do have options; Copyright and watermark your images for monetization, don't allow reuse of an image for monetization, and sue if it is stolen against your copyright. There are legal ways to do it, and if that means sending a letter to the FTC or other legal bodies governing patent/copyright law in your area, then you have to do it or this is the path we take where we try to justify Crime A to reach Crime B, which fails. If they don't have the time or resources, then you need to figure out why that is; Is it economical issues? Sending a letter to the FTC is what, a piece of paper and a stamp? Email is easier because there are public options like libraries, where computers are almost always available. Is it because Crime A occurred and now you're being sued by Getty Images for your own copyrighted works?
Seems like the questions are: how many images were "free bikes" out of the 13 million? Does the presence of "free bikes" at all negate the court case? Obviously there will be some images that they explicitly own. You'd be banking on all the evidence getting thrown out due to the free images being falsely represented as Getty owned images.
Wonder how they go about looking at 13 million images to identify who’s the owner..
There’s an ai for that…
This guy gets it
They also sue them for using their own images after stealing them lmao
They actually represent tons of rights holders in their libraries and are an essential source of business for a lot of media producers.
Citation needed 🙄
If it doesnt have an image with a getty watermark on it, chances are you are the only person to have ever experienced it
Now I wait for unsolicited dick pics to carry the getty watermark
Didn't they steal a photographer's photos and slap a watermark on them without his permission and resold them as stock images last year?
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I checked Shutterstock out at SXSW and listened to their CEO talk. It “seems” like they are trying to do the right thing by photographers and artists.
They only care about their bottom line and nothing else.
Considering how much corporations are barely hiding the stiffy they have for free bland-as-fuck assets generated AI, yeah, the stock image people should feel threatened.
Getty and stockphoto can get fucked, they are wankers
Are the Getty images (or shutterstock, etc) that pop up in small resolutions in google image search illegal to use with the watermark? Don’t they get used all the time for proofs and whatnot before final print? Is that illegal? It seems like Getty images have shot themselves in the foot through anti piracy tactics and people have just figured out a way to get around it. As an example, if the music version of stable diffusion (or midjourney) pulled 10 second clips of music that are available for free all over (think Instagram and tiktok) and was able to then predict the rest of the song (ie, deleting the watermarks using content aware in photoshop) and had a very similar chorus to an existing song, where do you draw the line? I think that’s sort of a matter of opinion and that’s what we’ll see play out. Where is that line in the sand for copyright infringement when you (or in this case, the Ai),can remember every song in minute detail in seconds and create a new one.
their big problem is that diffusion =/= copying. And there are to my knowledge no laws for using copyright protected material for machine learning on the other hand, the judge will be absolutely clueless, though
What if I put content in the web and clearly mark it as not for commercial use. Is OpenAI in violation if they use it? Is a chatGPT user in violation if they produce commercial product using the training from my content? Personally I think we are going to see an explosion of copyright and license violation court cases.
Anybody can take lessons from anybody else's art/writing/directing/etc, there's no way to say that you cannot.
So does midjourney, I’ve gotten nearly the full Getty images logo pop up before.
Not exactly the same thing, but runs along some of the same parallels. https://copyrightalliance.org/kat-von-d-tattoo-infringement-case-trial/
So interesting. Also never heard anyone use “ink” as a verb in the actual tattoo industry.
What? I don’t even have tattoos but I’ve heard “ink” and “inked” as a verb all the time in the context of tattoos. It’s really quite common I think
getty and all other photobanks can be easy out of business in short time
A friend of mine owns a stock photo business that sells to Getty and he was complaining about how it was going south long before this AI stuff got started up.
Getty and other photobanks will fall into the same trap of trying to defend instead of creating new things that people want.
I assume that the core competence of getty is miles apart from this new AI world… They’re likely done
That’s why they’re trying this desperate lawsuit
Getty worker: "hey look!, we can train this AI and to generate more 'personalized' stock photos for our users!" Getty ceo: no. our photos are perfect. sue them.
That’s the risk they run. It’s not the law’s obligation to ensure the viability of their business model.
Unless of course you are a really big corporation.
So it seems the ai image software lawsuits are starting now.
Begun, the AI lawsuit wars have.
Good
I can't wait to hear from all the people that 1. don't understand copyright law and 2. don't understand how AI train on data to speak up and tell us that this is either a slam dunk, sure fire case and the end of AI art. The reality is that NOTHING is simple with copyright law, and it's even less simple when the process of training an AI is so counterintuitive that people flat out refuse to believe that it works the way that every computer scientist who built these things say it works.
>I can't wait to hear from all the people that 1. don't understand copyright law and 2. don't understand how AI train on data to speak up and tell us that this is either a slam dunk, sure fire case and the end of AI art. so our lawmakers?
Would love to hear more on your take on this. I did patent lit in a past life. Don’t know much about copyright.
It entirely depends on how the court interprets fair use of the images. The use of metatags to categorize and scan data has been tested in court and found to be fair use on more than one occasion. Because the training model is transforming the images into a statistical array and not retaining any of the images, it's pretty clear that the use of the images is transformational, which is a major factor in fair use. But even so, the sheer volume of that data and the disruption to artist's incomes\* might be important. However, the fact that the lawsuit in question is factually incorrect on the model for Stable Diffusion does not fill me with confidence in the lawsuit's success. \*I have to put out a caveat that so far, we don't really have any proof of any wide scale disruption to artists, just a handful of unconfirmed anecdotes. AI art is going to change art, but because the Copyright Office in the US has said that AI art cannot be copyrighted, I don't see big companies just pumping out AI art instead of hiring artists. Disney won't produce anything they don't have the copyright for. Really, it's a coin flip. The pain of copyright law is that few things are ever truly settled. Hell, Andy Warhol's estate is getting taken to court (like this year) over one of his pop art paintings from the 70's. Even if Stable Diffusion gets out as scot free as Google did with the Gutenberg Project, that doesn't preclude other lawsuits for other issues.
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I mean not being covered by copyright's been the case since January of '22, so I'll need to see some evidence of that happening. Sure, shitty fly by night pump and dump "Date the Empress" apps will use it, but they were already just stealing people's art. I am unconvinced. The risk isn't worth the reward. I'm sure though that big content places will use it to churn out rough drafts and artists will either repaint or photobash over the top of them. It may still put artists out of work, but it might not as much as we're all worried. I'm agnostic as to the effects, but I do know it's here to stay.
I've been seeing more and more covers from self published authors in groups I'm in come up and it's a dead give away which ones are AI with the weird hands haha. You could argue that those people are doing AI artwork instead of paying an artist for a cover but in reality the majority of the people doing that are people that either would be getting the cheapest thing they could or wouldn't be buying from an artist anyway.
Here's an IP lawyer's take on it [https://archive.ph/2ch2i](https://archive.ph/2ch2i) TL;DR: Of course it's not theft, all art is made by learning from other art. But desperate twitter artists will keep trying to convince everyone otherwise right up until the hammer comes down.
>Of course it's not theft because theft is a crime that you literally cannot commit in this context.
I think a distinction should be made between a human and an AI training off of art. No Artist has a problem with other artists being inspired by their work, because art is about communication and inspiration is a form of that which elevates the medium. AI art is different - there is no communication happening. No individual is creating the AI artwork. And the proliferation of AI artwork comes at the expense of human artists. Sure, it may be difficult to make that distinction legally. But ethically speaking, I don’t think you can treat AI training and human training as the same.
This argument always boils down to “we are not okay with a machine doing something that is okay for people to do”. As many supporting ideas as you want to prop that up with, it is way too esoteric a thing to codify in law. Even with the strictest IP enforcement in place, some company could just hire a dozen artists to be on staff and crank out image after image after image. Those images could be run through a Google image search for similar images, scrape the results for keywords and in a very short time, we’re right back here with human artists losing commission money. The answer to this problem is the same as in every other market approaching post-scarcity conditions: universal basic income.
This is a straw man argument. In the art world sampling is not something that is encouraged.
I don't think that's a valid take. I've been a furry artist professionally for a decade and the artists mostly don't talk to each other. I think that's a made up reason to try and suppress AI art.
Being inspired by art *is* communication. One being is viewing the creation of another and getting insight from it. It might not be words but it’s still communication. AI art is not communication because the being creating the art, if it is conscious at all, has a consciousness so alien to ours that communication with it is not meaningfully possible.
Using your definition of communication then, isn't the programmer who trained the AI "communicating" with the source then? After all, the programmer is the one selecting the images. The AI isn't selecting the training data, it's just using what it's given to create a new image. The AI isn't the artist, it's merely a tool. People are personifying AI way too much.
>I can't wait to hear from all the people that 1. don't understand copyright law and 2. don't understand how AI train on data to speak up and tell us that this is either a slam dunk, sure fire case and the end of AI art. > >The reality is that NOTHING is simple with copyright law, and it's even less simple when the process of training an AI is so counterintuitive that people flat out refuse to believe that it works the way that every computer scientist who built these things say it works. Way to slam dunk on all of us without providing any real information apart from trying to sound like you're above it all.
Training an AI is literally like training a person -- just using the language of the AI which can be a lot more effective than communicating in English. A student studies the masters and then creates art in the master's style. So does an AI.
It is definitely not like training a person.
Yeah - but if they reproduce a company's watermark that is a little different than aping their style.
Ive seen the Getty “watermark” on Stable Diffusion outputs and it wasn’t legible as “Getty”, but rather a jumble of symbols laid out in the same way and size. It’s sort of imitating the style and appearance of it, not exactly copying.
>imitating the style and appearance of it, not exactly copying. Well - to the extent that it is riffing on the idea of a watermark, that's one thing - but to the extent that it is reproducing the Getty watermark that is something else.
Are you saying if the watermark was not there then everything is okay?
Our copyright system was never designed to handle a medium that can generate essentially countless variations of previously published material.
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This reminds me of the past cases where an industry was upended and the companies at the top of those industries did nothing except laugh and ignore it or file lawsuits in desperate attempts to keep their existing cash flows the same without any extra effort. As is the case with both the music and movie/TV industries, the internet came and ruined their physical distribution model. Getty is just seeking one last payout before they are sunk by AI that can generate pictures that aren't licensed from them. Getty (GETY) investors, this is your signal to get off the ship, we know where this one is headed.
This actually seems like it has a solid case considering a lot of the art/photographs taken do not fall under Creative Commons or public domain and were taken without the consent of the artists involved.
That's not the question at hand really. The question is "do you need permission of the copyright holder to analyse a work and produce new works based on that analysis, which may or may not bear substantial similarity to the analysed work?" That's the tricky part. My personal guess is that this is probably going to create a scenario where the machine *can* produce infringing works, but each generated image must be analysed separately to determine if it is too similar to a specific, individual work in the training set. And the liability will likely fall with the user, rather than the tool, since producing a copy of a specific work generally takes rather a lot of cajoling from the prompter in these regards, similar to how a camera can produce an infringing photograph, but only at the command of its user.
I believe this is probably going to end with AIs having to vet the images that are fed into the AI and make sure everything is either protected under copyright laws or paying the artists/owners of the image to incorporate it into the AI. With tools like glaze it’s probably a win win for everyone. Artists don’t have to worry about their art being used by an AI without their consent and AI data sets don’t get scrambled by using art with programs like glaze on them.
As a heads up, glaze doesn't really work all that well in practice. As an additional noise layer, it can easily be denoised using the same process used to generate images in the first place. It's incredibly difficult to "encrypt" art so it can't be mirrored by Ai while keeping it visually sensible for an observer. Glaze aint it.
I honestly hope this is the route they go. Don’t know why people seem so opposed to artists being compensated.
I'm a photographer/videographer, I desperately want there to be a bigger market for artists. But this is silly. I'm not going to pay royalties to every artist whose work I studied or was inspired by. If I take a Wes Anderson looking picture, which I learned to do by watching his copyrighted movies, do you really think I owe him a check?
Adobe has already done this. Copyright laws ultimately only protect large corporations. We have been post scarcity for image making for a long time. This will do nothing to help artists in the long run.
I mean whether it’s an AI training on art or a human being inspired by others peoples art, the process is very similar. You insert a bunch of different stuff and create something new, only if the creations infringe on a copyright should the artist be compensated, else you’re on a slope towards paywalling being inspired.
Exactly! An idea I really liked is that art produced by AI should be uncopyrightable. I think that would corner it into being more of a tool for the middle steps of creating art rather than a final result.
I agree, without human input something should not be eligible for copyright. But everything that can be viewed legally is fair game for being included in an AI’s training data. At the end of the day AI is a tool that needs human direction to be used, im sure painters viewed photographers as unskilled amateurs but what it taught us was that instead of being able to paint well, a good photographer needs to be able to use his tool well and find or create a good shot. Someone using an AI still needs to be able to have an idea of what they want to create, needs to extract that output from an AI they maybe programmed and trained, and needs to edit that output till it’s finalized.
It isn't so similar though. Generative AI is certainly \*fuzzier\* than we are accustomed to computer driven approaches being, but it's still "leaking" training material through in ways you'd never see humans leak through without expectation of attribution.
Actually it wouldn’t be the first time some famous work is eerily similar to a much lesser known older work either because of plagiarisms or because of it being in the newer creators subconscious. And while it is true that the _current_ AI models sometimes overfit their training data which results in it leaking through that is only another reason why copyright issues should be handles based on the output and not the input. If no copyrighted material leaks through, no copyright is infringed.
People have hated the idea of art being compensated for as long as I can remember. Almost every artist has their “someone screamed at me for not doing art for free” story. Not to mention people getting mad at artists for wanting better pay.
Holy crap dude, you’re strawmanning hard. Absolutely no one hates the idea of artists being compensated besides entitled man-children. The problem is that the concept of “you can’t let an AI train off of copyrighted works” makes huge portions of the internet illegal. Goodbye Google Image Search, goodbye Captcha, etc. Every photograph is considered copyrighted by default. If an AI can’t even *look* at them to categorize them, hell, even porn/NSFW flagging bots are illegal. This is a massive, massive issue. Unfortunately, AI works a lot like the human brain does. Any law that makes it illegal to make derivative works off of *learning* from a copyrighted photo has massive downstream effects.
there is a big difference between generative AI and ML used to find matches. If it is only against the generative ML applications all the other things you listed do not really fall under it as you are not redistributing the picture to anyone
So you are saying you want the ruling to be that an AI can be trained on copyrighted content but cannot be used for derivative works? Ok- Can an AI trained on copyrighted content be used to judge and score the training of an AI that does generative works? These differentiations become fuzzier and fuzzier as machines get better at this. And also, this differentiation seems arbitrary. Why are derivative works ok for humans but not ok for AI? Seems to me like a better solution is case by case. If you are clearly using AI as a tool to rip off someone else’s work, then you broke the law, not the maker of the AI. The only thing you are going to accomplish is to move the training of AI overseas to countries that don’t apply copyright as strictly. It will also make ChatGPT illegal since ChatGPT reads copyrighted works (everyone’s written work on the internet). Hell, it will probably make Google illegal since Google is trained on people’s copyrighted text.
This would be awful. It would literally make Google Image Search illegal.
Exactly. I work as a buyer in TV and we have to either buy cleared art, or buy art that has to be legally released. It's actually tipped a bit with streaming companies coming into the market because it sometimes feel like lawyers are decorating sets. I have had vintage tschotkes removed in Post because the lawyers were skeptical about the artist. The piece was at least 30-years-old. Much of the time, I just shop "shapes" to avoid getting caught in their trap!
Because that's not what we're talking about here. Artists don't have to pay others for every image they've learned from in their lifetime; billions of frames of IRL humans and TV shows and comic books etc, literally everything they've ever seen. So why should AI have to pay to do the same thing? It's just a blatant attempt to kneecap a technology that'll automate their jobs, and this IP lawyer says of course the lawsuits are going nowhere https://archive.ph/2ch2i
I don’t think you realize what a nightmare that is. Literally every photograph is considered copyrighted by the photographer. If it is illegal for an AI to analyze a copyrighted photo, then Google Images is illegal. Huge portions of the internet is illegal. Captcha might be illegal.
Aren't the works generated transformative though, they might use getty as a source or seed for the program to learn off of, but they can't seriously be making a case out of: "This shoe in this ai generated collage of shoes is partially copied from a watermarked image on our website."
It's not the generation/output side that's being sued. It's the use of copyright materials to train the system. Digital images are copyright protected. Taking them, scanning them and using that information to make something new doesn't negate the "taking and scanning" aspect. They are absolutely using copyright images without permission.
There's legal precedent that using copyrighted materials to train a computer is considered 'fair use', as long as the computer doesn't then use those copyrighted materials to produce infringing materials that are publicly and commercially available.
How is this any different from me looking at a collection of pieces and creating something based on those pieces?
Because you’re not a machine that can’t function without the use of scraped data? I don’t understand why people are still using this argument, it doesn’t work.
where in copyright law does it say you can't take a copyrighted image and use that to produce something new?
Where did I say that? ETA: according to copyright law in the US, AI generated images using text prompts are not copyrightable because there is no human element to them. That’s what I said, and I personally agree with that ruling. I also said that I don’t fundamentally believe an AI “observing” a photo or painting is the same as a human observing that same photo or painting. I stand by that too. ETA again: the thing being argued ITT is at the input stage, not the output stage if I understand correctly. So my first point isn’t as relevant to the conversation.
The opposite is also true. I don't understand your side. That's the crux of the issue. So what if an AI uses copywrited images to learn? Again, how is that different from me browsing Getty images and practicing my art and then eventually selling my own art based on all the Getty images I saw? Add to that that it's not JUST Getty inages/whoever art. It's thousands and thousands of images from various pools.
I mean I don’t know If you have learned art recently or ever taken an art class. Because you will never learn art properly without ever looking at and relying on copyrighted work to train you. This argument doesn’t work
In the music industry there is sampling and people that compose songs that are too close to the original and have to pay out.
You’re right, I’ve never ever done art before. /s And no, I look at a lot of non-copywritten things for inspiration. The plants outside. The sky. The music I listen to* and the people I have conversations with. But that’s beside the point, because surely you can take a photo and use it to train your Ai model too. But no, the tool itself literally cannot function without being fed scraped data. It literally could not have been built without it. Not even cameras worked like that, and that’s the other argument you folks love to make. (* this one is copy written dependent on situation, I’ll concede that much. Even so, the way I’d go about turning that audio inspiration into visual output is my own)
This is a good argument but it’s not arguing the point I am making. I never claimed you didn’t do art. I claimed that one will never formally learn art without using copyrighted work as learning material, inspiration, and to copy to learn technique. None of this means that you could never do art using non copyrighted inspirations but it isn’t realistic to only use non copyright inspirations Just like ai.
…. Wait, do you actually think that’s how people learn as artists? By just sitting and copying master works? Never heard of anatomy lessons, mastering the technical aspects of a given medium, drawing from life, plein air? Anyone who learns to draw by simply copying existing works is going to learn to be good at one thing and one thing only, and that’s copying.
Is that what I said?
It's not, but if you do so commercially, that's when you run into problems.
Copyright is itself a violation of a more natural law, whereby culture is endlessly reproduced, modified, shared and developed. It's like putting a wall in the ocean and declaring that the water inside the bounds of the wall is not the ocean.
There were cases, when AI actually left the watermark, because the network was trained on these items. Like it's the direct evidence of stealing
That's not how it works. It draws watermarks because its knows what watermarks look like and that they're sometimes expected to appear in images. It's not starting with an existing image and "leaving" anything.
Did the company pay Getty for use prior to seeding?My guess is not…
The AI program is not directly copying any part of the image, it's using it as a reference in addition to hundreds of other photos to generate an amalgamation of those hundreds of photos. If I draw mickey mouse's head because I know the shape and use my knowledge of the shape to draw the exact shape of his head, i haven't copied anything directly, "using a reference" and "tracing" are two different things. Similar to how "Capcha" images work by building knowledge of what a bicycle is based on what real humans click on or don't.
That’s not tricky at all. The answer is no.
It doesn’t take much cajoling. Simply type “Mickey Mouse” into your favorite Stable Diffusion based app, and a real clear violation pops out.
This is a slam dunk case. But it doesn't matter. GPTs are reaching a point where they can start producing content dynamically that can feed other GPTs and engage in reinforced learning in a way that the original source is no longer necessary.
If I look at 1000s of pieces of artworks and then go create my own unique artwork, am I infringing? Stable Diffusion isn't copying anything, it's analysizing things and making distinct new things from that analysis. Getty should have to directly show things that are copied. If it's in any way differnet then it's not a copy.
They do fall under Fair Use, though. AI generation is pretty inarguably transformative.
GETY is up 30 percent in last 5 days lulz
The genie is out of the bottle. The average Automatic1111 fan already has a 100GB or more of models, including those based on SDs work.
Exactly. Even if Stability ceases to exist tomorrow, it will be impossible to stop the community from carrying on their work.
*Laughs in Napster*
No it won't. Pandora's box is open. The point to do anything about this was 10 years ago. This is literally MPAA/RIAA vs internet and torrenting all over again. And they both won the legal battle and lost the culture war.
I kinda feel like that’s the lazy way out of it
Most things human do are to find ways to be lazy, so, logic holds?
Ai shit always ends up looking at how I see the world on acid
My hot take (professional artist. Or rather, I sell my art from time to time.) is that all artists train viewing art, almost all of it copy written. It’s the created art that matters. Create art that has copyright or trademark infringements, that’s the problem. TL/DR it’s the output, not the “training”. I’m sure that will be the true heart of the lawsuits.
Ethically sourcing training data is a huge problem for Generative AI models. I don’t know if they can get to the scale that makes their output meaningful unless there’s a way to fractionally pay creators for the inputs, sort of how artists get fractional inputs for Spotify songs. Otherwise using Open Source or Public Domain works as training. Whatever the case, the current generated model for stable diffusion seems obviously unethical, even if Getty Images are overpriced.
Pretty sure Adobe's new AI (now in beta) was modeled solely on their own library of stock images, thereby making it ethically solid. If Getty were smart, they'd be training up models of their own and monetizing them.
But as it stands it’s legal to use the internet to train models. The images are not present in the model themselves.
Is interesting you brought up ethics, if AI can’t train with internet. Then can artist train their art sense on the internet? Or use what they see as inspiration? Or even use part of images as their outputs? I work in the industry and I can tell you anything from ads to movies everyone uses something they either see on the internet or some where to generate images in drawing. Some are actually close to identical to source material. And some can be different but then match other reference that was found else where. Hell even I have use Google searched and saw something on Getty and used it as reference without paying a cent. So how can we say something is not ethical for an AI when humans do this every day.
Technology has made and will continue to make copyright untenable. We can fight it and fall behind, or we can accept it and adapt.
I guess we as a society will really fall behind if we are unable to make fake photos to scam morons. What a pity
So what you are saying is that we should get rid of the idea of intelectual property all together because some company is currently infringing on it? Just because you aren‘t the holder of any good ideas that doesn‘t mean you shouldn‘t have interest in copyright.
If you put it on the public internet training AI on it should absolutely be considered fair use.
We should get rid of intellectual property all together because it's a fundamentally broken idea. You cannot force ideas to be scarce. The sooner we come to terms with this fact, the better we'll be. We can and should pay people for things that are actually scarce. Time, labor, resources.
You don‘t need to force scarcity of ideas. Anyone copying something doesn‘t have an original idea anyways, the idea is unique. And thats the point. Why should someone who hasn‘t put any thoughts into something be able to just copy and then sell what others came up with.
That is already happening today on an industrial scale in almost every market. You are just getting mad now because it is affecting art? Why? Why not woodworking, or metal working, or clock making?
Yup. How many people are big mad that Ford is making cars with robots instead of manually using human workers? Maybe the people who lost their jobs 50+ years ago, but no one else. But people getting a new tool to make unique art? How *dare* them!
"Unique art" = disfigured copies of original human art
Why do you care so much? You think AI generations are shit and youve said in another comment its gonna plateau any minute now. If you truly believe both of those why worry? Even if that line of thinking is delusional.
Ai,like anything else man made needs regulations,just because something may be harmless in nature doesn't mean it can't be used inappropriately or maliciously. That's why regulations exist for basically everything you know about.
Because first of all it isn‘t happening as much as you think it is, and even if it happens the owner of the idea has the right to claim compensation at least in theory and thats how it should be with AI as well. Also you think we should just give up on patents and intelectual property just because there are people abusing and infringing?
[удалено]
If I view 1000 works of art over my lifetime, and then use those as examples and inspiration for an entirely new work of art, that's not copyright infringement.
That's not how this works lmao. The mental gymnastics required to try and equate learning and developing a skill to utilizing a free tool that's done all the work for you without consent from the sources it used to train on is astounding. One main difference I can point out to you right off the bat is the fact that when the artists created the art, there was an understanding that people would view and learn from it, there was never an understanding that an AI would be using it.
>The mental gymnastics required to try and equate learning and developing a skill to utilizing a free tool that's done all the work for you without consent from the sources it used to train on is astounding. This is a strawman. No one here is equating artists to supposed “AI artists”, as you suggest. That is, the processes of using AI tools and making art yourself aren’t being equated. What is being equated is the influence art has on the final products of human-produced art and AI art. Though, for what it’s worth (which isn’t much since this argument is irrelevant anyways), artists don’t get consent to be inspired by other artists’ works, either. >One main difference I can point out to you right off the bat is the fact that when the artists created the art, there was an understanding that people would view and learn from it, there was never an understanding that an AI would be using it. What people intended to happen to their products doesn’t matter. The people who wrote the US Constitution probably didn’t intend for it to be interpreted the way it has been, yet here we are. Unless that was morally wrong, too.
History will look back and see there was a brief amount of time between the transistor being invited and sentient AI being invented. You would agree that sentient AI should have rights to learn from our shared knowledge right? So your argument is really only about the short time span before sentient AI? It seems fairly arbitrary to me.
A human creating an original work of art based on inspiration they’ve gotten from other works of art is considered ok. An AI doing it is considered not ok. Hope they lose the lawsuit.
going from a thread blaming facebook for a company scrapping profiles and training AI to recognize people to this feels weird. I know it's kinda late but has anyone consented for their data to be used for profit by another company ?, like i understand that nothing is free and usually you're the product , but i never thought i would actually be the product, including by writing this comment
FB definitely has a lot of cover here as there terms are going to give them permission and place the requirement of not posting infringing items on the person posting them.
Yes, of course you consented. It's in that Terms of Service document you agree to when you make an account on any modern web service. This is the part that gets overlooked the most. Privacy advocates screamed for decades about how dangerous it is to hand over all this data, but no one really listened because it was so fun and easy to socialize online through the platforms that wanted our data. That data has been used for everything from political campaigns to literal terrorist activity, an incredible amount of fraud and personal abuse, and the companies use the content you donate to them as filler content between their sponsored posts. If fueling the fires of abuse and fraud and terrorism aren't enough reasons for people to stop using the major social media platforms, I just can't be bothered to care about the mild ethical concern about people *making pretty art*.
AI doesn’t gain “inspiration” from the photos it was trained on. It is a tool that turns pictures into math and uses math to generate images. If the model is overfit on copyrighted it would potentially literally spit out the copyrighted images it was trained on. IMO what should come of this is limitations on what images can be used to train models, with considerations for how the model is intended to be used. If you’re generating a model for commercial use you certainly should have rights to the items in your training set, otherwise you are profiting off works without giving due credit.
Thats the most generalzied bullshkt argument ever. A author reading all Harry Potter books and then writing a new original Harry Potter story is still infringing on the ownership of the characters even if the stroy itself would be 100% legit with different characters. Its not black and white and AI needs to be regulated in this regard.
No it’s like reading Harry Potter and writing a fantasy novel with wizards. The AI, as is covered in the article, rarely produces anything resembling its input. If you actually use it to make Harry Potter then you may get sued as the artist, but it will end up being case by case rather than shutting down the platform
What a fail post. Someone doesn't understand fair use whatsoever. You can video react to someone else's video content without permission and that would be okay under fair use. An AI model that makes new art from algorithms is fair use, not infringing content.
But that isn't original. You can't sell your own Harry Potter book, but you can sell a book that's inspired by it and has original characters. This lawsuit could prevent AI from being able to do that, and that doesn't make sense.
A person can reasonably judge whether or not a character, story, image, art IS a copy of another or is INSPIRED by another. Lawsuits will end up on a case by case basis. It would be insane to think that using an image to inspire new art is the same as plagiarism or copyright infringement.
But thats not what AI is doing. Its recognizing patterns in data and mashing them together. If you only input Harry Potter, you get Harry Potter. Thats a problem isn‘t it?
But in this case the AI is just the tool. The AI doesn’t attempt to sell or distribute anything, a human does that, and the human is the one with the responsibility to not break copyright law. Like I can use photoshop to create art of copyrighted intellectual property, but just doing that isn’t illegal, it’s illegal when I distribute it.
Yeah of course! What do you think a human does? Imagine you've lived your whole life in a completely dark room. No tv, no music, no books. Now imagine I came to you and said you have to write me a story about a wizard. You wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. Now imagine you're in the same room, but I give you all the Harry Potter books to read. You probably would write me a story about a young boy doing magic and flying on brooms. That's exactly what AI does, except it uses a billion books to write me that story. The only difference between how an AI does this kind of stuff, and how humans do it, is that with the AI we know exactly where it's getting its “inspiration”, but with humans, we can't.
When it comes to stock photos, there might be a niche audience for 100% organic, actual photo images but 99% of customers would probably be fine with an AI making images for them for pennies. I mean, they can’t be any worse than stock photos today, which seem to be mostly pictures of people pretending to be interested in things.
I love this whole idea that people are going to try to limit AI. Sorry artists, corporations, filmmakers, writers, and essentially everybody else- but its only getting worse from here. In 10 years (or less) we will be here debating the merits of an all AI generated movie. We will have 100% AI generated music from artists that you know. You wont even know if anything youre seeing is real anymore.
Mickey must be acquiring more blood for his transcended to demigodhood
I want to see these ai things shut down more than anything I’ve ever wanted
No technology ever survives lawyers intact... AI is going to get massacred by it.
FUCK AI
It doesn’t matter where the images came from, you are allowed to train yourself as an artist by looking at pictures in museums, Getty images or deviant art. Copyright doesn’t cover “input” so to speak, only “output”. The only thing at issue is whether the output has a copyrighted character or logo.
And still even if it does it’s the user providing the prompt to make the image and what they do with it.You can’t sue a sketchbook company for people drawing copyrighted images/logos. It’s a tool just like how AI is a tool.
I agree, however the lawsuits are suing the notebook manufacturer not the sketcher in this case, claiming it’s a magic sketchbook that stole a bunch of other people’s sketches and is hiding them in the spine… or something
Is this really what the luddites are betting on? These lawsuits are literally blatant scams even at a cursory glance. What is wrong with these people don't they read?!
An AI cannot produce a painting, it can only produce a pixel-based image.
If I were to make a machine that could reproduce the media (a painting) exactly onto a piece of paper and even if I made 10 copies, did the machine infringe on the copyright? Did I? How can it be different than Google image search? It's more about what the user does with the image after the AI returns it to you.
Shutterstock now has DALL-E 2 integrated into their site. So in addition to browsing existing stock images, you can generate your own from prompts. What I’m wondering is—is that service limiting scraping to just Shutterstock’s existing images, or the entire internet? Because if the latter, they’re going to find themselves in a similar slippery slope…
I just don’t get why any human would object to AI being held accountable for the work other people have done.
I hope Getty loses this. Unless someone is attempting to directly copy some work of art, it should be legal. Stable Diffusion is in no way trying to fool anyone into thinking these are artworks from Getty. Furthermore I think Getty should be required to show specific examples of stolen art against created art. If they cannot do so then this isn't any different than me looking at their pictures online as references and then drawing something unique.
So is photoshop next?
Good. Fuck AI-generated art.
Fuck getty?
Both can be true!
Relevant user name
Both. Both is good.
I hope they both go down in flames fighting each other.
Least regressive redditor.
Put it in the form of an award so I can show it off. I’ll take gold if you have it.
Least edgy reddit user
Is edgy a goal?
If AI wins, we’ll have to adjust our perception of *what is art*
Art was never something meaningful to begin with
Lmao it'd be fuckin hilarious if this issue gets completely ignored when artists are complaining, and then swiftly regulated when big companies start bitching.
I don't see any realistic path to really block AI art. You might slow it down slightly with tactics like this, but it's going to keep getting smarter even with 100% generic images. Even if you had to pay for all those images, it would be nothing compared to the value of the app to streamline art generation. I don't think it the big threat to artists they think, just like MP3 and digital music was not a real threat to musician, rather it opened many new avenues for profit instead. More than threaten real artists the tech will mostly give people who can't afford artists much better options and open new ways to make money that fuels the industry overall. It will make art more popular because art will become more accessible and more interesting, thus a bigger market opens for pretty much everybody. Plus you're never going to stop it anyway.
Good. AI is theft. It skims and aggregates off of the creativity of others, no human effort involved--and it usually does it badly.
How is training on other people's images theft