Reading between the lines of this, it sounds to me like Getty is preparing a copyright claim against the AI companies:<p>1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open.<p>2. Their business stands to lose substantially as a result of such models existing.<p>3. It would be a bad look for them to make a claim whilst simultaneously accepting works from the models into Getty.<p>4. At least some of their watermarked content seems to have been included in the training data of the OpenAI model: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523</a><p>If I'm correct about that, they will probably not settle, as their business was likely worth substantially more than any feasible settlement arrangement.
It's always weird to see the contrast between HN's reaction to copyright questions about text/image generation, and HN's reaction when it's code generation.<p>When a model is trained on 'all-rights-reserved' content like most image datasets, the community say it's fair game. But when it's 'just-a-few-rights-reserved' content like GPL code, apparently the community says that crosses a line?<p>Realistically, this tells me that we need ways for people to share things along the lines of all the open-source licenses we see.<p>You could imagine a GPL-like license being really good for the community/ecosystem: "If you train on this content, you have to release the model."
Email this morning:<p>AI Generated Content<p>Effective immediately, Getty Images will cease to accept all submissions created using AI generative models (e.g., Stable Diffusion, Dall‑E 2, MidJourney, etc.) and prior submissions utilizing such models will be removed.<p>There are open questions with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and there are unaddressed rights issues with respect to the underlying imagery and metadata used to train these models.<p>These changes do not prevent the submission of 3D renders and do not impact the use of digital editing tools (e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) with respect to modifying and creating imagery.<p>Best wishes,<p>Getty Images | iStock
Their legal worry probably makes sense, but my suspicious mind also feels like it's in their long-term interest maybe not to open pandora's box too much on letting AI art in, because wouldn't one of Getty's competitive advantages be the relationships it has with (I imagine) hundreds of thousands of artists? And so if they let AI art in then suddenly the historic artist relationship means less (because a lot more people can now contribute) and they may end up competing against new and emerging low-cost AI art marketplaces? Not sure, just speculating future scenarios and not eroding ones own competitive moat.
Haha, Getty images should be planning a big pivot strategy, not worrying about AI content. I predict that within 5 years we will have this all refined to the point where we can generate almost any image we want, to our liking.<p>If you're shopping for a stock photo, you only have what's available. I've looked for things before, and sometimes you have lots of options which just aren't quite what you want. So you take "good enough". AI can already generate "good enough" with some prompt and parameter practice.
It does seem like much of Getty's business is redundant if you can trivially generate "photograph of person laughing while eating a bowl of salad"<p>Maybe the new business is "reasonably high degree of trust that if it's a Getty image it's not an AI fake" for news outlets and the like who want to sell trustworthiness
So, where is the line?<p>Diffusion models, Midjourney: not accepted. Okay that was the easy part.<p>What if I use a AI-powered sharpening tool like Sharpen AI? Technically it's adding "AI generation" to it. What about Photoshop neural filters? What if I just extend/"touch" an image using DALL-E or Midjourney and still have the original image but with slight additions?<p>Probably what they mean is "majorly created with AI" but still then how is "majorly" defined then?
Until paint was produced commercially during the Industrial Revolution (circa 1800), painters had to make their own paints by grinding pigment into oil.[1]<p>Photography drove painting deeper towards abstraction. [2]<p>I'm not unsympathetic but the AI revolution might be a similar revolution despite fiddling with code currently being much less pleasant than flinging industrially mass-produced paint from mass-produced tools in a sunlit studio. At least in the medium term, someone will still have to manage the machine.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/paintings4.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/paintings4.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.peareylalbhawan.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-the-invention-of-photography-changed-art/" rel="nofollow">http://www.peareylalbhawan.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-the-inven...</a>
This is purely a PR move.
They don't ban AI content because of fears of legal challenges, but because they see their entire business model fall to pieces. Why would anyone license images from them when they instead can generate any image for free?
They only ban AI images in order to make PR with "fears of legal challenges" in the hope that the message that AI generated content could be a legal risk will stick in the heads of people.
> The creators of AI image generators say the technology is legal...<p>Which means nothing really, they always make this claim, whether it's correct or not. There's too strong an ethos of an "ask for forgiveness, not permission" in the tech world.
I'm not a copyright lawyer or anything, but the way I look at it is that the big concern is that you can't easily prove that a particular AI output is not just a memorized copyrighted training example. So even if we assume that it is perfectly allowable to train your model on unlicensed images, that doesn't protect you if your model spits out a carbon copy (or something close enough to be infringing) of a copyrighted image.<p>A similar concern exists for things like Copilot, but it feels even harder to detect in the image domain.
Great.<p>So who is now starting the Getty competitor that does accept these or (even better) accepts these and makes them available via CC license?<p>With good custom and tagging, easier since you have the text prompt that generated the content, you could probably disrupt Getty's entire business model in half a year.
Getty's business relies on the legal framework of copyright, and how it enables control (and sale) of the licensing of copyrighted material. And they're saying: nope - AI output is so ambiguous w.r.t. copyright and licensing of the inputs (when it's not flagrantly in violation, as with recreating our watermarks), that we want to steer totally clear of this.<p>When HN has discussed Github's Copilot [1] for coding, it seems like the role of copyright and licensing isn't discussed in much detail [2] (with some exceptions awhile back [3, 4]).<p>Do you think there is a software-development analog to Getty (I mean a company, not FSF), saying "no copilot-generated code here"? Or is the issue of copyright/licensing/attribution even murkier with code than for images?<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/features/copilot/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/features/copilot/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&query=copilot&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187362" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187362</a><p>[4] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874166" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874166</a>
It is very easy to see hypocrisy in the FurAffinty statement:
"Human artists see, analyze and even sample other artists’ work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists that they have consumed in their lifetime to create derivative images,” ... “Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don’t believe it’s in our community’s best interests to allow human generated content on the site."
When your business sees an existential threat on the horizon you have two options – be at the forefront of the change and get ahead of your competitors and any new entrants by adopting the change yourself, or stall/threaten/litigate/raise prices/lower prices and otherwise hold on to your business model at all costs. Those in the latter group don't survive very long.
What about images that are a hybdrid, i.e. human composed but using AI elements? Similar to Worhol and photography. I'd imagine a large percentage of artwork will use this approach and Getty will have to evolve their stance to stay relevant.
If AI generated Images are of better quality than the alternatives, getty or other orgs rejecting AI won't suppress its rise.<p>Rather alternate markets for these images will arise quickly, and people will flock there leaving getty behind.
The impression that I’m getting from a lot of the comments here (and a lot of past discussions about AI art on HN) is that tech people view the art industry as a “challenge”, and they want to use machine learning tools to “defeat” it - either because they just want to demonstrate the sheer power of these tools, or because they think artists are irrational for thinking that there’s something special about human art and they want to prove them wrong, or what have you.<p>I can’t think of any other way to explain the persistent desire to keep forcing AI art into spaces where it’s not wanted, or the repeated discussions about loopholes in the rules, how AI art can avoid detection, etc.<p>I suppose the comparison I would make is to chess. Computer assistance is strictly forbidden in chess tournaments - it’s cheating. Both the players and the spectators want to see matches played between two humans, without computer interference. You could devise clever ways of getting around the rules and cheating (there’s a big cheating scandal rocking the chess world as we speak), but no one would praise you for doing this. They would just think you were being a jerk.<p>Similarly, there will always be people who want to create communities centered around human art, simply because of the mere fact that it was made by a human and they want to see what human skill is able to accomplish without AI assistance.
I always got a weird spidey sense from Getty Images and similar stock photo sites, and this just solidifies it. They exist in this limbo between open and closed, somehow finding a way to greatly enrich themselves while simultaneously not enriching their content contributors. Same for sites that put published papers behind paywalls, and even news sites that block access to articles unless the user goes to the enormous effort of (gasp) opening a new private window in the browser.<p>I don't know how, but that stuff all has to end. We've got to move past this tragedy of the commons that's happening with copyright. We all suffer just so a handful of greedy rent seekers can be the gate keepers and shake us down.<p>I had hoped that we'd have real micropayments by now so people could each spend perhaps $10 per month and distribute those funds to websites they visit and content they download, a few pennies at a time. Instead we somehow got crypto pyramid schemes and NFTs.<p>I'm just, I'm just, I don't even know anymore! Can someone explain it? Why aren't the people with the resources solving this stuff? Why do they put that duty onto the hacker community, which has to toil its life away in its parents' basement on a shoestring budget as yet another guy becomes a billionaire?<p>I'm just so over all of the insanity. How would something like this AI ban even be enforceable? Whatever happened to fair use? Are they going to spy on everything we do now and send the copyright police? Truly, what gives them the right? Why are we paying these people again?
I've actually been working on a stock photos site built around Stable Diffusion for some of these exact reasons.
<a href="https://ghostlystock.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ghostlystock.com/</a> is the first version, but we're adding a bunch of useful features to make it more useful for people to find legitimately useful stock images.
So it's just for copyright reasons.<p>I was wondering whether there were authenticity issues at stake? For example you can imagine someone wanting a stock image of "New York Skyline" and using an AI generated image that looks right but actually contains elements not in the skyline. This could undermine trust in Getty, which would be something they'd want to avoid.
I feel like the easiest thing to do would be to declare that entirely ai generated images are public domain because a human didn't have enough of a hand in making them (and only humans and groups of humans can have a copyright), and there's not enough of any one image from the the training data in the output to say that the output contains a recognizable segment of any of the images that it was trained on, even assuming the training images were all copyrighted.
Getty at this point should be feeling extremely threatened from ai generating images. It may not fully replace Getty but will take a large chunk of its business.
> The creators of AI image generators say the technology is legal...<p>I'd bet that said creators are not lawyers, nor (well-)advised by lawyers, nor even able to cite substantial law nor case law to back up that "say".<p>And with the extremely low bar for calling something "AI" these days - how close to "kinda like Google image search, but with a random filter or two applied" might a low-budget "AI" get?
I don't mean to be dismissive, but there's no doubt there'll be plenty of other places to host images like this.<p>Does Stable Diffusion and the like automatically add some kind of steganographic code to images so it can be automatically detected, e.g. and not added to future training sets? Obviously this could be removed deliberately, but it would prevent the vast majority of cases.
And thus the AI auto filtering arm race has begun.<p>New filters will appear to detect AI-generated images, then new models will be trained to bypass the filter, then upgraded filters will detect the images made by the new model, etc...<p>In the end tough it's likely that we won't be able to distinguish between a real image and an AI-generated image, it's only a question of time.
I read a paper some time ago, where somebody ran a facial recognition algorithm on the output of a GAN face generator. It found lots of images in the training data that looked strikingly similar.<p>In other words, one reason AI images look so good, is that look a lot like actual images.<p>Thing, is for the love of me, I can't find the paper anymore? Who knows it?
This question of copyright legalities and AI-generated media reminds me of the "Monkey selfie copyright dispute" from a few years back:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...</a>
I'm not sure how they'd enforce it while they still accept other digital art,<p>But it seems a good decision, both on their stated concern about copyright (it's all a synthesis of the training sets, but who knows how much?), and also that AI art is effectively an infinite output stream that would very rapidly swamp all human output.
Getty in theory could just ask for a "fair" (whatever large or small could it be) share in any AI company uses Getty's images to train its models. It could be battle not for instinction, but for the new market share and control over AI companies.
Depending on the prompt, it is certainly possible to generate images that are watermarked. I got some istock watermarks on a couple of images last I tried and I wasn't using istock or anything related as part of the prompt.
Can two images be identical if both are generated using the same prompt and model combination?<p>If all images generated are unique, I fail to see how copyright can ever be enforced.
Interesting that they will still accept fully computer generated images, most of them created with a massive amount of help from AI-assisted algorithms in Photoshop and the like.
Seems like a statement of intent without any details. How do they define 'AI-generated'? And do they plan to automatically detect it, and how?
A visualization of the announcement by a neural network:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/illubots/status/1572620909885669378" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/illubots/status/1572620909885669378</a><p>(I'm building an illustration agency for robot brains, aka neural networks. So far, I have 3 robots who can consistently draw in their unique style. This is by illustration robot Jonas)