https://petapixel.com/2024/03/07/recreating-iconic-photos-with-ai-image-generators/

None of the copies are great, but they're clearly more than "inspired by" the very famous images they were trained on.

Whoa, found today wirestock's AI image generator:

https://wirestock.io/ai-generate

Dam*, that thing is better as I would expect. The generator is obviously using finetuned Stable Diffusion models.
Their price is even not that bad. 10 bucks / month for 1000 generations.

Here are some test generarions:

https://ibb.co/VCX2VPr
https://ibb.co/dtyxc1J
https://ibb.co/s1fK54j
https://ibb.co/Q9VySpR

This development makes me quite nervous.
It's faster than I would expect.

I can currently beat the generated results by only using an AI upscaler (altough I haven't tried out wirestock's upscaler yet).

As an AI prompter I think you should already now focus on learning to generate visual aesthetic and striking images to stand out of the coming storm.

Bloomberg article about Adobe Firefly training - "Adobe�s �Ethical� Firefly AI Was Trained on Midjourney Images"

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/adobe-ethical-firefly-ai-trained-123004288.html

PetaPixel via Bloomberg:

https://petapixel.com/2024/04/11/adobe-will-buy-your-videos-for-up-to-7-25-per-minute-to-train-ai-report/

Bloomberg: "Adobe Inc. has begun to procure videos to build its artificial intelligence text-to-video generator, trying to catch up to competitors after OpenAI demonstrated a similar technology."

More interesting, especially in light of the first article is one of the comments (emphasis mine):

"I just realized what this actually means. It's mostly marketing. Clever marketing.
They can't possibly gather enough material in a timeframe that can compete with simply scraping or buying in bulk. While they wait for volunteers to upload content, the other AI companies will have stolen the entire Internet twice over (which is what I think they are also doing, behind the scenes).
This is made to become product differentiation at launch.
And it's impossible to check the numbers (creators, video time etc) because it's confidential.
Brilliant.
PS: they can use the material they gather through this method, it is useful, but it's just too little. This method provides protection in the case of overfitting, or it can be used to produce better results by referencing more aggressively."

It seems to me that only a very tiny percentage of this is being paid to artists.

There's no doubt about that. If Adobe is true to their word, we are getting 30%, minimum for any image used. Make a note, other like SS and IS we'd get 15%? But I don't see Adobe disclosing what we are actually getting paid for data training.

Training AI using other AI images, is a dangerous tactic. Adobe admits that 5% or less, which was carefully inspected, was used. WHY? First off, if it's such a small number, why not find real images to fill the voids? But 1% is still, some percent, so Firefly is not free of scraped data.

We're still watching the courts to see what is decided about out of copyright and fair use. More claims, more trials, somewhere, someone has to make a decision that defines and decides with clear limits and regulation.

Somewhat gloomy headline on a Wall Street Journal (paywall) story today:

"The Last Stock Photographers Await Their Fate Under Generative AI
Digital photography ravaged the business of taking and licensing commercial photos. Some fear AI will kill it off entirely."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-stock-photographers-await-their-fate-under-generative-ai-822d1e6a?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

I think the real situation is more complex than the story suggests. But some quotes:

"The companies that broker stock imagery say doom-mongering is unfounded. Consumers are still proving hostile toward AI-generated images, and so are marketers looking to convey an air of authenticity, according to executives. Real photos of real things are still in demand, said Paul Hennessy, CEO of stock photography provider Shutterstock, on an earnings call in February. �We are not seeing our customers at any level of scale with a desire to buy, purchase and utilize AI-generated images,� Hennessy said."

"The biggest companies in stock photography take the same line. AI imagery sometimes looks uncanny or fake, and most consumers and customers want the real thing, they say. Stock companies� AI models will also require a stream of fresh photos to remain up-to-date, especially when it comes to images of new technologies and current events, said Rebecca Swift, Getty Images� global head of creative."

Ms Swift says "...AI is unlikely to diminish stock photographers� pay any further because companies including Getty have to keep prices high enough to maintain their own operations"

What I think she meant to say is that when you pay $0.01 and $0.02 royalties as Getty/iStock currently does, you can't reduce it much more because it's already so close to zero!!

Understanding what is fair use.

fair use is the idea that there are certain ways that you can use a piece of copyrighted work regardless of whether you have the rightsholder�s permission, and it's determined by a balancing test that considers four factors�

    the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
    the nature of the copyrighted work;
    the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
    the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Has anyone seen the new Flux model?
https://blackforestlabs.ai
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/flux-this-new-ai-image-generator-is-eerily-good-at-creating-human-hands/

*, this is a new level of an open source model.
My current experiments are quite very promising. I'm thinking to start again with AI image generation although my last attempts with stable diffusion did not bring any remarkable earnings.

//////
I wonder if the developers harvested like crazy either the whole Midjourney's database or terabytes of stock photo libraries for their training data.
I mean the results are over 80% of the time just crazy. The understanding and following of easy prompts of the model is a new level.