They have bought the licenses in good faith, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were tons of images on their platform that the original seller had no right to sell to Getty.
If the copyright lawsuits do end up ruling against image AI statups, Getty may face problems when inevitably someone demands Getty takes down the images they had no right to buy and use, and retrain the AI to exclude those images from generated works as well.
However, until something like that happens, Getty has every right to generate images, of course.
Authors, artists, etc. are suing projects whose models just inhaled their work and generate derivative works and I'm surprised the studios aren't getting more involved with going after AI models that included their properties in them.
I can see this going the route of us having a Disney AI, Sony AI, Discovery AI, Amazon AI, etc. where you can generate stuff using models owned by the studios, but only those studios and any public domain stuff they suck in too.
> I'm surprised the studios aren't getting more involved with going after AI models that included their properties in them.
If you're the first group to sue you have to spend millions extra on lawyers to establish the precedent. I don't see much reason for Disney and friends to rush to be first.
The current state of AI isn't really a threat to Disney and friends, just suggestive of a future threat. No need to rush on that account either. Especially since if they win the lawsuit - they're still going to benefit from all the R&D on neural networks that is happening on other peoples dime right now.
And all in, do studios stand to lose more or gain more to AI? Drastically cutting their costs might be worth some extra competition.
It's a lose-lose for the studios. If they win on the IP side, all of the generative content of the future will exclude their IP. If they lose, then they don't get paid for it, or worse they have to pay for it.
Most people seem to have a difficult time grasping that if the model is trained in such a way that Disney's IP is excluded, the model doesn't know Disney even exists. Consider if every Disney website was excluded from Google and every Disney related trademark was blacklisted.
As of mid 2023 it is very clear personal assistants are going to replace traditional web search. In my use case, they've replaced it 100%: excluding searching a single website or product name. Will these generative assistants -- which must be capable of both processing and generating images -- know the rights holder's IP even exists? The idea that a useful LLM is going to be trained on 100% public domain, copyright free data is absurd.
IP owners are suggesting that future personal assistants would need to pay them for the knowledge of even the mere existence of their IP. That would be like if every website indexed by Google and every trademarked keyword required Google to pay the copyright owner per search. That isn't possible. To the contrary, the reverse occurs.
What if the future is in fact the opposite of what IP owners are now suggesting? Nike pays the generative AI company for Nike shoes to appear in the one-off movie generated for a single viewer based on their personal preferences?
The world is drowning in IP: text, video, music. The future will be a deluge.
What Getty's done I think is the most "artist" friendly version of this.
Presumably when photographers/artists submit their images to Getty they hand over full ownership, or otherwise pretty broad licensing agreement. If Getty's the rights holders for these images they can use that by training their own models.
In my mind, OpenAI/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion are the Napsters of generative AI. Adobe Firefly, and now Getty, are coming up with the iTunes Store/Spotify. For better or worse.
Very different -- Spotify significantly increased the amount of music people consume, and the amount of artists that can get easily compensated (listing on Spotify is much easier than releasing a CD).
In this case: Getty is going to be paying less overall (otherwise, why do it at all?), and they will pocket the extra margin.
I don't think there is any "quibble" involved in whether record labels are good or bad for artists. And claiming that the alternative is "torrenting" is really throwing in a huge strawman.
The alternative to Spotify and the traditional record labels are places like Bandcamp, where artists get a far more significant portion of the earned money. Any industry where 99% of the money goes to the middle man or service provider rather than the creator is an industry in dire need of disruption.
My limited understanding is that Getty is at least as bad as the music industry, if not much worse. No doubt Getty will make millions of dollars from their AI image generator, while the artists may get a few cents a year if they are lucky.
edit: also, re spotify, as far as I'm aware they do carry small and independent labels. Getty is comparable to the big music labels, not to spotify.
Anyone can, through a service such as DistroKid, publish their music on spotify without a label. You can even enter your own label name so yeah spotify very much seems pretty label agnostic. Not sure how much the big labels end up paying them at the end of the day though.
It's legal but not particularly friendly to hold someone to a prior agreement like "you can mostly do what you want with X" when what it's possible to do with X significantly changes.
Hey, at least Getty handed over some money as the basis for that claim, OpenAI et all are leaning on "our scraper brought it back" to maker their version of that exact claim.
> I can see this going the route of us having a Disney AI, Sony AI, Discovery AI, Amazon AI, etc.
Exactly. These companies are probably hoping the artists win as many legal battles as they can, since the result will be that only big companies will be able to create useful AI models.
That’s for a fine-tune of an existing SD model that has already trained on a mountain of data. Training from scratch requires a mountain of image data and a lot more compute, so you would need a 100% clean base model as well, but then yes it’s totally doable.
There are a couple existing pretrained SD models that use all CC0/public domain data. I think at this point they're still significantly lower quality than other popular models, but I'm sure that will improve over time.
Just like how every time streaming gets more convoluted more people turn to torrenting. These companies manage to find ways to hurt themselves while thinking they're forcing people into paying them more.
Does not seem like its hurting Netflix / Disney all that much. If I had a 100 million subscribers paying me $100/year, I'm pretty sure I'd be crying into my caviar.
Admittedly, they're both nonsensically incompetent at times, and if you believe Disney's financials (do you believe any Hollywood financials?) then they somehow manage to lose money on $10,000,000,000 / year. I'm still not sure how you make the equivalent of 10's of 1,000's of tv episode costs ... and then lose money ... with Disney's back catalogue and vault.
The other angle on ‘Corporate AI’ is when we’ll start to see product placement and adverts inside generated content. Create an image of coffee, and you’ll find Starbucks logos everywhere. Ask an LLM about a topic and see it work in an advert about a particular brand of beer. I’m sure people are working on this already, but I really hope it never happens.
Oh god yeah that sounds horrible. If this happens, peopl will just hold onto the endless stable diffusion base models we've got now and never update anything.
> I can see this going the route of us having a Disney AI, Sony AI, Discovery AI, Amazon AI, etc. where you can generate stuff using models owned by the studios, but only those studios and any public domain stuff they suck in too.
As entertaining as it would be to have a model where you type "photo of an astronaut riding a horse" and it defaults to Buzz Lightyear riding the horse from Tangled, that's not really what people use these models for in the main.
You don't actually want derivative works. The interesting training data isn't Hollywood movies, it's all the junk people post on social media. What you want is thousands of generic pictures of astronauts and thousands of generic pictures of horses. Pictures of Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell aren't any better (and may actually be worse) than actual public domain photos from NASA.
+1 - large scale owners of IP should all be working towards this, it just makes sense. This is also a big point of contention with the Writers and Actors guilds, they understand this dynamic very clearly.
I've been saying all year that LexisNexis absolutely HAS to be building a training corpus. It was a big deal when that dumb lawyer in TX filed a brief with bogus citations, but what if you had an LLM that was specifically trained on legal filings, understood rules like "If you cite a case, you MUST include a reference to that case and it must be valid in our system"?
Same strategy as Adobe's Firefly, which was trained on their catalog of stock images.
Not so long ago many predicted that stock image sites will eventually become obsolete or at least much less important due to AI image generators. But it might turn out that stock image sites are uniquely positioned to dominate commercial AI image generation because of the "ethically sourced" high quality training data they posses.
They might still have minor legal fights whether this is a legal way to use the data licenses to them, but the list of people who could possibly sue is much shorter, known to the stock image site, and consists of people who have already signed some form of contract about the use of these images. The legal risks are well scoped and predictable, unlike "we scraped the internet" models.
How do you figure? Because they say so? Anyway, where do they say it, for Firefly? I haven’t seen it. They don’t address the text encoder at all, which uses images, precisely because it’s something like T5 or CLIP. I’ve emailed them through my enterprise Adobe account about it, and they simply didn’t reply. And then suppose they did talk about this, who audited it? How do you know they’re not biding time? Those text encoders take forever to train.
At the end of the day, we’re only talking about these models because someone published research completely tainted by the copyrighted training. So it’s still totally unknown, until a lawsuit, if even a “redo” of every part of the model on all licensed stuff, which may not even work because there isn’t enough variety, if it’s all that it promises legally.
> positioned to dominate commercial AI image generation
the high-margin, very legal brand-name market. As others have pointed out, the means of production are already leaked, the goods easily copied and delivered, so there will be endless layers of gray market, not-legal, cheaper knock-offs and worse IMHO.
Philosophical question, but: if AI is supposed to learn stuff that otherwise only humans would know, how will AI ever be able to become as good, if humans actually ARE trained using copyright content?
Because each individual human has only read a tiny tiny subset of the documents in a lifetime. Yet the AI can read most of the documents (just not the copyrighted ones).
The Getty website claims that this system will somehow compensate the original authors of the work that went into the training model. Have they discussed the specifics anywhere? i.e. is it a blanket fee of some fraction of a cent per image to every Getty contributor whose images went into the training set? Statistical analysis of prompts users submitted in the last month and assign more of the money to contributors whose images had matching keywords?
I'm pretty firmly on the side of "large-scale analysis of content that's accessible to the public should be entirely outside the scope of copyright, regardless of what one does with the output", even though I also sympathize with artists that see generative AI as a potentially existential threat to their careers. But I'm curious if Getty is actually going to make meaningful payments to the creators of the images that went into the training set, or if this is more of a "we could continue to pay our existing royalties to content creators, or we could keep most of the money for ourselves by selling access to a model trained on that content" type of situation.
[1] "We’ve created a model that compensates our world‑class content creators for the use of their work in our AI model, allowing them to continue to create more of the high‑quality pre‑shot imagery you depend on." (https://www.gettyimages.com/ai/generation/about)
>"But I'm curious if Getty is actually going to make meaningful payments to the creators of the images that went into the training set, or if this is more of a "we could continue to pay our existing royalties to content creators, or we could keep most of the money for ourselves by selling access to a model trained on that content" type of situation.
Adobe is also dealing with this question with Firefly. So far they plan to pay creators annually, but how much each artists gets and how the amount is calculated is yet to be determined. Since a model is only as good as its training data, hopefully this can be a new revenue stream for artists?
obvious approach for corporations is to simplify the math.
the model is made from X images, from Y artists, each artist has a percent contribution to the total. between 0 and 100 percent.
so each time money is generated by the model, the contributors get their share.
as a bonus, it is easy to understand how that share was derived. so it is implicitly fair.
(please keep in mind that this “artist’s share” will be a percentage of the net revenue generated, and that this percentage will probably be a trade secret or some such.)
(any works from artists unable to be paid, meaning public domain or otherwise, will be handled by the corporation for the continuous and never-ending improvement of the platform that makes it all possible.)
And of course simple math is fair, which is why I have submitted millions of images to Getty Images in massive waves, because of course such a fair algorithm will find your image among my stack of millions. And when we grind out compensation, I get 1,000,000/1,000,001 and you get 1/1,000,001. Because of course I would never game your fair algorithm.
a company could always train a model on what constitutes a low value or malicious image. submissions get screened by the bouncer before going on to integration with the commercial model.
throw in a submission fee, and enough of the malicious submissions will be stopped to plausibly call this solved.
And some photographer now goes and tries to game the system by uploading 1,000,000 mostly dull and uninteresting images that they took by wandering around a city while holding down the shutter button?
I'd say these vague promises of compensation are meant to encourage content producers pushing for the idea that licensing should be a legal requirement, thus cementing Getty's/Adobe's position as middlemen and prohibiting models trained on open sources (intelligence definition).
> is it a blanket fee of some fraction of a cent per image to every Getty contributor whose images went into the training set? Statistical analysis of prompts users submitted in the last month and assign more of the money to contributors whose images had matching keywords?
If this isn't already a scam it's about to be. Paying copyright holders money for this will cause people to produce mountains of low effort images, which then get the same payment as things people put actual work into, ensuring that the payments are negligible because they're diluted by such volume. And will reduce the quality of the model so nobody wants to use it.
And we know what the cheapest way to generate a large volume of low effort images is, which is probably not going to bode well for the purity of the system either.
Paying copyright holders money for this will cause people to produce mountains of low effort images
At the same time though, Getty and Adobe have a vested interest in not allowing that content into their training sets. They are obviously curating here, so that their generator outputs better stuff than the generators of competitors. I'm sure they are wargaming out the possibility of MS/OpenAI and Google coming in. Or maybe even worse, Disney or the video game makers, entering this market.
So you would need to generate a mountain of low effort content, and then hope that some of it is good enough to make it through the curation process. It's not a guaranteed thing.
Getty Images is not exactly high art. It's already a collection of low effort images.
The threshold for getting accepted has to be much lower than the threshold for making much money, because the company needs the long tail (and so does the AI model), but a photographer previously only made money if their photos were popular.
Now as long as you can meet the minimum bar for inclusion, you get the same payment as anyone else, so the quantity of photos at that minimum level of quality goes way up.
It's imperative we use this window to push open and free models otherwise the entire future of this tech will be locked behind a Getty or Adobe paywall forever as those are the only sort of companies with licenced libraries able to provide the training data and the models will be substandardas stock photography from both those sites has a look to it that isn't always desirable.
I have an image in my head of the future o AI that looks like abandoned malls. That any potential that there was just eventually died behind paywalls and bad business practices and it couldn't sustain itself.
This reminds me of when YouTube first came out. Lazy Sunday went viral, although it was a clip from SNL which the poster didn't have the rights for. Naturally many voices in the media were critical of YouTube. Soon afterward Google Video launched a product which was "like YouTube, but we make sure we have the rights to everything!" And they actually got the rights to the Lazy Sunday clip. Media coverage of this launch was pretty positive.
It ended up not really mattering, because the product people preferred to use was YouTube, and the branding, media coverage, lawsuits, all that stuff took so long to resolve that it happened after YouTube was the winner of the space. Of course if the YouTube lawsuit had worked out like Napster then everything might have ended differently....
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadDerivative work and all that jazz.
If the copyright lawsuits do end up ruling against image AI statups, Getty may face problems when inevitably someone demands Getty takes down the images they had no right to buy and use, and retrain the AI to exclude those images from generated works as well.
However, until something like that happens, Getty has every right to generate images, of course.
Authors, artists, etc. are suing projects whose models just inhaled their work and generate derivative works and I'm surprised the studios aren't getting more involved with going after AI models that included their properties in them.
I can see this going the route of us having a Disney AI, Sony AI, Discovery AI, Amazon AI, etc. where you can generate stuff using models owned by the studios, but only those studios and any public domain stuff they suck in too.
If you're the first group to sue you have to spend millions extra on lawyers to establish the precedent. I don't see much reason for Disney and friends to rush to be first.
The current state of AI isn't really a threat to Disney and friends, just suggestive of a future threat. No need to rush on that account either. Especially since if they win the lawsuit - they're still going to benefit from all the R&D on neural networks that is happening on other peoples dime right now.
And all in, do studios stand to lose more or gain more to AI? Drastically cutting their costs might be worth some extra competition.
Most people seem to have a difficult time grasping that if the model is trained in such a way that Disney's IP is excluded, the model doesn't know Disney even exists. Consider if every Disney website was excluded from Google and every Disney related trademark was blacklisted.
As of mid 2023 it is very clear personal assistants are going to replace traditional web search. In my use case, they've replaced it 100%: excluding searching a single website or product name. Will these generative assistants -- which must be capable of both processing and generating images -- know the rights holder's IP even exists? The idea that a useful LLM is going to be trained on 100% public domain, copyright free data is absurd.
IP owners are suggesting that future personal assistants would need to pay them for the knowledge of even the mere existence of their IP. That would be like if every website indexed by Google and every trademarked keyword required Google to pay the copyright owner per search. That isn't possible. To the contrary, the reverse occurs.
What if the future is in fact the opposite of what IP owners are now suggesting? Nike pays the generative AI company for Nike shoes to appear in the one-off movie generated for a single viewer based on their personal preferences?
The world is drowning in IP: text, video, music. The future will be a deluge.
Presumably when photographers/artists submit their images to Getty they hand over full ownership, or otherwise pretty broad licensing agreement. If Getty's the rights holders for these images they can use that by training their own models.
In my mind, OpenAI/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion are the Napsters of generative AI. Adobe Firefly, and now Getty, are coming up with the iTunes Store/Spotify. For better or worse.
In this case: Getty is going to be paying less overall (otherwise, why do it at all?), and they will pocket the extra margin.
The alternative to Spotify and the traditional record labels are places like Bandcamp, where artists get a far more significant portion of the earned money. Any industry where 99% of the money goes to the middle man or service provider rather than the creator is an industry in dire need of disruption.
My limited understanding is that Getty is at least as bad as the music industry, if not much worse. No doubt Getty will make millions of dollars from their AI image generator, while the artists may get a few cents a year if they are lucky.
edit: also, re spotify, as far as I'm aware they do carry small and independent labels. Getty is comparable to the big music labels, not to spotify.
Exactly. These companies are probably hoping the artists win as many legal battles as they can, since the result will be that only big companies will be able to create useful AI models.
> He told me the training process took about 2.5 hours on a GPU at Vast.ai, and cost less than $2.
This is a SaaS waiting to happen.
https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwillin... This was on the front page last year.
Admittedly, they're both nonsensically incompetent at times, and if you believe Disney's financials (do you believe any Hollywood financials?) then they somehow manage to lose money on $10,000,000,000 / year. I'm still not sure how you make the equivalent of 10's of 1,000's of tv episode costs ... and then lose money ... with Disney's back catalogue and vault.
As entertaining as it would be to have a model where you type "photo of an astronaut riding a horse" and it defaults to Buzz Lightyear riding the horse from Tangled, that's not really what people use these models for in the main.
You don't actually want derivative works. The interesting training data isn't Hollywood movies, it's all the junk people post on social media. What you want is thousands of generic pictures of astronauts and thousands of generic pictures of horses. Pictures of Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell aren't any better (and may actually be worse) than actual public domain photos from NASA.
I think the vast majority of this is going to replace google image search, the way it replaced clip-art
There was this topic yesterday related to legal data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37627129
I've been saying all year that LexisNexis absolutely HAS to be building a training corpus. It was a big deal when that dumb lawyer in TX filed a brief with bogus citations, but what if you had an LLM that was specifically trained on legal filings, understood rules like "If you cite a case, you MUST include a reference to that case and it must be valid in our system"?
There could be an AI carveout going forward but that's not retroactive.
Not so long ago many predicted that stock image sites will eventually become obsolete or at least much less important due to AI image generators. But it might turn out that stock image sites are uniquely positioned to dominate commercial AI image generation because of the "ethically sourced" high quality training data they posses.
They might still have minor legal fights whether this is a legal way to use the data licenses to them, but the list of people who could possibly sue is much shorter, known to the stock image site, and consists of people who have already signed some form of contract about the use of these images. The legal risks are well scoped and predictable, unlike "we scraped the internet" models.
At the end of the day, we’re only talking about these models because someone published research completely tainted by the copyrighted training. So it’s still totally unknown, until a lawsuit, if even a “redo” of every part of the model on all licensed stuff, which may not even work because there isn’t enough variety, if it’s all that it promises legally.
the high-margin, very legal brand-name market. As others have pointed out, the means of production are already leaked, the goods easily copied and delivered, so there will be endless layers of gray market, not-legal, cheaper knock-offs and worse IMHO.
End result: AI outperforms humans.
I'm pretty firmly on the side of "large-scale analysis of content that's accessible to the public should be entirely outside the scope of copyright, regardless of what one does with the output", even though I also sympathize with artists that see generative AI as a potentially existential threat to their careers. But I'm curious if Getty is actually going to make meaningful payments to the creators of the images that went into the training set, or if this is more of a "we could continue to pay our existing royalties to content creators, or we could keep most of the money for ourselves by selling access to a model trained on that content" type of situation.
[1] "We’ve created a model that compensates our world‑class content creators for the use of their work in our AI model, allowing them to continue to create more of the high‑quality pre‑shot imagery you depend on." (https://www.gettyimages.com/ai/generation/about)
Adobe is also dealing with this question with Firefly. So far they plan to pay creators annually, but how much each artists gets and how the amount is calculated is yet to be determined. Since a model is only as good as its training data, hopefully this can be a new revenue stream for artists?
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/13/adobe-starts-paying-bonuse...
the model is made from X images, from Y artists, each artist has a percent contribution to the total. between 0 and 100 percent.
so each time money is generated by the model, the contributors get their share.
as a bonus, it is easy to understand how that share was derived. so it is implicitly fair.
(please keep in mind that this “artist’s share” will be a percentage of the net revenue generated, and that this percentage will probably be a trade secret or some such.)
(any works from artists unable to be paid, meaning public domain or otherwise, will be handled by the corporation for the continuous and never-ending improvement of the platform that makes it all possible.)
I don't think I understand this. How does something being simple to understand make it fair?
The model would be almost entirely, if not entirely, on your images.
a company could always train a model on what constitutes a low value or malicious image. submissions get screened by the bouncer before going on to integration with the commercial model.
throw in a submission fee, and enough of the malicious submissions will be stopped to plausibly call this solved.
plus, new cash stream.
If this isn't already a scam it's about to be. Paying copyright holders money for this will cause people to produce mountains of low effort images, which then get the same payment as things people put actual work into, ensuring that the payments are negligible because they're diluted by such volume. And will reduce the quality of the model so nobody wants to use it.
And we know what the cheapest way to generate a large volume of low effort images is, which is probably not going to bode well for the purity of the system either.
AI. I’m ok with closing the loop and AI folding on itself.
At the same time though, Getty and Adobe have a vested interest in not allowing that content into their training sets. They are obviously curating here, so that their generator outputs better stuff than the generators of competitors. I'm sure they are wargaming out the possibility of MS/OpenAI and Google coming in. Or maybe even worse, Disney or the video game makers, entering this market.
So you would need to generate a mountain of low effort content, and then hope that some of it is good enough to make it through the curation process. It's not a guaranteed thing.
The threshold for getting accepted has to be much lower than the threshold for making much money, because the company needs the long tail (and so does the AI model), but a photographer previously only made money if their photos were popular.
Now as long as you can meet the minimum bar for inclusion, you get the same payment as anyone else, so the quantity of photos at that minimum level of quality goes way up.
They will totally train on every image they can get their hands on, and then finetune on a curated set of the best images.
More obfuscation will mean more shaving.
It ended up not really mattering, because the product people preferred to use was YouTube, and the branding, media coverage, lawsuits, all that stuff took so long to resolve that it happened after YouTube was the winner of the space. Of course if the YouTube lawsuit had worked out like Napster then everything might have ended differently....