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Comment by celestialcheese | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Getty and Stability AI were ever in negotiation for licensing their work and this lawsuit is fallout.

Getty announced in Oct they partnered with BRIA (?) to provide generative AI tools using their licensed images [1], and Shutterstock announced a partnership with OpenAI [2].

So it's clear these rights holders are OK with generative AI, as long as they continue to extract their pound of flesh. The language around "protecting artists" is horseshit - if you're a creative and you see Disney, Getty, etc getting behind your cause, you should look _very_ carefully around and make sure you're not the one being screwed.

1 - https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/bria-partne... 2 - https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23422359/shutterstock-ai...

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I don't feel like it's even slightly contradictory for Getty to simultaneously be OK with licensing their content to someone for AI modeling, but not being OK with a random unaffiliated company using their IP. It feels like pretty straightforward copyright management.

"Protecting artists" is not something they claimed as if they were opposed to AI usage at all. In their press release they said:

> It is Getty Images’ position that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images absent a license to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators.

It's clear from this that the issue was not that Stability is an AI company, but that it's unlicensed. Getting an exclusive license to the images is specifically what they pay contributors for. Having those copyrights infringed by a competitor makes the content less valuable to Getty, and disincentivizes Getty from paying for new content in the future.

So yeah, it's plausible that this behaviour from Stability could harm content creators. Not because it's AI, but because its just run-of-the-mill unauthorized usage.

I do NOT require licensing to produce artwork, even if it may or may not be slightly/not so slightly inspired by so called 'copyrights'.

Me thinks you are an industry guy. You should read about all of the failed/lost cases that get swept under the rug.

I don't have a clue whether Stability AI will win this, it depends on their exact algorithm and how much they rely on source content, but if I draw something similar to the modern equivalent of the 'Mona Lisa', no, you don't have a right to it unless you can prove that in court. No, you can't copyright a painter painting a woman, either.

I am not an industry guy, nor do I make any claims about how successful the lawsuit will be. I am simply arguing that Getty is not being hypocritical in their position.

But now that you brought it up -- reproducing intact watermarks for Getty in multiple images as shown in the lawsuit feels like maybe your "slightly inspired" argument doesn't apply here.

> but if I draw something similar to the modern equivalent of the 'Mona Lisa'

But in this case you're not drawing anything. A little computer factory is. That same factory was built using images it didn't own.

Well, and here enlies the crux of the issue, can a non-human own or break copy right. You know not too long ago a guy gave a camera to a monkey, the photo that money took became popular and he wanted to capitalize, but the US copyright office clearly stated that they only copyright artistic works created by humans, not those created by non-humans. And it would extend that if non-humans cannot hold copyright, then they cannot break copyright.

Every human artist that ever lived(to my knowledge), heard, or saw someone else create a similar piece of art, from which they were inspired. If I create a song right now, how is that any different than an AI doing the same from being trained on copyrighted music. Certainly my song will be entirely made up of elements i've heard before, however large or small. An ML model is doing the same thing. There is nothing truly original in art. Artists are just filter and amplifiers of what they've heard, seen, and like. Your copyright does not permit you to restrict others from being inspired by your work, or using it for inspiration.

All good points.

> If I create a song right now, how is that any different than an AI

It's vastly different in the fact that you are a human and the other is more or less a program built for business. There is only one version of yourself and your output where the AI has unlimited copies of itself and is only stopped due to lack of processing power and electricity.

I think even AI companies know there is a big difference and is the reason they use non-profit and researcher datasets instead of their own.

> as they continue to extract their pound of flesh

Be compensated for the use of their content is maybe a more accurate and friendlier way to phrase this, but I guess not as edgy.

Is it truly their content? It’s private people uploading these pictures to these sites right?

Private people who agreed that Getty would manage their distribution and compensate them when their image was used by one of Getty's clients, yes.

So yeah, not only is it very much Getty's content to distribute, but Stability AI is absolutely screwing over thousands of little guys by not paying royalties too...

Some of that, but Getty also repackages images with licenses that allow it. And sometimes then acts like it "owns" those images by harassing others that use the same original source, including the original copyright owner. That's not especially relevant to the article, but helpful to understand a lot of what's there isn't their IP to manage.

That’s the minority of their images and also if it’s the version from their server with their watermark on it, it actually is their IP to manage. So as you said it’s not especially relevant and it’s very clear stability didn’t limit its scraping of Getty to these kinds of images. Getty in other instances being jerks doesn’t make them wrong here.

>That’s the minority of their images

It's difficult to find any source that would prove or disprove that. I can find references that they changed 35 million images to "royalty free" in 2014. The examples I can find of those are things like this: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/mcs/media/images/73409000/...

Which appears to be a public domain image.

Or this $499 image from Getty: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/floyd-burrough...

Free from the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/00651772/ (including the 50MB tiff that appears to be the highest resolution avaialable)

The crux of the issue is whether Stable Diffusion is 'learning' like a human would be if they just scrolled through Getty Images or someone's DeviantArt to learn to draw and copy their style (a style is not copyrightable).

This is why Getty Images' claim is that Stable Diffusion is a "collage tool", while SD will most likely argue on the basis of the AI being capable of exhibiting the same level of creativity as a human.

It's best understood as an extremely sophisticated collage tool. We can make vague analogies about how training ML models is sort of like human learning, but ultimately it's not actually that.

It will still spit out stuff like watermarks and product photos unprompted, because its "learning" is still fundamentally mindless. It works strictly in the realm of pixels, it has no mechanism for understanding context.

My understanding is that it doesn't in fact work in the domain of pixels, but I'm far from an expert.

So "extremely sophisticated" that the word "collage" takes on an almost entirely new meaning.

So, not really.

It's really really not best understood as a sophisticated collage tool.

You can't take a person and turn them into a cartoon if you're just pasting existing parts of images together. Stable diffusion understands what is a cartoon and it understands what is you (assuming you train it on your face).

It spits out watermarks because it understands that watermarks appear in images and it's going to try to reproduce the watermarks if you ask for something that tends to have a watermark in it.

This seems totally irrelevant to the case in my view, which is whether Stability Ai had the right to use Getty’s content for training in the manner that they allegedly did.

In general, consuming content cannot be a violation of copyright or a license agreement; What is controlled, however, is stuff like reproduction. So if you do see a Getty Images picture, redraw it almost verbatim (even without tracing), you've effectively reproduced it, but the act of viewing it isn't illegal. In this vein, "exhibiting the same level of creativity as a human" is important - if it is, you can argue that the AI is just creating new stuff and the training set was simply "viewed", so anything it creates isn't necessarily infringement of any one of Getty's photos.

That’s really helpful clarification, thanks :) - and helps explain why the claim doc includes a focus on the stages in the process where the Getty content is allegedly copied.

With this in mind it will be even more interesting to see how this plays out.

The difference here, which in my opinion the law is yet to catch up with, is the scale of usage enabled by these algorithms.

A lot of it is public domain photos that they pretend they own the copyright for.

Not sure if you are asserting this but Just because an image is in the public domain, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Stability has a right to use it for training. I have online content that is licensed as Creative Commons attribution, non commercial, share alike- it seems to me that using this for training would breach at least the non commercial terms of that license.

I'm talking about millions of old photos and art that have had their copyright expire. Getty sells them for $500 a pop.

Eg: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/people-and-t...

This isn't a photo, but there are millions of pics as well.

Fair enough. I agree that $500 is a big ask for public domain content, however there is still a service provided by Getty in surfacing this content. It seems fair to charge a fee for that convenience- after all, the consumer has an option to do that work and find it themselves if they value their time less than the cost and have the necessary knowledge. Kevin Kelly identifies this in his excellent article “better than free“ (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/)

Getty asserts a related point in the claim- that the work done to build extensive metadata for the content (which Stability apparently used for training their models) is a valuable service in and of itself.

Edit: just clicked through your link above and should have done so before. While the points above still stand (imho), the presentation on the Getty site borders on misrepresentation in the implication that they are copyright holders. Leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I understand not liking the price point here, but people sell copies of public domain works all the time; it's utterly mundane. Are you also upset that you can buy copies of Frankenstein?

I'm upset that they're misrepresenting these works as being protected in order to make a sale to people who don't know better. It's a scam.

Unless they have explicitly transferred ownership, then yes. IP generally vests with the creator and is licensed to the recipient unless they have explicitly agreed otherwise.

It's actually a fairly common idiom in English, dating prior to Shakespeare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_of_Flesh

totally unnecessary explanation, don't know what in my comment led you to think I needed it. Do you regularly define words and etymology for people in comments?

It's not hypocritical to be upset at someone else stealing your content to sell it, just because you sell it yourself. That's probably a part of why you're upset - because you don't get the money.

My understanding is that in general, artists aren't necessarily against generative AI, but their complaint is (partly) around a complete lack of consent of being a part of these training models.

i think a big part of what has been lost on people is that for an illustrator in the computer age, copyright is quite literally your product.

From the article it might be read as "Stability AI didn't even bother attempting to reach out"

> Rather than attempt to negotiate a license with Getty Images for the use of its content, and even though the terms of use of Getty Images' websites expressly prohibit unauthorized reproduction of content for commercial purposes such as those undertaken by Stability Al, Stability AI has copied at least 12 million copyrighted images from Getty Images' websites, along with associated text and metadata, in order to train its Stable Diffusion model.

> So it's clear these rights holders are OK with generative AI, as long as they continue to extract their pound of flesh.

They own the images.

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