Getty made an AI generator that only trained on its licensed images
Getty made an AI generator that only trained on its licensed images
Generative AI by Getty Images offers copyright indemnification to users.
Make note, folks who have been demanding only "ethical" AI training. You're demanding a world in which only Getty Images and other such existing incumbent copyright-holding corporations have decent AIs.
Getty is benefitting from having historically paid creators for the rights to their creations. The horror.
VCs have burned oodles of cash on startups. They could do the same to fund artists and photographers to create training images. A company could earn the good will of the community by starting with public domain and CC images. People who support AI image generation could sign over their own photos.
There are options that aren't as easy and carry more risk than unethically scraping the web. But companies are willing to be unethical until the law catches up, in hopes of cementing their foothold. See Uber and Airbnb for examples.
Getty Images is infamous for adding public domain images to their archives and then sending threatening demands for payment from anyone they subsequently spot using them. They're a big giant corporation like any other, all they're interested in is cash flow.
Note that I put "ethical" in quotes because ethics are a subjective matter that can't be proven one way or another. "Scraping the web" is IMO no different from regular old reading the web, which is what it's for. If you don't want your images to be seen then don't put them online in the first place.
Make note about what? This is a good thing. They went through the efforts to acquire the rights for the training data, and people might have even been paid for the original work.
It's not like this stops someone from paying artists or photographers to make art or photos for their training data, or creating some sort of group where contributors actively give the rights to their own artwork or photos for a model, like some sort of open source project kind of thing, people love that kind of stuff! You're just acting like this is some awful thing, when it's completely fine, and the way it should be.
Weird to think that Getty Images is making an AI that will turn their copyrighted images into non-copyrightable images. They're usually pretty strict about enforcing their copyrights.