In its submission to the Australian government’s 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.
Take a close look at the “watermark” on the AI-generated image. It’s so badly mangled that you wouldn’t have a clue what it says if you didn’t already know what it was “supposed” to say. If that’s really something you’d consider “copyrightable” then the whole world’s 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 they’re alleging the AI is producing copyrighted images.
I said “recognisable”, and it is clearly recognisable as Getty’s watermark, by virtue of the fact that many people, not only I, recognise it as such. You said that the models don’t use any “recognizable part of the original material that it was trained on”, and that is clearly false because people do recognise parts of the original material. You can’t argue away other people’s ability to recognise the parts of the original works that they recognise.
I said that models don’t contain any recognizable part of the original material. They might be able to produce recognizable versions of parts of the original material, as we’re seeing here. That’s an important distinction. The model itself does not “contain” 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, that’s 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, that’s 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 he’s previously seen.
In any event, as I said, Getty isn’t suing over the copyright to their watermark.
