That's what Adobe Firefly is already doing, it's trained on Adobe Stock photos along with copyright-free content

https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html

The tricky bit is that those stock photos include generative images too. Many of which aren't labeled as generative. So I wonder if theirs is already including potentially problematic content.

I would be surprised if they hadn't externalized that risk when they started their stock photo library.

Generally, whenever a company buys a photo, there's a release form where the claimed-author of the photo has to state that they own the rights to the photo. So, the infringement is on the part of the seller, and you have a high barrier to sue Adobe for that.

> So, the infringement is on the part of the seller, and you have a high barrier to sue Adobe for that.

No, you don’t, Adobe just has a low barrier to suck the source of the image into the case as an additio al defendano and a potential additional de¹1¹fense against any claim of willful infringement.

OTOH, Adobe would like potential plaintiffs to think that it works the way you describe.

> It doesn't really matter if you can't put the AI back in the bottle so to speak.

Exactly. Companies like Getty, Disney and Shutterstock are never tired of collecting money and the easiest target for this is Stable Diffusion, which is already commercializing the model with DreamStudio which includes Getty's images without their permission.

O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com avoided this by partnering with shutterstock to get this permission first before training on their images for DALL-E 2. If O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com was able to do that, then SD has no reason other than taking images without attribution or credit and using them commercially. (Which they have been caught many times)

> trained from images they own copyright to

Do they own the right to train-a-model? It's not clear at all. A lot of great photographers don't want their unique style to be multiplied ad infinitum. Copyright is to "copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work", and this is not an adaptation

You can't prevent others from using a style though. Which is why there are so many bands that people might remember having their songs appear in car commercials, but it turns out the car company just paid for a sound-alike clone of a band and not the actual band content.

but then owning the copyright doesn't matter, because it doesn't cover style (And do they even hold the copyright for derivative works?)

It just means there will be a Google Books-style settlement where a few major tech companies write big checks to a few major publishers (whose work wasn't even verifiably used in training the models.) The AI models will exist and be ubiquitous on the Internet, you'll just have to pay a small tax to some company in order to use them in commercial work.

Yup, this is exactly what will happen - good ol regulatory capture

> That being said, nothing is stopping Getty images, for example, from releasing their own image generator, trained from images they own copyright to.

which is fine, if it's theirs they're free to do what they want with it

however I didn't give Microsoft permission to sell people code derived from my works without attribution

Funny because getty will steal public domain images and charge you 200$ for it

That's a different discussion. Getty is clearly in the wrong there, but it has nothing to do with AI.

Short sighted artists claiming that Getty and Adobe models are fine when in 5 years all tools will be piped through these models anyway, in 10 years GPUs will have them built in running real time and the only difference they made with this hissy for is if they pay Getty and Adobe $100+ a month for the privilege instead of it being free.

You can’t escape it, we may as well all benefit instead of this silly crusade making only 4 companies max benefiting, forever.