<story><title>Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/21/23364696/getty-images-ai-ban-generated-artwork-illustration-copyright</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jfoster</author><text>Reading between the lines of this, it sounds to me like Getty is preparing a copyright claim against the AI companies:&lt;p&gt;1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open.&lt;p&gt;2. Their business stands to lose substantially as a result of such models existing.&lt;p&gt;3. It would be a bad look for them to make a claim whilst simultaneously accepting works from the models into Getty.&lt;p&gt;4. At least some of their watermarked content seems to have been included in the training data of the OpenAI model: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=32573523&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=32573523&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m correct about that, they will probably not settle, as their business was likely worth substantially more than any feasible settlement arrangement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ar-nelson</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen a lot of confidence on HN and other tech communities that a court would never rule that training an AI on copyrighted images is infringement, but I&amp;#x27;m not so sure. To be clear, I hope that training AI on copyrighted images remains legal, because it would cripple the field of AI text and image generation if it wasn&amp;#x27;t!&lt;p&gt;But think about these similar hypotheticals:&lt;p&gt;1. I take a copyrighted Getty stock image (that I don&amp;#x27;t own, maybe even watermarked), blur it with a strong Gaussian blur filter until it&amp;#x27;s unrecognizable, and use it as the background of an otherwise original digital painting.&lt;p&gt;2. I take a small GPL project on GitHub, manually translate it from C to Python (so that the resulting code does not contain a single line of code identical to the original), then redistribute the translated project under a GPL-incompatible license without acknowledging the original.&lt;p&gt;Are these infringements?&lt;p&gt;In both of these cases, a copyrighted original work is transformed and incorporated into a different work in such a way that the original could not be reconstructed. But, intuitively, both cases &lt;i&gt;feel&lt;/i&gt; like infringement. I don&amp;#x27;t know how a court would rule, but there&amp;#x27;s at least some chance these would be infringements, and they&amp;#x27;re conceptually not too different from distilling an image into an AI model and generating something new based on it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of copyright claims</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/21/23364696/getty-images-ai-ban-generated-artwork-illustration-copyright</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jfoster</author><text>Reading between the lines of this, it sounds to me like Getty is preparing a copyright claim against the AI companies:&lt;p&gt;1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open.&lt;p&gt;2. Their business stands to lose substantially as a result of such models existing.&lt;p&gt;3. It would be a bad look for them to make a claim whilst simultaneously accepting works from the models into Getty.&lt;p&gt;4. At least some of their watermarked content seems to have been included in the training data of the OpenAI model: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=32573523&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=32573523&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m correct about that, they will probably not settle, as their business was likely worth substantially more than any feasible settlement arrangement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wnevets</author><text>&amp;gt; 1. They seem of the opinion that the copyright question is open.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m surprised it has taken this long to be honest. I&amp;#x27;ve seen generated images with the blurred Getty watermark on them.</text></comment>