Good for them. About time someone stood up to these soulless VC-funded land grabs.

I am very pro AI but I think this is a really important case. These bots need to be controlled and having your content scraped should be on an opt-in basis. They really need to get their ducks in a row bc the bot does essentially reword your content and use YOUR WORK to generate results. That's not fair. They all need to be tightly regulated

But how? Aren’t these models open source?

It’s up to the user at the individual level to decide what the scrape or train. If they break the copyright law while doing that, it’s not the tool that’s responsible, it’s again the individual.

Good thing scraping isn’t illegal

Why is it always SD and not a big corp? You're all like spoiled children: "ooh, I'm gonna sue! gonna sue, gonna sue, gonna sue!".

Im not sure why the art tools themselves are being targeted and not the dataset developers like LAION.

Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc. are just using datasets from LAION. I would think the buck stops with them in terms of getting permission / rights to use image URLs in their datasets.

I don't think it's fair to target A.I developers themselves in this case - they can more so be considered users to some extent in this case.

Scraping URLs is not illegal, no.

Taking those URLs and downloading the images on/in those URLs is a different story though. Collecting URLs is benign. Extracting information from those URLs may not be though.

It’s also not illegal to scrape the content of a site if said content is accessible to the public

We'll see how that plays out legally wirh respect to artwork.

Just because that's how things function currently doesn't mean it's going to end up being legal to do so in the future.

Had to happen : the Big Players won't give up their positions easily.

For example, do you really believe that Disney will allow small firms to use AI to generate decent quality films & videos for pennies?
(FYI Disney managed to get the US Govt to modify Copyright law in order to maintain commercial control of Mickey Mouse!)

The huge firms have the money to drain the finances of the small players, even if there is no real case to prove.

They also have the money to influence Copyright law, and the like, to their advantage.

At the end of the day, it will be Business As Usual, with all the toys being owned by the rich and powerful for their own advantage.

You’re right about that. I’d think the internet ought to be treated like a public road, if things are intentionally made to be viewed in public than people are at liberty to record it. But, that may not be the case

Laions license stated to avoid commercializing using there dataset as it was for research only iirc

But, I do think it is important to protect your content. Today chatGPT is trained on so much info, which is based off books and blogs written by real people, who will not be credited for it, but the owners of chatGPT will earn in Billions.

That's definitely something that will be brought up in court.

From the layman's perspective, it would seem that Midjourney, etc. are no longer operating as research outlets and are instead offering a commercial product. Corporations are surely treating it like a commercial product at least.

People do exactly the same : they read many books and then write a book .. which is effectively based on the author's prior inputs.
Totally legal.

Yeah, agree with you. But here it's about a corporation earning on the back of the work of millions of people, who will mostly be jobless due their new product. I am not arguing with you, there's no right or wrong here, but the point is, google and other search engines atleast reward the content creators. In chatGPTs case there's no such thing.

that isn't at all how any of this works. there is no database of images of stolen art that the model draws from when you generate a prompt. you're going to have to point out exactly where this stolen art is in their model, and good luck with that, lol.

People are downvoting me but this is the fun content generating AI. Realistically, bots will scrape us and craft custom ads to fit your personality and likes.

They go for the Open Source projects because their goal is to crush them.

>table Diffusion, Midjourney, etc. are just using datasets from LAIO

LAION uses Common Crawl to crawl the net and Common Crawl obeys the robot.txt rules of any site it crawls. Getty images have no case here, if they didn't want their content crawled they should have specified it in their robots.txt file.

Furthermore, Getty is one of the scummiest companies out there, they pretended to have the copyright of tens of millions of images in the Library of Congress, they also take the photos of photographers who publish them under the CC license and then try to shake these photographers for money.

I know how they obtained URLs using CommonCrawl. CommonCrawl isn't the issue.

CommonCrawl only returns URLs. LAION had to take the URLs and download the content contained on the webpage therein.

The point is, if they didn't want that content scrapped, they should have put a rule disallowing it in their robots.txt

A few issues with this thought process:

1. Even if folks were to retroactively add or edit robots.txt files to disallow scraping, that does nothing to address the content already scraped and downloaded. So the aspect of LAION downloading potentially copyrighted works is still in play.

2. I think it's an extremely flaky argument to say "Well, those artists should have edited their robots.txt files to disallow the thing they didn't know was happening". It's a very real possibility that the artists in question didn't even know this kind of stuff was happening, let alone there being something they could do about it. I'm not sure a court would view that argument as being sound.

3. I think LAION is a European company. Why this is relevant is because of their FAQs:

> If you found your name only on the ALT text data, and the corresponding picture does NOT contain your image, this is not considered personal data under GDPR terms. Your name associated with other identifiable data is. If the URL or the picture has your image, you may request a takedown of the dataset entry in the GDPR page. As per GDPR, we provide a takedown form you can use.

So, LAION is beholden to GDPR terms. I think the potential exists for someone to ask "Well... If my picture and data is considered personal data, why isn't the content I produce also considered personal data?" Current GDPR guidelines behave this way, but I think we may end up seeing edits or rewrites of GDPR guidelines given cases like this.

It's neither reasonable nor sound to say "Artists should have taken this very technical detail into account in order to protect their work."

What will disney do in eu countries? Yes can’t do shit

We know it’s been posted plenty of times already

Because LAION doesn’t have any money.

The genie is out of the bottle. They can't put it back in. There is going to be a flood of biblical proportions of AI generated content and there's nothing that nobody can do about it.

If they try to fight it, it's going to be even more pathetic than the music industry trying to fight the digital downloading of music.

True .. but there will be several years of legal cases and general mayhem before the big media houses realise that the game is over.

Open source movement cannot be stopped by Disney or anyone for that matter.

If Ais training is made illegal public domain systems will be trained and those using illegal ais will simply hide in their discord groups.

Probably right - but could take a few years.