In its submission to the Australian governmentâs review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
Nevertheless, the Getty watermark is a recognisable element from the images the model was trained on, therefore you cannot state that the models donât spit out images with recognisable elements from the training data.
Take a close look at the âwatermarkâ on the AI-generated image. Itâs so badly mangled that you wouldnât have a clue what it says if you didnât already know what it was âsupposedâ to say. If thatâs really something youâd consider âcopyrightableâ then the whole worldâs in violation.
The only reason this is coming up in a copyright lawsuit is because Getty is using it as evidence that Stability AI used Getty images in the training set, not that theyâre alleging the AI is producing copyrighted images.
I said ârecognisableâ, and it is clearly recognisable as Gettyâs watermark, by virtue of the fact that many people, not only I, recognise it as such. You said that the models donât use any ârecognizable part of the original material that it was trained onâ, and that is clearly false because people do recognise parts of the original material. You canât argue away other peopleâs ability to recognise the parts of the original works that they recognise.
I said that models donât contain any recognizable part of the original material. They might be able to produce recognizable versions of parts of the original material, as weâre seeing here. Thatâs an important distinction. The model itself does not âcontainâ the images from the training set. It only contains concepts about those images, and concepts are not something that can be copyrighted.
If you want to claim copyright violations over specific output images, sure, thatâs valid. If I were to hit on exactly the right set of prompts and pseudorandom seed values to get a model to spit out an image that was a dead ringer for a copyrighted work and I was to distribute copies of that resulting image, thatâs copyright violation. But the model itself is not a copyright violation. No more than an artist is inherently violating copyright because he could potentially pick up his paint brush and produce a copy of an existing work that heâs previously seen.
In any event, as I said, Getty isnât suing over the copyright to their watermark.
