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.

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...)

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

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.

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.

>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?

> 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).

It’ll be derivative fair use.

Not really, kind of clear the watermark is from Getty Images with no licence, no partnership, not even removing it from the training data and with no permission, all the while making money from the hosted service (with the trained model) with Dreamstudio.

Just because it's a scrambled watermark doesn't mean it's transformative.

Also, these images are copyrighted and it being generated by an AI (supposedly) turns it into a public domain image, which is incompatible with fair use.

It’s not a copy so…. Let me ask this, if you paint a realistic copy of a photo is that copyright infringement?

And where do you draw the line: https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-a....

> It’s not a copy so….

You're saying it can't be a 1:1 Getty Images watermark but it also can't be generated in a vacuum, so how did that 'recognisable watermark that apparently for some reason resembles a Getty Images watermark but it isn't' get in there?

Either way, under the law, derivative works are still under the copyright holder.

> Copyright protection for the owner of the original copyright extends to derivative works. This means that the copyright owner of the original work also owns the rights to derivative works. Therefore, the owner of the copyright to the original work may bring a copyright infringement lawsuit against someone who creates a derivative work without permission.

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works...

But here is the kicker, it all comes down to, permission.

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/eula

> No Machine Learning, AI, or Biometric Technology Use. Unless explicitly authorised in a Getty Images invoice, sales order confirmation or licence agreement, you may not use content (including any caption information, keywords or other metadata associated with content) for any machine learning and/or artificial intelligence purposes, or for any technologies designed or intended for the identification of natural persons. Additionally, Getty Images does not represent or warrant that consent has been obtained for such uses with respect to model-released content.

Taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night is a copyright breach [1] as are pictures of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, Radio City Music Hall in New York City, and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome (all of which except the Eiffel Tower I didn’t know about until looking up the provided reference) and all of them seem to me to be ludicrous but they ya go - I don't make the rules, only break them.

[1] https://mymodernmet.com/eiffel-tower-copyright-law/

No, that's transformative because you painted it. Transforming it into data bits, on its own, isn't considered transformative from a fair use perspective.

There's no "fair use" in UK law (where the lawsuit is happening). The corresponding "fair dealing" concept is much more narrow in scope.