Hello everyone,

generative ai is transforming our industry more drastically than the invention of the photocamera transformed art.

Allover the internet creatives are having very emotional discussions and reassessing their personal and business futures.

Is Ai an opportunity, a new tool? Is it the robot overlord that will replace us all? Is there nothing creative left for humanity to explore? Is this the end�?

etc�

To give all these very valid questions a better grounding, I would like to suggest that we use this thread to collect links to interesting and well written articles on the subject.

The technological background, articles and videos how to use it as a tool, links to ongoing court cases and the devolopment of copyright in relation to prompters and users.

And obviously all links or news about how the various agencies are dealing with the issue.

Also those in the community who are journalists or in the media, can you please post the blog posts or articles you write here, whenever you do?


Those that are lawyers, please add anything you find helpful.


Ambassodors of agencies, please add your comments or suggestions or links as well.


Here are my current favorites:



- The AI companies seem to use content collected by this project:

https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/

They describe in great detail how they literally scraped the entire internet and used the image descriptions and keywords associated with images to create a huge training base for ai software.

Might be worth backing up and saving anything on their website, incase they remove it all later�unless the waybackmachine already has it all, I didn�t check�

Interestingly, if you want to have your images removed from this �collection�, the project threatens to sue you.

Robert Kneschke discussed this in a German blog post. Hope he follows in up. (run it through deepl for English)

https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-verein-droht-urhebern-die-ihre-daten-aus-ki-trainingssatz-nehmen-wollen-mit-schadensersatzanspruechen/

- In an interview, the CEO of Midjourney admits that they were not picky about choosing training content and that he believes it is impossible to find the copyright owners of images visible on the internet.

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/midjourney-founder-basically-admits-to-copyright-breaching-and-artists-are-angry


- Gettyimages is suing various AI creators for copyright breach. They explicitly state they are not against the technology, but they demand a correct licensing of the training data.

Here are a few links

https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/getty-images-statement?]https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/getty-images-statement?[/url]%20fbclid=IwAR0QZsgm810ysqQaEXGzgCEUDHMGTrj9S1e3S_urdge-SuDrsAKxfF-%20bKbQ


https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images-stable-diffusion

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/06/getty-images-sues-ai-company-over-hideous-frankenphotos/?sh=1f775c7640b2

- Shutterstock announced they will let customers use dall-e to generate content and that the ai is trained on the ss collection. They announce they will pay artists a small fee whenever their files are somehow used in a recreation.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23422359/shutterstock-ai-generated-art-openai-dall-e-partnership-contributors-fund-reimbursement

- This is a general article about legal risks with ai

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/ai-generated-images-legal-risks-copyright

- Not related to images, but this article discusses the rpoblems actors face who are asked to sign away voice rights whenever they do a voice job.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

I am sure there is a lot more out there. Please add your favorite links.

Hope you find this thread useful.

thanks for those links & details - hopefully will bring more substantive discussions

The link to Adobe doesn't work.

Inadvertent space after the hyphen?

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/generative-ai-content.html

Generative Ai content for Adobe, Helpdesk article on how and what to upload

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/generative-ai-content.html

Article about generative ai on Dreamstime

https://www.dreamstime.com/blog/dreamstime-now-accepting-ai-generated-content-under-specific-terms-59030

In a different thread I read that pond5, alamy, mostphotos and 123rf are also accepting gen ai. But I haven�t yet found an announcement.

Anyone have that?

No announcement from Alamy that I'm aware of but a search for "Generative AI" brings up 232,364 images as of 1:30 am on March 10, 2023, so it would appear that they are accepting it. There are some discussions on the forum there.

very weird sorry, i will try to repair them all.

eta: hope they work now. thank you to everyone who alerted me.

I made my copy/paste via my ipad, maybe there is a problem there. works fine with my computer.

I only fixed one, did a number of them go bad because of copy and paste on the iPad. I might do that some day and will need to watch out.

I uploaded some to Alamy I didn't mark them as anything except Illustrations. Maybe that's in the works. I'll watch here.

As for the search, user added description and keywords.  Ai generative Stock Photos and Images(237,843)

I've had AI images accepted by alamy - marked as AI

Yes, I'm saying, they don't seem to have a requirement or system label of any sort for identifying them, when uploading? Or do they and I missed it?

I don't see any advantage in marking my images as generated by AI so I don't tag them as that.

This makes me reluctant to invest time and money creating AI images: 

No copyright protection for AI images, says US government

https://www.diyphotography.net/no-copyright-protection-for-ai-images-says-us-government/

If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that.

Quoted parts are from the above document. Bold is mine.

"V. Conclusion
This policy statement sets out the Office�s approach to registration of works containing material generated by AI technology."

Policy statement, not law.

"The Office recognizes that AI-
generated works implicate other
copyright issues not addressed in this
statement. It has launched an agency-
wide initiative to delve into a wide
range of these issues. Among other
things, the Office intends to publish a
notice of inquiry later this year seeking
public input on additional legal and
policy topics, including how the law
should apply to the use of copyrighted
works in AI training and the resulting
treatment of outputs."

Two parts. Legal aspects of training from copyrighted materials and the resulting outputs.

"...a human may select or
arrange AI-generated material in a
sufficiently creative way that ��the
resulting work as a whole constitutes an
original work of authorship.�� Or an
artist may modify material originally
generated by AI technology to such a
degree that the modifications meet the
standard for copyright protection. In
these cases, copyright will only protect
the human-authored aspects of the
work, which are ��independent of�� and
do ��not affect�� the copyright status of
the AI-generated material itself."

But in addition

"This policy does not mean that
technological tools cannot be part of the
creative process. Authors have long
used such tools to create their works or
to recast, transform, or adapt their
expressive authorship. For example, a
visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop
to edit an image remains the author of
the modified image,"

Is the final image transformative and making it a new work. Here's my point. I obtain an AI created image, using my prompts, from one of these computer driven systems. I open and edit it, and transform it, into a new work... it's now mine and I can copyright it. And that's not so much of a stretch if you see some of the artists (this seems to come back to Warhol so often) did the artist change the meaning or the image, enough to make it their own work.

But the main point is, this is the OPINION of the USCO and not the law. It's their current interpretation and policy. Based on legal decisions, the law could change their opinion, or support it. Also the question of, rights to use images that are copyrighted to train the system, needs to be decided.

The answer is, we don't know and neither does the US Copyright Office.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on March 17, 2023, 11:01

If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that.

"This policy does not mean that
technological tools cannot be part of the
creative process. Authors have long
used such tools to create their works or
to recast, transform, or adapt their
expressive authorship. For example, a
visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop
to edit an image remains the author of
the modified image,"

Is the final image transformative and making it a new work. Here's my point. I obtain an AI created image, using my prompts, from one of these computer driven systems. I open and edit it, and transform it, into a new work... it's now mine and I can copyright it.

Same:
"If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that."

That's very obvious not what is meant when they say "For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image"

Because they say REMAIN. Which means you need to have owned copyright of the image before you edited it in the first place, so they are talking about editing your own human created artwork, not AI generated images. It does not mean that you become the copyright owner of an AI created image if you edit it in photoshop, because according to the US copyright office you were not the copyright owner of the unedited image, so you cannot "remain" the copyright owner by editing it.

True, but if you create an image using AI and then edit it, to make a transformative NEW image, they you now have created an image that can be protected. Taking an image that's public domain, fair use or in some cases (as much as I hate it) a copyrighted image, and substantially changing it, makes it a new work.

Your conclusion that someone must own the rights before they can alter and claim protection is not valid. (If you want some examples I'll start a different thread for appropriation art. Which personally I think is just plain stealing.) At least with AI something new is created, that didn't exist before, and then edited to create something else that's new?

Shortest possible answer though is, this is an opinion of the USCO and not a legal decision from the courts. That is yet to be decided.

A. Do these services have the right to use copyrighted images for training?
B. Is a new work, which is the result of human directions, allowed to be protected.
C. Does editing an AI image and substantially altering it, make it a new human created work?

I don't know. I'm just quoting and reading the fine points.

The legal part around do we have copyright will probably be discussed for years.

The safest route is probably to have a seed image to start from.

But if you are interested in creating ai content for stock you know from the getgo that legally you are in murky waters.

Quote from: Her Ugliness on March 17, 2023, 11:45

Quote from: Uncle Pete on March 17, 2023, 11:01

If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that.

"This policy does not mean that
technological tools cannot be part of the
creative process. Authors have long
used such tools to create their works or
to recast, transform, or adapt their
expressive authorship. For example, a
visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop
to edit an image remains the author of
the modified image,"

Is the final image transformative and making it a new work. Here's my point. I obtain an AI created image, using my prompts, from one of these computer driven systems. I open and edit it, and transform it, into a new work... it's now mine and I can copyright it.

Same:
"If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that."

That's very obvious not what is meant when they say "For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image"

Because they say REMAIN. Which means you need to have owned copyright of the image before you edited it in the first place, so they are talking about editing your own human created artwork, not AI generated images. It does not mean that you become the copyright owner of an AI created image if you edit it in photoshop, because according to the US copyright office you were not the copyright owner of the unedited image, so you cannot "remain" the copyright owner by editing it.

Sorry you have twisted the meaning by picking out the word remain. They are saying you don't lose your rights by editing in Photoshop. I can take an AI image and become the owner of a new human created artwork by editing.

No, you have twisted the meaning by completely ignoring the word remain.
Yes, they are saying you don't lose your rights by editing in Photoshop. -  The right to an image you had the copyrigfht to begin with, otherwise the word "remain" would be pointless in that sentence. You can't remain something you had not been before.
I am not sure how you can call that "twisting". I am not the one twisting anything, it's written there, exactly like this:
"a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image".
 The word remain is there, I did not make that up.
If they were refering to AI generated images where, according to them, you do  not have copyrigh, the sentence would be
"a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image becomes the author of the modified image".
Two completely different things.

Quote from: Diana Herrmann on March 19, 2023, 05:24

Quote from: Her Ugliness on March 17, 2023, 11:45

Quote from: Uncle Pete on March 17, 2023, 11:01

If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that.

"This policy does not mean that
technological tools cannot be part of the
creative process. Authors have long
used such tools to create their works or
to recast, transform, or adapt their
expressive authorship. For example, a
visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop
to edit an image remains the author of
the modified image,"

Is the final image transformative and making it a new work. Here's my point. I obtain an AI created image, using my prompts, from one of these computer driven systems. I open and edit it, and transform it, into a new work... it's now mine and I can copyright it.

Same:
"If you see only what you want to see and draw conclusions from that."

That's very obvious not what is meant when they say "For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image"

Because they say REMAIN. Which means you need to have owned copyright of the image before you edited it in the first place, so they are talking about editing your own human created artwork, not AI generated images. It does not mean that you become the copyright owner of an AI created image if you edit it in photoshop, because according to the US copyright office you were not the copyright owner of the unedited image, so you cannot "remain" the copyright owner by editing it.

Sorry you have twisted the meaning by picking out the word remain. They are saying you don't lose your rights by editing in Photoshop. I can take an AI image and become the owner of a new human created artwork by editing.

No, you have twisted the meaning by completely ignoring the word remain.
Yes, they are saying you don't lose your rights by editing in Photoshop. -  The right to an image you had the copyrigfht to begin with, otherwise the word "remain" would be pointless in that sentence. You can't remain something you had not been before.
I am not sure how you can call that "twisting". I am not the one twisting anything, it's written there, exactly like this:
"a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image".
 The word remain is there, I did not make that up.
If they were refering to AI generated images where, according to them, you do  not have copyrigh, the sentence would be
"a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image becomes the author of the modified image".
Two completely different things.

The question was if someone loses their rights, when they use Photoshop and the answer is no.

"This policy does not mean that
technological tools cannot be part of the
creative process. Authors have long
used such tools to create their works or
to recast, transform, or adapt their
expressive authorship."

Create an AI image, edit it, you have now created a new image that's yours. There's nothing involving the retaining rights in that scenario. Any time you create a new image, you automatically have protection. Transforming an AI image into my image, makes it my new image.

Meanwhile the Copyright office doesn't make the laws, they just set policy based on their opinion of the law. There is no law saying that I can't create an image using AI software and then copyright it as mine. There is no court decision (an opinion) saying that I can't copyright an image that was originally created using AI technology.

There is only the opinion of the USCO that only a human can create something that is protected. Their view is,  "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention" pretty simple? What is human intervention? Is typing a prompt human intervention? Is editing after the fact?

But the second part is asking if the photographer has made a creative contribution to the work? A decision was, that copyright also subsists in a picture if the work reflects the personality of an author, and it expresses his/her free and creative choices, evidenced e.g. by lighting, framing, editing and the overall atmosphere created. That was the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)

Seems like all of this isn't such as easy as, if it was created using AI, then it's not going to get copyright protection, because someone at the USCO has decided they aren't going to approve them.

This needs to be decided in court.

Adobe announces their own AI system.

Welcome Firefly!

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/21/bringing-gen-ai-to-creative-cloud-adobe-firefly?fbclid=IwAR2tIv5tsSELTNHR0tqFcz2DrIMKrbAkjwN0u71NkOCg6Z7jCIngIFY8YNo

You see, Adobe in the end will f*k you over as well. It's all about the money. And that is all that matters, not you. But you can be thankful. Without you they would never have come to this in the first place. And now you have served your purpose and can go away. Maybe you get a thank you somewhere down the line.