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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think StabilityAI (or anyone) should pay Getty for training.

Should an artist pay Getty for leafing through their images or visiting a museum and closely studying?

Stability isn’t deriving images from Getty, they are getting “inspired.”

I fear that if this lawsuit succeeds that eventually just by existing, I’ll be forced to license the world I see in order to perceive it and incorporate it into my consciousness.

How will digital consciousnesses work with licensing? Will an AI be forced to pay a license fee because it uses copyrighted images as part of its consciousness? What happens if it can’t pay? Is it shut off? Is it forced into slavery?

Maybe the upside is that copyright can be revisited with the maximalists not in power. I think Getty benefits from unjust copyrights that last decades.

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Apart from sci-fi futuristic of an "AI consciousness", i'd use the same arguments. Neural networks do not copy or use the original images in the inferences. They just vaguely remember, what was fed them during the training, mixed this with the noise to produce weights. Weights those are the same for a billions of images. The difference between human looking at an artwork and then reproducing something in the same style and Stable Diffusion doing the same, is that SD spend hours instead of decades to learn, and consume much less energy as well (an average human consumes about 58kWh per day https://home.uni-leipzig.de/energy/energy-fundamentals/04.ht...)

I would argue that there is a difference to the 'inspiration' you mention. As I see it, what SD does with Getty's database is more akin to me as an artist taking the Getty pictures and making a collage from the photos (actively using them).

[There is a separate point around the value of the Getty database. Routinely, companies are sold with their customer list / database as a main selling point. Getty has undoubtable value through the sheer size of collected work. Nobody could expect that we just assign 'no' value to it, even if it can be accessed (with a watermark) for free by most.]

You can prove your point by manually make a collage and see if you can get a similar result, which I highly doubt.

What SD does is nothing like a collage, though. It's not picking and choosing from images that it has stored and mixing them. If you tell it to make a human dog, it's not picking one image of a human and one of a dog and cutting them up and pasting them back together. It'll take the concept of what makes a human and a concept of what makes a dog and put those together. That's a pretty big difference.

Under US law it is totally legal for artists to make collages out of copyrighted works. But in order to sell a collage it has to be sufficiently transformative. There is some case law to help determine that threshold.

> Should an artist pay Getty for leafing through their images or visiting a museum and closely studying?

Getty has chosen the forum (UK courts) quite carefully. The precedents favor them substantially. In 2012 there was a case where a photo was found violating copyrights because the photographer independently took pictures of Westminster bridge and reproduced a similar photo.

Basically the case says you're violating copyrights if you're "inspired" by a photo and make a similar one intentionally. See eg. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=57171429-4dea... for details.

Pretty sure that case would have been laughed out of court in the US, but historically the UK courts have been pretty strict in interpreting the scope of copyright protection. So even if you're successful in arguing for "the AI has a digital consciousness and is basically a human" analogy, case law in the UK still doesn't allow you to do that.

I personally think this is ridiculous though, but unfortunately that's the status quo (in the UK where SD is being sued).

>Should an artist pay Getty for leafing through their images or visiting a museum and closely studying?

An AI model isn't an artist leafing through their images or visiting a museum and closely studying, so what exactly is your point?

Payment/Ticket to visit a museum is not something new.

This.

This is what most HNers miss when they invoke the 'copy art from the museum / gallery' argument.

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