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 box art unprompted, because its "learning" is still fundamentally mindless. It works 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.