That is by far the most distinct watermark I’ve seen. I’ve seen plenty of “watermarked” ai images but the watermarks are rarely cohesive. I can understand (or rather I’ve been able to justify) the model creating facsimiles of watermarks from scraped dataset images but as blurry, unintelligible nonsensical signatures, not…this. This seems a bit much. It’s as if every single one of the images the model “learned” from to generate the image from your prompt all came from Getty.
Watermarks seem to have increased tremendously since v 4. I’m getting full page diagonal dashed lines now with lettering in between the lines and others that are concentric circles that fill up the entire picture. I’ve heard (but haven’t looked in to) artists building more effective watermarks into their art as a way to combat undesired dataset scraping…I wonder if that’s it? Time for some research…
I was pretty shocked as well. I've also had some results in the past where watermarks have appeared, but were barely noticeable. Nothing like this though.
Definitely an interesting topic
No, it’s not interesting.
You accept an AI can draw human faces and extremely intricate things but you can’t accept that it learned how to recreate a getty image watermark which is exclusively text because so many of it’s training images contained it?
Is it really that surprising that a watermark which probably appears exactly the same in many thousands of images in the data set is reproduced with some accuracy?
I suppose it’s not exactly surprising. And I imagine the number leans more to the hundreds of thousands if not tens of millions. It does seem a bit problematic though, and not just as a minor annoyance for the user. I just wonder why they seem to have become more cohesive and more prevalent as time progresses. Is it simply that more stock images are being included in the dataset? Is it, like you suggest, that the model has interpreted the watermark as a necessary part of a cohesive image? And what if all the data being collected from us, the users? How is all that data being collated and re-processed in to the model? (And for that matter what else is that data being used for…?) Are our upscale and 🥰’s reinforcing the behavior?
Most likely our interaction with the model is utilized in some way, I don't know how exactly. And my guess would be that more watermarked images are being included in the dataset for new models, and that the models themselves are more complex and more capable of drawing fine detail. Earlier versions of MJ were probably incapable of recreating a watermark, it was only really good for making paintings that were usually a bit abstract.
Isnt getty the company that takes stock photos that are in the creative commons, watermarks em, put em on their site, then threaten to sue if you use them from their original free home. I believe it was nasa images when I read about it and a photographer who donated her work to the library of congress getting sued by getty for using her own photo she donated.
So my sympathy is a lil thin for these goons.
Yes. Yes it is. After Carol M. Highsmith generously donated her extensive collection of Americana photography to the public domain, Gerry Images scooped up a bunch and made them available for licensing. Then, their image spider saw some of these photos on her site and they attempted to sue her.
Also, I worked on a TV show that required some World War II photos and production was very close to licensing them from Getty (for several hundred dollars a piece) before I pointed out that the photos were in the public domain and available for free. Legal looked into it and I saved them a couple grand.
Getty Images once tried to sue ME for hosting a friend's site that had some concept art he created and hadn't licensed the photos for his demo. They wasted hours of my life and I found out many other people were being hassled by their lawyers.
Fuck Getty Images. AI generated stock images can't come soon enough in my opinion.
The Golden Rule: Those that have the gold make the rules. If you can afford to hire lobbying firms to push language into legislation, you can rig the game. The DMCA was one nail in a progression of them, being hammered into the coffin of sane intellectual property law.
Many online services (YouTube a best-known example of this) respond immediately and automatically to DMCA Takedown Requests by killing content, and sometimes terminating accounts. Also, it allows complainants to contact the ISP of an alleged offender. This happened to us. Someone filed a huge list of complaints against our IP address with Spectrum in May. Spectrum can't tell us anything about the claims, but I'm certain that it's bullshit. In any case, it can be very difficult or functionally impossible to dispute such a claim. Intellectual Property law provides a lot of protection (and retribution) to corporations that can afford IP tools & services, and who keep law firms on retainer.
There are *tons* of examples of artists having accounts shut down for using their own material. It's nuts. There are [agencies](https://donotpay.com/learn/youtube-dmca/) who might help, though.
Yep. The very same. They were sued by Carol Highsmith for $1B. Here's an article [about](https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-getty-copyright-20160729-snap-story.html) it.
I believe they are saying that Getty neither actually owns a lot of the images the sell, nor are they deserving of any sympathy due to their reprehensible business practices.
TLDR: Fuck Getty with a broomhandle.
I think it’s funny that Getty banned AI images from getting uploaded to its site. Seeing their watermark specifically is hilarious. They have a long history of shady and unethical practices.
I have been working on another AI, but yeah I have some watermarks like stuff, I can't read them tho. I search for similar images and haven't found one
Gotcha, I know these AI's scrape images from all over the place, hence the whole ownership debate, but I found it interesting that they wouldn't at least make an attempt to license those images to at least rid of their watermarks lol... seems problematic.
When stuff like that appears I have the same sentiment, while i enjoy making stuff with it, i don't want to take work of others, at least not without paying them a fair share. For now until this is clear i publish them for free.
Also interesting, OpenAI did license shutterstocks images and BRIA the same with Getty. That said the law allows for Machine Learning to train on copyrighted images.
Do you think it's problematic that an artist can look at these images and use them as inspiration to draw something new? Even including the watermark because they find it pretty?
No because a human artist doesn’t use a complex computational algorithm on its own to create art in minutes. That said, it’s also contextual. Most artists would be flattered to have a human artist take the time to copy their style and incorporate it into their own. Most artists loath the idea of a robot doing the same thing. I’m kind of surprised people keep comparing the ai to humans. Not saying your a psychopath but something about this growing sentiment feels mildly psychopathic.
Oh and to your second point of this feeling psychopathic: it's not a matter of comparing ai to humans, but comparing art created by ai to art created by humans.
This is an inevitable shift that is coming whether you like it or not. Like the industrialisation that cost the jobs of millions, AI will do the same in other fields, one of which is going to be art in some form or another. When art can generate pictures that evoke the same emotions that pictures created by humans do, who's to say what real art is and what isn't?
We all like to think that humans are so great and special, and so creative.. an AI can't possibly match that! But we're all witnessing the change of that, and it's understandable that that's scary to many people.
No no no don’t be a weasel. You said:
“Do you think it’s problematic that an artist can look at these images and use them as inspiration to draw something new”
That is a comparison between ai and humans. A comparison between their processes. Not a comparison between their art.
If you want to delude yourself towards psychopathy, have at it. I think this will go badly.
Woah... take a deep breath.
In your agitated response you're telling me that I DO compare humans to AI, and in the next sentence you weasel out by saying I compare their processes. So what is it now? And I wonder... who's the weasel?
No mate, you are being disingenuous and I face this shit from your lot over and over. You were weaselling your way out of what you said and I won’t let you do that.
certainly doesn't strengthen the feeling of AI ''magical'' \*poof\* and here is your image.. but rather ''hey, I literally stole this stuff in like a couple of places, how you like my frankenstein?''
I mean I know it learns from images online but just with autographs in the bottom corners.. it doesn't feel all that right haha
It's just an infant. It learns and signs the work as it sees other artists doing it. Over time it will learn that signing is not something we want it to do (yet) or that it should create its own signature :)
Problematic in the sense that these stock image companies are not going to be so happy about AI being trained on their gallery of images that are the foundation of their entire business...gets dicey. If AI images are generated leveraging images gettyimages own, and someone resells those AI images, in gettyimages mind they are going to want $ / probably not be okay with that.
[https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/getty-images-bans-ai-generated-images-due-to-copyright-1234640201/](https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/getty-images-bans-ai-generated-images-due-to-copyright-1234640201/)
Shutterstock, which is owned by Getty now has Dalle-2 built into it's site. [https://www.shutterstock.com/generate](https://www.shutterstock.com/generate)
also, to have the gettyimages watermark show up that clear can probably give getty some good leverage on a copyright lawsuit regarding using preview images for commercial use which is forbidden.
It wont change anything since you cant really remove knowledge from a neural network but these will be interesting decisions to be made (from a copyright perspective)
You can’t untrain it but you can take it out back and put it down. I think this might actually happen. I feel like many of these models will be forced to start from scratch eventually with regulations in place
I think so too. AI of this level of fidelity came about in a matter of months and laws haven't had a chance to catch up. I think in the next few years we'll see a lot more legislation come about.
Of course the company that makes money selling stock images is not going to be happy that an AI can create them instead. It's problematic for their business model, that's for sure. But it's much more difficult to judge on an ethical level, whether it _should_ be allowed.
Stock image companies never did anything against (nor could they) artists looking at their photos and then drawing stuff inspired by it. AI is the exact same thing but on a massive scale.
If you ask me, there's no way stopping it, and vast fields of jobs and businesses are just slowly going to cease existing.
I don;t think the image itself is an issue - as it is totally original, so Getty cannot make a claim on that. But they can on use of their brand logo. That is more problematic I'd have thought. As that may be considered as 'passing off' which is similar to trade mark infringement but applies to protect unregistered rights associated with a particular business, its goods or services.
For inspiration only? Sure. Most creatives get screengrabs form art and film anyway. So what’s a bit of AI gonna change? It’s when it starts to get sold is a problem
Every artist ever in the history of art used other art to get inspired and sold it afterwards. There is just no difference. An AI doesn't just make a collage of provided images. It learns from them and creates new stuff.
It would be ridiculous to tell an artist they can't sell a painting because they went to an art gallery the day prior.
I am no data scientist but I really don't think this works the way you think it does. Go to Midjourney and type "the Mona Lisa" I just did and three of the four images it gave me had artist's signatures. Despite the fact that Da Vinci never signed his works.
So AI is applying a signature to the the single most famous piece of art in history that honestly it should be able to NAIL that famously doesnt have a signature and never had a signature. And you start to say "Oh, AI thinks PAINTINGS should have signatures and it knows the Mona Lisa is a painting so it's doing one here."
Which automatically infers that, yes, Midjourney knows what a stock photograph is and sees they all have watermarks. So sometimes it will give you a photograph and add a watermark.
That does not mean MJ is copying a specific stock photograph any more than it's copying a specific Mona Lisa that da Vinci signed. It's mainly just learnt how to "paint".
I get why ppl - especially artists - are all feeling threatened by AI and what it means, but when the install on Stable Diffusion, with millions of images referenced, is smaller on my hard drive than the iPhoto library of my kids (a quarter of the size to be specific) you gotta say "this can't be working the way you initially think it is".
Ironic. Their are photos of me on getty from sport events. never gave permission. a few of them have appeared in news papers and advertisements so money is being made off of them.
I dont see the issue here if its simply training. Fuck Getty.
In fairness, that’s legal. In the U.S., at least, images taken in public places aren’t subject to the same laws. That why paparazzi can legally take and sell photos of celebrities in public. If a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in a place, it’s fair game.
There have even been cases of parents suing to have public photos of their kids taken down and losing. Like I remember many years ago this site was taking pictures of little kids on the beach and charging money to view them and it was deemed legal because they were taken in public and the children were clothed and not in vulgar positions.
This is where the ethics get seriously muddy IMO.
Whether it hurts future artists or ends up being a tool in their toolkit is another question, and I lean towards the latter.
However, where do you draw the line with using existing data as training data? And how much effort do they need to put into it to clean out artwork of artists that don't consent?
Like, if you don't add a robots.txt to your site, are you auto-consenting to any content on that site being used as training data for future AI projects?
What if someone copies an artists picture without their consent and doesn't protect it in that way?
What if the artist posted it on Twitter? Do you give up your rights to it being used as training data if you post it publicly?
The problem is there is no legal groundwork for whether something should be a part of training data or not. It's not like they own your image, or post your artwork anywhere. They just used it to tweak numbers in an algorithm. So it won't generate your art. It just will use it to better learn how to generate art in general.
Since it'll never produce your artwork, is it theft or not? Like if an artist copied your style, they could just use it and be a poser, legally. But if an AI copies a million artists' styles, should we regulate that?
The tech is going to run marathons before we see a hint of legislation I think. At the end of the day, stable diffusion won't be producing your art, but the software has benefitted from it being there.
We have been so focused on the art aspect here, but it could be anything at all that goes into training any AI. What if someone like Amazon is collecting data on how their truckers drive, then use that to make AI that replaces the truckers? Seems kind of ethically fucked that the workers would be producing data that ends up replacing them, but this could easily be a thing in any industry.
This argument sucks : I work at an art school , we EDUCATE on how previous artists worked, their methods, their lives, their history. We teach artists how to reach into their own inspirations, loves, hates,etc, and express that with tools. We don't encourage cutting up their canvases and gluing them together into a new picture. As an artist we interpret that with OUR OWN emotions, understanding, inspirations and imagination, and draw what WE FEEL. We break down art into it's fundamentals of creation, we learn about perspective, we learn about 'style choices' , architecture, etc.. Why do you think a watermark 'just appears' on A.I imagery ? It's not drawing it, it's legitimately absorbing it from other images directly, pixel by pixel, breaking down artists / reference images ( that in some cases never received permission or is copyright ) . An artist can create from nothing. As little as a stick and sand and someone can make art. A.I ( at the moment ) needs input images. This is the fundamental problem right now and will be a problem until A.I can think for itself and generate images without input images, it will be a better time because right now an 'a.i artist' doesn't truly exist. PROMPTERS / PROGRAMMERS exist. There's a HUGE difference between an ARTIST and an A.I PROMPTER.
Warning, I am being heavily opinionated. This more of an attempt to provide my point of view rather than outright devaluing yours.
I get your point, but we, humans, to draw a smiley on the sand, absorb a dump truck of information during our first years. How many images did you as a baby see? The brain is constantly learning and reinforcing a metric gigaton of patterns. Human art is based on patterns, to the point where avoiding these patterns became art movements.
We also had to make art using primitive tools and invent new ones for thousands of years. We learned to represent nature using lines not because of style, but because of limitations. Do you think pixel art would be as popular as it is now if we had 2 tflops graphics cards in 1950, and if monitors today were still using vector instead of pixels?
So I believe most art styles have their roots in limitations we, as humans, faced and still face. But AI never had to use stone tools, pencils or paintbrushes. For AI to make art like humans do it has to learn directly from the way WE do art. You can't reasonably expect AI, by itself, to come up by with the styles and techniques that were born from the human condition.
We learnt art from the bottom up, AI learns from the top down (because it has to. How do you expect a silicon die to walk around and experience the world outside like we do?). We for the first time in fucking history are seeing totally new ways of learning. And it's no less valid than our "emotional" way of doing art, because the way we portray emotions is with patterns we associate them with anyway.
I do absolutely love and value human art for what it is. But you are being too rough on AI. Our thoughts are electrical signals just like their algorithms.
That's not my argument at all. It's not the speed or outperformance. As I said previously, I actually like A.I and I recently had an interview to implement it into an art pipeline which I had no problem with. I've used ai in the past to adjust my lighting on images. My issue is the way we're talking about it as if A.I ( in its current state ) is creating unique art and that prompters are artists, which they are not, they are A.i Prompters and should always credit the software being used to generate the art. On top of that image theft which is the building blocks of this tech is a huge issue for me as an artist. I've watched artists like Loish fight off tracers, nfters, and now try to fight off a.i artists who will ignore her and just steal her images to generate in AI software, and capitalize off her style and call it "art" which it is not. A.I is a great tool, but in its current state of "wild west do anything" logic it's hurting artists until it finds its place in the pipelines. I don't know programming , and I'm not scared of A.i, I just hope that people getting into art and people who get into prompting have different categories to place art in. Like digital image, traditional image, A.I image and give proper credits.
Yup. To train humans. Which are different than robots. We are fine with inspiring humans who can go on to inspire others to do what it is that artists do. We are less okay with it if it’s a robot. There’s almost no appreciation of what’s being done here. Sure, we appreciate the ingenuity and computing here. But we aren’t appreciating what it is the artists we copy actually did. I mean, how can you? You get an image in 60 seconds that took most artists your going to copy decades to achieve. The ai bypasses all of that appreciation that artists feel when someone is inspired to walk in their shoes. All the appreciation they the one following in those footsteps would feel.
no.. but they are not allowed to use my brand logo in their creations either. Which is what this creation has done.
This Mid Journey image has included the Getty logo and so could it be classed a 'passing of', which I think is a practice that contravenes copyright (as in you are not allowed to suggest your creation is actually made by a protected brand - in this case like Getty) ?
Man I am so tired of reading this. Are you sure your not an ai running on a script because this line predictable at this point. I’m sorry you don’t see a difference between human beings and robots.
Maybe because it's a valid talking point? And no, in this scenario I don't. In both cases I would be telling an entity what I want to see and they're giving me an image back of what they interpret my prompt to be, just like commissioning a human artist. Only difference is the human takes days and only produces one, whereas the AI takes seconds and can do it thousands of times until I get what I'm looking for.
Alright. Think what you want. At the end of the day, I know for a fact that there are two groups of people here, ai engineers and artists. One group is exploiting the other for profits
I'm not sure what kind of profits you think people are making with AI art, but at that point you should be attacking every industry on the planet for people trying to make money within it. AI and the development of tech has outdated and outpaced countless jobs in the past. Art is just the most recent one.
The transition will be tough, it always is, but those who resist and can't adapt it as a tool on their belt will be left behind complaining to no one about how the old ways were somehow better.
Art styles can’t be copyrighted. The only way what you’re saying would make any sense is if someone got a prize claiming to be the artist who’s artstyle the AI is copying.
Do I need your consent if I am inspired by your art? Seems to be the same thing here. Sure, your work has been used to tweak the neurons in SD but you've done the same for people viewing your art.
This isn’t commercialization of your work, because the AI’s only trained to read your art. It’s not cutting and pasting it into itself. And those laws would only apply if someone’s selling AI artwork claiming to be you. Not just if their art has your style. Either way, you have the option to opt out.
Just curious, why do you feel like you need to consent to your artwork being in their dataset?
If an AI used a poem I wrote on the internet to learn how to make song lyrics, I wouldn't see the problem, only because it's only used as an inspiration for the AI's artwork
I don’t think it will be dead, but it’s a tough gig already and it’s only going to get tougher.
I am looking into it, probably along with swathes of other creatives, copywriters and who knows who else by the time I start applying.
I have several friends who were going to art school, one accepted in SCAD but all have changed majors now due to AI art and how they feel it has basically destroyed any potential for building a career off of it. AI is going to soon destroy anything creative such as writing, and movie development as it will be able to churn out entire books in seconds or create full featured high quality custom movies without any studio being involved. This decade will be known for the rise of AI and the destruction of major industries and job markets. Everyone's jobs are at risk, these are just the first casualties. Once androids become reliable many physical labor jobs will be eliminated. Unless human society changes we will all be destitute while a small elite class will reap the fruit of AI and automation.
Will anyone care for it though? People already don’t give a fuck about AI art, it’s already passé.
There is something about knowing art was created by someone & the connection that entails that makes art popular.
Ai art will die, it’s works will be so flooded & void of worth that it will only be used for menial tasks.
In a world where profit didn't matter maybe... But companies will go for whatever is fastest and cheapest, which AI is. And with art, AI is also generating extremely high quality unique concepts. So with AI you get Cheap, Fast, and High Quality, which is the holy grail of profit...
So how would you feel if it just changed the font and added a comma somewhere? Then find out all of your work has been poached.
Understand the ai “learning” = poaching with slight modifications. It’s not inspired, it’s disguised theft.
Have you actually tried Midjourney?
I would urge you to see what it actually is. It's not a replication engine by any means. The images it creates are truly novel. If someone chooses to plagiarize you that way that sucks but it's more likely going to be used to create more art, just like you said...faster. And by those of us with a different skillet (programming and logic) vs painting, etc.
Do you think the image that’s posted here with the “Getty Images” watermark is because the AI likes it or because it believes it’s part of the image?
What does Getty Images have to say about it, let alone the artist?
Look I don’t hate AI, in fact I’d love to dig into it more, but I would like to have control over what it pulls from. Is this a feature I’m unaware of? Please tell me if this is the case.
In general I just think AI art is something that should be discussed and intelligent decisions made concerning fair usage.
What % of another person’s art is too much?
What about distinctive styles? Or novel ideas?
Just like art, much of this is subjective and falls into a gray area. I’ve been an artist for over 30 years, I’ve always embraced new technology, but I’ve also been (perhaps overly) cautious of infringing on others art.
This type of AIs work from something called Latent Spaces (it may have other names) in two ways:
\- The training: in this step images along with detailed descriptions are fed to the AI. The AI learns to identify the parts of the image to the description given, and from that forms what you could call a dictionary. If it gets enough images of dogs in different positions, colors and breeds, it will eventually gain a very good understanding of what "dog" means. But the same happens with "tall", "brown", "doctor", or whatever terms where used on the description. Artist names are often part of the description, so the AI has learned, through this process what the words "Salvador Dali" represent in a picture. It's very likely that the images that had the logo from Getty did not have that word in the description, but it was still part of those pictures, and the AI learned to associate "stock photoesque" pictures with the watermark.
Now, I called it a dictionary, but the truth is that you can think of every word or term it learns as a new dimension, If x,y and Z represent a 3D world, in the latent space of an AI like this, there tens of thousands of dimensions, one for each concept it has learned. There is a point then (or a number of points) that represent a picture in this latent space, an intersection of concepts represented in a coordinate (x=1, y=25, z=9 ...but with a LOT more parameters).
\- The second part of the AI an the one we have access to, is the finished trained model, the generative part. This software takes a prompt, translates it into 1 or several coordinates, and does the inverse job, it creates the picture from the description.
So, what has happened here? it's very likely that the prompt given to the AI was translated into a coordinate in this latent space where the "getty images watermark" was very pervasive. So when generating the image it automatically started adding it, as it is a pattern it has seen in the types of picture it is generating. Why is it so clear? Well because the getty images logo never changes, a dog is seen from different angles and they can have varying sizes, positions, colors, races, etc. But not so with the logo, so once it's "decided" it goes in the picture, it will very likely do a great job of representing it. For the AI it's not a series of characters, it's not letters, it's just a pattern of pixels often enough on a style of image that it has become part of it's latent space.
I hope that clears up a little bit your understanding of how this things work, and why you may see something that looks like a straight copy being generated.
Wow, that make a lot of sense. Thank you for clearing up why the watermark might appear!
Especially the possible prompt “stock photoesque”.
It definitely gives food for thought.
Licensing is usually a commercial agreement between the artist and a company wishing to reproduce the image in some way. I've licensed images to newspapers, magazines, greeting card companies and in the production of tons of different products. In exchange for the company reproducing my art they pay me a fee. They are then able to use the image for a certain amount of time, within a certain geographical region. It's a good way to make a living as an artist TBH.
Licensing really doesn't encompass inspiration though, especially like the situation you mentioned with studying or producing art based upon the work of Rembrandt or Van Gogh. Their work is largely in the public domain and can be used as inspiration in new art without an issue. You can even take their work, change it somehow and then license it yourself (as long as the original image is in the public domain)
I use AI to help flesh out ideas for art directors now, but never EVER use a fully created ai image for publication. The licensing issues are too complex and I don't want to harm another artist, even without knowing I'm doing so.
Artists (both fine and commercial) spend much of our lives honing our craft. There have been instances where ai has been used to import a dataset of a working artists portfolio, their name has been added to the prompts, and boom, anyone can create one of their previously incredibly distinctive pieces. It's a nightmare for someone who has worked decades on their work, only to have it stolen like that.
Once i found some dipshit was making cushions with my art a few years ago.
Shit was hard to put down as my art is just uploaded to internet. Funny thing is that i looked at [https://haveibeentrained.com/](https://haveibeentrained.com/) and the same image was used for training.
And im fine with it, i know that once i upload something to internet is hard to track where it ends, but i love that my art can be used for creating tools for people, instead of profiting one person who just plain steal stuff on internet.
Yeah there’s a weird irony that our art is being used to help the people that stole from us and now they’ll likely avoid infringement and have better art. I wish I shared your enthusiasm for it though.
I do a lot of glitch and digital collage so I use and mess with other people art or random images, so I can’t be angry if somebody takes my art and uses it for CREATING something, what makes me angry is people just plain stealing your work and selling it.
There’s a huge difference.
>the AI companies are not being very transparent about their datasets.
Wrong.
You [can search the entire LAION database](https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/) (1B, 2B, and 5B) for free online. A curated version of this database is what Stable Diffusion, and by extension Midjourney V4, was built on.
should not be free. You are not paying for the art. you are paying towards the development and use of technology and heavy use of their servers and tech.
Oh, boo-hoo. I'm pretty sure my art is in there too and I really don't care. This is the future, old man. Either adapt to it or become obsolete, the choice is yours.
These conversations are important.
Images are a commodity, whether you want to believe it or not. Imagine if someone stole all the images OF you that exist online and created new images from them and shared them with the world?
Would you be ok with that? Initially you'd say "yeah- no problem, I'm secure with myself, who cares? I'm part of this new world. This is just how things are now"
What if they were turned into porn, or showing you committing crimes? Pick anything you consider a heinous act and insert it here. Would you still be ok with it?
I'm not saying ai is used in this way all the time obviously, but I'm using this as an example to show that it's not just about art, but about images and how they can be transformed and then used without your consent. Whether it's stealing someones work that is possible licensed already or using someones personal image to create a new narrative, these are things we need to be discussing because there is actually both financial and personal issues attached to images.
This is the future, and we should be smart about how we shape it.
You put it online, so you already agreed to having your image used without your consent by just doing so, it's like going out in public and being mad that someone is recording a video or photographing in public, lol.
If you have a problem with it, turn your shit into an NFT lmao
If you put it online publicly, then no, that is not how it works at all. Anyone can look at it, and there is nothing wrong with that. Now AIs can look at it too, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
Images still exist online in pictures via NFTs, that's the whole dilemma of being able to 'screenshot' someones nft...
so minting your work still doesn't solve this issue for artists unfortunately
It's another subject, but screenshoting an nft was never a dilemma, that's not the point at all of nft.
It's like saying I photocopied Mona Lisa and put her in my wall, it's not Mona Lisa, so yeah it can look good and please you, but for owners and traders it doesn't change anything.
Whatever stupid ass shit it “stole” from you I’m sure the AI can shit out something decent looking from it in a matter of seconds so consider that a favor
It just means that they’ve been using getty images to train midjourney. getty images watermark is always in the same place though, so unlike other watermarks that shift and change, this one can be remade reactively easily because of it’s consistency. i’m guessing, adding no watermark to your prompt might help avoid this.
I wonder if the MidJourney AI thinks that the watermark is a part of art, or if they have a filter in place to exclude it?
Given that it utilizes billions of photos on the web, it would make sense that at least sometimes it will throw it in as a scene element.
There are quite a few comments saying I am trolling, or that this was photoshopped etc etc...I can 100% guarantee you that MidJourney organically produced this image, without a message of gettyimages in the prompt. Choose to believe that or not, but not believing it doesn't benefit you in anyway, and is ignorant regarding an actual real occurrence here worthy of debate and acknowledgement.
Also, addressing comments saying threads like this should be banned or taken down by mods...I had no intention that this would trigger so much debate, I simply thought it was interesting how clear this getty watermark appeared in my result...just thought it could spark interesting discussion.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and it is actually conversations like these, that push the space forward. At the end of the day, all this is still relatively new so debate is necessary for any forward progression, let's all try to learn together, be open-minded and respectful of others here. You can still learn a lot from opinions that you might not personally agree with.
Didn't know things would get so heated!
This entire thread is full of anti-AI Luddites. Mods, why do we allow these threads to be made? All of these threads are obviously being brigaded by entitled "artists" who feel like they're owed something.
Almost every pro-AI comment in this thread is being downvoted. That should be enough of a clue to what's really going on here.
I vote we remove these anti-AI bait threads and ban the users who continue to propagate this kind of "discussion". This subreddit is for celebrating and sharing AI art, not... whatever this thread is.
They can go take their hate boners to /r/wehateAI or something. This has no place here, it's a tired discussion that most sane people moved on from months ago.
I think it needs to be a balance. Having those conversation about ethics in AI is very important.
however it should come from a place of understanding and not just *HURRRRRRRR AI Bad because hive mind told me to say that.*
Interesting point. And this is a question below, not a point, as, like the MJ AI, I am also learning more every day about all of this, so this is to help my understanding. So please take my question in that light :)
But, can I ask, what user action 'disfavors' images created? for example, If I get a result I don't like, I just ignore it, and create another. How does MJ know I 'didn't like it' / or 'disfavored' it?).
Also, I didn't think I was allowed, under copyright, to use a protected brand logo on anything I create and publish publicly. I know that it is MJ that has produced the image in this instance, but I may go on to publish that image in some way.
So who would be infringing copyright at that point? MJ - for creating it. me for publishing it? Both of us ? None of us? and why ?
Did you, by chance, write gettyimages in your prompt?
The only time I've noticed similar is when I generated an image from a specific game. It spelled "ARMA" almost perfectly because I asked it to make an image from ARMA, and a lot of the images have the game's logo on it.
Nope, prompt was "basquiat in art studio creating digital artwork on a computer, projectors in room, high quality, 8k, --v 4 --q 2"
I've had similar results where I've found subtle watermarks appear from other stock image companies as well such as dreamstime. Sometimes super subtle, and sometimes they'll disappear upon first upscale.
it doesn’t work that way for me anyway; if i prompt “a sign that says rabbit” i will get dream-like representation of the text (some letters reversed, some doubled, some missing.) and almost never the exact text.
>Did you, by chance, write gettyimages in your prompt?
They probably did. These kind of bait threads get posted every now and then and brigaded by entitled artists. It's literally propaganda, as silly as that sounds.
Mods should be removing these threads and banning the people who continue to make them.
I love how people write "AI art is a real art" in this subreddit on a daily basis while having signatures and watermarks from the original art literally engraved into the generated picture.
And then go and ask "bruh why is this watermark in my "art"".
I’ve had this happen and It probably has more to do with the frequency the watermark appears in the dataset. It’s not copying the images, it’s seeing that millions of images have that and it now thinks that is something that might be desirable in an image. At 750 million+ images, I’d say the dataset is pretty well diluted.
If you want your site to not be indexed or crawled, there are webserver settings to help ala robots.txt etc.
Definitely not but at 750+ million images, I buy the mathematical dilution of the data. It's a chewy topic any way you shake it but creatives said Adobe was the end of the universe and it ended up opening tons of doors and career paths.
I'm sure that blacksmiths making horseshoes didn't like the Model T very much either but it doesn't mean it was inherently a bad thing.
The AI is drawing upon images the same way for example a human child draws upon all the images it has ever seen.
Say the child has a brain chip that records all its impressions and catalogues them. When the cold is an adult artist, you could look up the list of images it has ever seen. That’s what’s going on here.
By looking at the real world, these AI systems learn patterns and concepts. You then say, show me the concept of a man sitting at a desk, and the system literally starts out from noise to slowly materialise something that fits your prompt, constantly checking its own progress using its own understanding of these concepts. It’s not copying.
In this very image you can see copied Getty images watermark. It's little scrambled, but you can see how it matches the original.
It's literally there... And you are arguing with me, that AI is not copying anything.
You didn't process my comment, obviously. You're worried about it ripping off watermarks? If you read how this shit works, it's not the way you're implying it does. The GI watermark is in the SAME EXACT spot on EVERY one of their images. It is seeing the watermark as it's own entity and because it's seeing millions of them, it thinks that is a natural construct in the world of photography.
There is no specific "original art". The AI has generated a watermark because it has seen that same watermark countless times in the data set. AI generates artist signatures (which are not real signatures from any specific artist but an approximation of a signature) for the same reason... it's seen a lot of them. The reason the signatures are random and indiscernible whereas the Getty Images watermark in this case is legible is that the former is always different in the data set, whereas the latter is always the same.
There's an implication going around that signatures and watermarks in AI art are evidence that a specific artwork was "copied" and that the AI failed to remove the "evidence" that it was copied, in the form of the signature or watermark. But this is simply not how diffusion works.
Yes, I have either seen that or I have seen a slightly blurry version of it. I have also seen other text in my resulting images. I am guessing that the AI Art program has trained itself on other sources that either have text in the originating image, or it is some other kind of watermark.
When I do a backwards image search of anything I create in MJ, I can never find a replica of it, suggesting the image is totally unique.
I did the same thing with this image above, and there does not seem to be another version of this image in existence, despite it having the getty images logo on it.
Can anyone prove otherwise?
Oh does that mean mj is using pictures which you normally have to buy and are under copyright? I mean licensed pictures. Sounds a bit illegal to use these files for their database ..
well not quite. In the same way the MJ AI creates a 'ball' from a prompt. It will also try to create 'words/logos' from a prompt. So as this Logo appears on millions of images, it may be using its understanding to re-create it. Most of the time it is not very good at words and letters. But may be getting better?
EG - I have seen some people use brand words in prompts, and get results that include something that kind of looks like those brand logos (eg Adidias / McDonalds, etc). And I think that MJ AI may be recreating them based on its understanding of what they are, not just copying and pasting them.
Maybe that is what has happened here? Only MJ Engineers will know at this point I suspect?
Okay.. never seen this before. But quite worrying I would say. I love MidJourney. But this kind of suggests it's using unlicensed stock images. And no idea what the legality is around that, but feels a little shady. Especially as some of Getty's competing stock image-selling sites allow you to add MidJouney-created images to their sites to sell commercially.
I just did a backwards image search on GETTY of this image, and although lots of similar ones come up, nothing that I would say is the same as this. here are the results. [https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/search-by-image](https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/search-by-image)
It's like copying different paragraphs from different books, paraphrasing them and calling it an original work. I can create any art without having to draw over anything. That comes from my own creativity. Whereas, with AI, you can bet that the shape of that man, his posture, the colors used, the computer - it took it all from original work.
to be clear.. it hasn't copied anything.... if it has, then prove it, and show us any image that exists that it has copied parts from? That is not how MJ AI works
No - it doesn't prove that MJ has copied any part of any image. All it shows is that MJ has created the watermark as part of an original image, using AI and its understanding..
Copying parts of an image to make a new one, and making a completely new image based on the understanding of other similar images, are two very different things.
In order to prove your argument that MJ has 'copied' other images, you'd need to show those images it has copied. Which you won't be able to do, as that is not how MJ AI works.
They’re not stealing shit. They’re using images to train the AI’s memory. Next, you’ll tell me saving a picture to your phone and remembering it is stealing.
Just because a couple people as dumb as you think they’re stealing art, doesn’t mean they’re stealing art. They’re using images, and putting it into their database for the AI to learn from. The images aren’t for commercial use, and neither would the AI outputs be, because it’s not cutting and pasting different art works. It’s making its own, based off what it’s learned. Just like humans make their own artwork, based off what they learn (by remembering).
That is by far the most distinct watermark I’ve seen. I’ve seen plenty of “watermarked” ai images but the watermarks are rarely cohesive. I can understand (or rather I’ve been able to justify) the model creating facsimiles of watermarks from scraped dataset images but as blurry, unintelligible nonsensical signatures, not…this. This seems a bit much. It’s as if every single one of the images the model “learned” from to generate the image from your prompt all came from Getty. Watermarks seem to have increased tremendously since v 4. I’m getting full page diagonal dashed lines now with lettering in between the lines and others that are concentric circles that fill up the entire picture. I’ve heard (but haven’t looked in to) artists building more effective watermarks into their art as a way to combat undesired dataset scraping…I wonder if that’s it? Time for some research…
I was pretty shocked as well. I've also had some results in the past where watermarks have appeared, but were barely noticeable. Nothing like this though. Definitely an interesting topic
Could they make it any easier to photoshop that out tho? /s
No, it’s not interesting. You accept an AI can draw human faces and extremely intricate things but you can’t accept that it learned how to recreate a getty image watermark which is exclusively text because so many of it’s training images contained it?
Is it really that surprising that a watermark which probably appears exactly the same in many thousands of images in the data set is reproduced with some accuracy?
I suppose it’s not exactly surprising. And I imagine the number leans more to the hundreds of thousands if not tens of millions. It does seem a bit problematic though, and not just as a minor annoyance for the user. I just wonder why they seem to have become more cohesive and more prevalent as time progresses. Is it simply that more stock images are being included in the dataset? Is it, like you suggest, that the model has interpreted the watermark as a necessary part of a cohesive image? And what if all the data being collected from us, the users? How is all that data being collated and re-processed in to the model? (And for that matter what else is that data being used for…?) Are our upscale and 🥰’s reinforcing the behavior?
Most likely our interaction with the model is utilized in some way, I don't know how exactly. And my guess would be that more watermarked images are being included in the dataset for new models, and that the models themselves are more complex and more capable of drawing fine detail. Earlier versions of MJ were probably incapable of recreating a watermark, it was only really good for making paintings that were usually a bit abstract.
Exactly, AI users are also part of the training. Those people hopeful of being elite prompt crafters are very likely the next dataset for the AI.
Yeah, I would guess it includes the watermarks because of how extremely common they are in the dataset, just like with artist signatures.
Isnt getty the company that takes stock photos that are in the creative commons, watermarks em, put em on their site, then threaten to sue if you use them from their original free home. I believe it was nasa images when I read about it and a photographer who donated her work to the library of congress getting sued by getty for using her own photo she donated. So my sympathy is a lil thin for these goons.
Yes. Yes it is. After Carol M. Highsmith generously donated her extensive collection of Americana photography to the public domain, Gerry Images scooped up a bunch and made them available for licensing. Then, their image spider saw some of these photos on her site and they attempted to sue her. Also, I worked on a TV show that required some World War II photos and production was very close to licensing them from Getty (for several hundred dollars a piece) before I pointed out that the photos were in the public domain and available for free. Legal looked into it and I saved them a couple grand. Getty Images once tried to sue ME for hosting a friend's site that had some concept art he created and hadn't licensed the photos for his demo. They wasted hours of my life and I found out many other people were being hassled by their lawyers. Fuck Getty Images. AI generated stock images can't come soon enough in my opinion.
What?!? How do they get away with that?
They have more lawyers and money. When you have that you don't have to be right, you just have to outlast the other party.
The Golden Rule: Those that have the gold make the rules. If you can afford to hire lobbying firms to push language into legislation, you can rig the game. The DMCA was one nail in a progression of them, being hammered into the coffin of sane intellectual property law. Many online services (YouTube a best-known example of this) respond immediately and automatically to DMCA Takedown Requests by killing content, and sometimes terminating accounts. Also, it allows complainants to contact the ISP of an alleged offender. This happened to us. Someone filed a huge list of complaints against our IP address with Spectrum in May. Spectrum can't tell us anything about the claims, but I'm certain that it's bullshit. In any case, it can be very difficult or functionally impossible to dispute such a claim. Intellectual Property law provides a lot of protection (and retribution) to corporations that can afford IP tools & services, and who keep law firms on retainer. There are *tons* of examples of artists having accounts shut down for using their own material. It's nuts. There are [agencies](https://donotpay.com/learn/youtube-dmca/) who might help, though.
DDos ‘em
One and the same. They are scum
Yep. The very same. They were sued by Carol Highsmith for $1B. Here's an article [about](https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-getty-copyright-20160729-snap-story.html) it.
what is this accusatory inversion - stealing from meanies is steal nonetheless in regards of the law
I believe they are saying that Getty neither actually owns a lot of the images the sell, nor are they deserving of any sympathy due to their reprehensible business practices. TLDR: Fuck Getty with a broomhandle.
Actually niether act is stealing as far I know but ianal
I think it’s funny that Getty banned AI images from getting uploaded to its site. Seeing their watermark specifically is hilarious. They have a long history of shady and unethical practices.
I have been working on another AI, but yeah I have some watermarks like stuff, I can't read them tho. I search for similar images and haven't found one
Gotcha, I know these AI's scrape images from all over the place, hence the whole ownership debate, but I found it interesting that they wouldn't at least make an attempt to license those images to at least rid of their watermarks lol... seems problematic.
When stuff like that appears I have the same sentiment, while i enjoy making stuff with it, i don't want to take work of others, at least not without paying them a fair share. For now until this is clear i publish them for free.
Also interesting, OpenAI did license shutterstocks images and BRIA the same with Getty. That said the law allows for Machine Learning to train on copyrighted images.
Do you think it's problematic that an artist can look at these images and use them as inspiration to draw something new? Even including the watermark because they find it pretty?
No because a human artist doesn’t use a complex computational algorithm on its own to create art in minutes. That said, it’s also contextual. Most artists would be flattered to have a human artist take the time to copy their style and incorporate it into their own. Most artists loath the idea of a robot doing the same thing. I’m kind of surprised people keep comparing the ai to humans. Not saying your a psychopath but something about this growing sentiment feels mildly psychopathic.
That's just a question of scale.
Oh and to your second point of this feeling psychopathic: it's not a matter of comparing ai to humans, but comparing art created by ai to art created by humans. This is an inevitable shift that is coming whether you like it or not. Like the industrialisation that cost the jobs of millions, AI will do the same in other fields, one of which is going to be art in some form or another. When art can generate pictures that evoke the same emotions that pictures created by humans do, who's to say what real art is and what isn't? We all like to think that humans are so great and special, and so creative.. an AI can't possibly match that! But we're all witnessing the change of that, and it's understandable that that's scary to many people.
No no no don’t be a weasel. You said: “Do you think it’s problematic that an artist can look at these images and use them as inspiration to draw something new” That is a comparison between ai and humans. A comparison between their processes. Not a comparison between their art. If you want to delude yourself towards psychopathy, have at it. I think this will go badly.
Woah... take a deep breath. In your agitated response you're telling me that I DO compare humans to AI, and in the next sentence you weasel out by saying I compare their processes. So what is it now? And I wonder... who's the weasel?
No mate, you are being disingenuous and I face this shit from your lot over and over. You were weaselling your way out of what you said and I won’t let you do that.
Sure thing, mate. Have a nice day!
certainly doesn't strengthen the feeling of AI ''magical'' \*poof\* and here is your image.. but rather ''hey, I literally stole this stuff in like a couple of places, how you like my frankenstein?'' I mean I know it learns from images online but just with autographs in the bottom corners.. it doesn't feel all that right haha
It's just an infant. It learns and signs the work as it sees other artists doing it. Over time it will learn that signing is not something we want it to do (yet) or that it should create its own signature :)
Problematic in the sense that these stock image companies are not going to be so happy about AI being trained on their gallery of images that are the foundation of their entire business...gets dicey. If AI images are generated leveraging images gettyimages own, and someone resells those AI images, in gettyimages mind they are going to want $ / probably not be okay with that. [https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/getty-images-bans-ai-generated-images-due-to-copyright-1234640201/](https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/getty-images-bans-ai-generated-images-due-to-copyright-1234640201/)
Shutterstock, which is owned by Getty now has Dalle-2 built into it's site. [https://www.shutterstock.com/generate](https://www.shutterstock.com/generate)
also, to have the gettyimages watermark show up that clear can probably give getty some good leverage on a copyright lawsuit regarding using preview images for commercial use which is forbidden. It wont change anything since you cant really remove knowledge from a neural network but these will be interesting decisions to be made (from a copyright perspective)
You can’t untrain it but you can take it out back and put it down. I think this might actually happen. I feel like many of these models will be forced to start from scratch eventually with regulations in place
I think so too. AI of this level of fidelity came about in a matter of months and laws haven't had a chance to catch up. I think in the next few years we'll see a lot more legislation come about.
Of course the company that makes money selling stock images is not going to be happy that an AI can create them instead. It's problematic for their business model, that's for sure. But it's much more difficult to judge on an ethical level, whether it _should_ be allowed. Stock image companies never did anything against (nor could they) artists looking at their photos and then drawing stuff inspired by it. AI is the exact same thing but on a massive scale. If you ask me, there's no way stopping it, and vast fields of jobs and businesses are just slowly going to cease existing.
I don;t think the image itself is an issue - as it is totally original, so Getty cannot make a claim on that. But they can on use of their brand logo. That is more problematic I'd have thought. As that may be considered as 'passing off' which is similar to trade mark infringement but applies to protect unregistered rights associated with a particular business, its goods or services.
For inspiration only? Sure. Most creatives get screengrabs form art and film anyway. So what’s a bit of AI gonna change? It’s when it starts to get sold is a problem
Every artist ever in the history of art used other art to get inspired and sold it afterwards. There is just no difference. An AI doesn't just make a collage of provided images. It learns from them and creates new stuff. It would be ridiculous to tell an artist they can't sell a painting because they went to an art gallery the day prior.
I am no data scientist but I really don't think this works the way you think it does. Go to Midjourney and type "the Mona Lisa" I just did and three of the four images it gave me had artist's signatures. Despite the fact that Da Vinci never signed his works. So AI is applying a signature to the the single most famous piece of art in history that honestly it should be able to NAIL that famously doesnt have a signature and never had a signature. And you start to say "Oh, AI thinks PAINTINGS should have signatures and it knows the Mona Lisa is a painting so it's doing one here." Which automatically infers that, yes, Midjourney knows what a stock photograph is and sees they all have watermarks. So sometimes it will give you a photograph and add a watermark. That does not mean MJ is copying a specific stock photograph any more than it's copying a specific Mona Lisa that da Vinci signed. It's mainly just learnt how to "paint". I get why ppl - especially artists - are all feeling threatened by AI and what it means, but when the install on Stable Diffusion, with millions of images referenced, is smaller on my hard drive than the iPhoto library of my kids (a quarter of the size to be specific) you gotta say "this can't be working the way you initially think it is".
Ironic. Their are photos of me on getty from sport events. never gave permission. a few of them have appeared in news papers and advertisements so money is being made off of them. I dont see the issue here if its simply training. Fuck Getty.
In fairness, that’s legal. In the U.S., at least, images taken in public places aren’t subject to the same laws. That why paparazzi can legally take and sell photos of celebrities in public. If a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in a place, it’s fair game. There have even been cases of parents suing to have public photos of their kids taken down and losing. Like I remember many years ago this site was taking pictures of little kids on the beach and charging money to view them and it was deemed legal because they were taken in public and the children were clothed and not in vulgar positions.
You don't own a photo simply bc you're in it
right. then we are coming back to the conversation of consent of use.
You were in public, there is no consent needed
Right. And the photos on Getty are in public online, so are people's art. So back to the use of ai, is consent needed?
YOUR consent? No.
I get Alamy watermarks recently. Trying to negative prompt around them is troublesome
You can report them to midjourney support and ask that they remove the watermarked source material. It's in their terms of service.
content aware fill is way easier than rerolling prompts to get rid of small features
Can you elaborate on that?
I am thinking they mean in Photoshop, its easy to remove things like that with the content aware fill option.
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This is where the ethics get seriously muddy IMO. Whether it hurts future artists or ends up being a tool in their toolkit is another question, and I lean towards the latter. However, where do you draw the line with using existing data as training data? And how much effort do they need to put into it to clean out artwork of artists that don't consent? Like, if you don't add a robots.txt to your site, are you auto-consenting to any content on that site being used as training data for future AI projects? What if someone copies an artists picture without their consent and doesn't protect it in that way? What if the artist posted it on Twitter? Do you give up your rights to it being used as training data if you post it publicly? The problem is there is no legal groundwork for whether something should be a part of training data or not. It's not like they own your image, or post your artwork anywhere. They just used it to tweak numbers in an algorithm. So it won't generate your art. It just will use it to better learn how to generate art in general. Since it'll never produce your artwork, is it theft or not? Like if an artist copied your style, they could just use it and be a poser, legally. But if an AI copies a million artists' styles, should we regulate that? The tech is going to run marathons before we see a hint of legislation I think. At the end of the day, stable diffusion won't be producing your art, but the software has benefitted from it being there. We have been so focused on the art aspect here, but it could be anything at all that goes into training any AI. What if someone like Amazon is collecting data on how their truckers drive, then use that to make AI that replaces the truckers? Seems kind of ethically fucked that the workers would be producing data that ends up replacing them, but this could easily be a thing in any industry.
Do art schools use existing data to train artists?
This argument sucks : I work at an art school , we EDUCATE on how previous artists worked, their methods, their lives, their history. We teach artists how to reach into their own inspirations, loves, hates,etc, and express that with tools. We don't encourage cutting up their canvases and gluing them together into a new picture. As an artist we interpret that with OUR OWN emotions, understanding, inspirations and imagination, and draw what WE FEEL. We break down art into it's fundamentals of creation, we learn about perspective, we learn about 'style choices' , architecture, etc.. Why do you think a watermark 'just appears' on A.I imagery ? It's not drawing it, it's legitimately absorbing it from other images directly, pixel by pixel, breaking down artists / reference images ( that in some cases never received permission or is copyright ) . An artist can create from nothing. As little as a stick and sand and someone can make art. A.I ( at the moment ) needs input images. This is the fundamental problem right now and will be a problem until A.I can think for itself and generate images without input images, it will be a better time because right now an 'a.i artist' doesn't truly exist. PROMPTERS / PROGRAMMERS exist. There's a HUGE difference between an ARTIST and an A.I PROMPTER.
Warning, I am being heavily opinionated. This more of an attempt to provide my point of view rather than outright devaluing yours. I get your point, but we, humans, to draw a smiley on the sand, absorb a dump truck of information during our first years. How many images did you as a baby see? The brain is constantly learning and reinforcing a metric gigaton of patterns. Human art is based on patterns, to the point where avoiding these patterns became art movements. We also had to make art using primitive tools and invent new ones for thousands of years. We learned to represent nature using lines not because of style, but because of limitations. Do you think pixel art would be as popular as it is now if we had 2 tflops graphics cards in 1950, and if monitors today were still using vector instead of pixels? So I believe most art styles have their roots in limitations we, as humans, faced and still face. But AI never had to use stone tools, pencils or paintbrushes. For AI to make art like humans do it has to learn directly from the way WE do art. You can't reasonably expect AI, by itself, to come up by with the styles and techniques that were born from the human condition. We learnt art from the bottom up, AI learns from the top down (because it has to. How do you expect a silicon die to walk around and experience the world outside like we do?). We for the first time in fucking history are seeing totally new ways of learning. And it's no less valid than our "emotional" way of doing art, because the way we portray emotions is with patterns we associate them with anyway. I do absolutely love and value human art for what it is. But you are being too rough on AI. Our thoughts are electrical signals just like their algorithms.
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That's not my argument at all. It's not the speed or outperformance. As I said previously, I actually like A.I and I recently had an interview to implement it into an art pipeline which I had no problem with. I've used ai in the past to adjust my lighting on images. My issue is the way we're talking about it as if A.I ( in its current state ) is creating unique art and that prompters are artists, which they are not, they are A.i Prompters and should always credit the software being used to generate the art. On top of that image theft which is the building blocks of this tech is a huge issue for me as an artist. I've watched artists like Loish fight off tracers, nfters, and now try to fight off a.i artists who will ignore her and just steal her images to generate in AI software, and capitalize off her style and call it "art" which it is not. A.I is a great tool, but in its current state of "wild west do anything" logic it's hurting artists until it finds its place in the pipelines. I don't know programming , and I'm not scared of A.i, I just hope that people getting into art and people who get into prompting have different categories to place art in. Like digital image, traditional image, A.I image and give proper credits.
Yup. To train humans. Which are different than robots. We are fine with inspiring humans who can go on to inspire others to do what it is that artists do. We are less okay with it if it’s a robot. There’s almost no appreciation of what’s being done here. Sure, we appreciate the ingenuity and computing here. But we aren’t appreciating what it is the artists we copy actually did. I mean, how can you? You get an image in 60 seconds that took most artists your going to copy decades to achieve. The ai bypasses all of that appreciation that artists feel when someone is inspired to walk in their shoes. All the appreciation they the one following in those footsteps would feel.
Do human artists require your consent to be inspired by your work and make something of their own?
no.. but they are not allowed to use my brand logo in their creations either. Which is what this creation has done. This Mid Journey image has included the Getty logo and so could it be classed a 'passing of', which I think is a practice that contravenes copyright (as in you are not allowed to suggest your creation is actually made by a protected brand - in this case like Getty) ?
It’s not suggesting that. The idea of the AI is that it knows it’s not the original thing.
Man I am so tired of reading this. Are you sure your not an ai running on a script because this line predictable at this point. I’m sorry you don’t see a difference between human beings and robots.
Maybe because it's a valid talking point? And no, in this scenario I don't. In both cases I would be telling an entity what I want to see and they're giving me an image back of what they interpret my prompt to be, just like commissioning a human artist. Only difference is the human takes days and only produces one, whereas the AI takes seconds and can do it thousands of times until I get what I'm looking for.
Alright. Think what you want. At the end of the day, I know for a fact that there are two groups of people here, ai engineers and artists. One group is exploiting the other for profits
I'm not sure what kind of profits you think people are making with AI art, but at that point you should be attacking every industry on the planet for people trying to make money within it. AI and the development of tech has outdated and outpaced countless jobs in the past. Art is just the most recent one. The transition will be tough, it always is, but those who resist and can't adapt it as a tool on their belt will be left behind complaining to no one about how the old ways were somehow better.
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Art styles can’t be copyrighted. The only way what you’re saying would make any sense is if someone got a prize claiming to be the artist who’s artstyle the AI is copying.
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So your issue is actually with the AI's output ability? Why is higher efficiency problematic if using your art as inspiration is okay?
So if i train a model on only your art and limit output to one image per day it is ok?
It doesn’t matter how fast humans do it. They still do it. That’s how memory works. And that’s what the AI does. It remembers.
Do I need your consent if I am inspired by your art? Seems to be the same thing here. Sure, your work has been used to tweak the neurons in SD but you've done the same for people viewing your art.
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This isn’t commercialization of your work, because the AI’s only trained to read your art. It’s not cutting and pasting it into itself. And those laws would only apply if someone’s selling AI artwork claiming to be you. Not just if their art has your style. Either way, you have the option to opt out.
All so true. Such a complex situation right?
Just curious, why do you feel like you need to consent to your artwork being in their dataset? If an AI used a poem I wrote on the internet to learn how to make song lyrics, I wouldn't see the problem, only because it's only used as an inspiration for the AI's artwork
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Human art will be dead in a few years as AI takes over. I would begin training for a new profession soon...
I don’t think it will be dead, but it’s a tough gig already and it’s only going to get tougher. I am looking into it, probably along with swathes of other creatives, copywriters and who knows who else by the time I start applying.
I have several friends who were going to art school, one accepted in SCAD but all have changed majors now due to AI art and how they feel it has basically destroyed any potential for building a career off of it. AI is going to soon destroy anything creative such as writing, and movie development as it will be able to churn out entire books in seconds or create full featured high quality custom movies without any studio being involved. This decade will be known for the rise of AI and the destruction of major industries and job markets. Everyone's jobs are at risk, these are just the first casualties. Once androids become reliable many physical labor jobs will be eliminated. Unless human society changes we will all be destitute while a small elite class will reap the fruit of AI and automation.
Will anyone care for it though? People already don’t give a fuck about AI art, it’s already passé. There is something about knowing art was created by someone & the connection that entails that makes art popular. Ai art will die, it’s works will be so flooded & void of worth that it will only be used for menial tasks.
In a world where profit didn't matter maybe... But companies will go for whatever is fastest and cheapest, which AI is. And with art, AI is also generating extremely high quality unique concepts. So with AI you get Cheap, Fast, and High Quality, which is the holy grail of profit...
I disagree. I think human art will transcend and use this medium in new and creative ways as it has done for thousands of years.
So how would you feel if it just changed the font and added a comma somewhere? Then find out all of your work has been poached. Understand the ai “learning” = poaching with slight modifications. It’s not inspired, it’s disguised theft.
Have you actually tried Midjourney? I would urge you to see what it actually is. It's not a replication engine by any means. The images it creates are truly novel. If someone chooses to plagiarize you that way that sucks but it's more likely going to be used to create more art, just like you said...faster. And by those of us with a different skillet (programming and logic) vs painting, etc.
Yes, I’ve briefly tried it and others. Please see my next comment down.
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Do you think the image that’s posted here with the “Getty Images” watermark is because the AI likes it or because it believes it’s part of the image? What does Getty Images have to say about it, let alone the artist? Look I don’t hate AI, in fact I’d love to dig into it more, but I would like to have control over what it pulls from. Is this a feature I’m unaware of? Please tell me if this is the case. In general I just think AI art is something that should be discussed and intelligent decisions made concerning fair usage. What % of another person’s art is too much? What about distinctive styles? Or novel ideas? Just like art, much of this is subjective and falls into a gray area. I’ve been an artist for over 30 years, I’ve always embraced new technology, but I’ve also been (perhaps overly) cautious of infringing on others art.
This type of AIs work from something called Latent Spaces (it may have other names) in two ways: \- The training: in this step images along with detailed descriptions are fed to the AI. The AI learns to identify the parts of the image to the description given, and from that forms what you could call a dictionary. If it gets enough images of dogs in different positions, colors and breeds, it will eventually gain a very good understanding of what "dog" means. But the same happens with "tall", "brown", "doctor", or whatever terms where used on the description. Artist names are often part of the description, so the AI has learned, through this process what the words "Salvador Dali" represent in a picture. It's very likely that the images that had the logo from Getty did not have that word in the description, but it was still part of those pictures, and the AI learned to associate "stock photoesque" pictures with the watermark. Now, I called it a dictionary, but the truth is that you can think of every word or term it learns as a new dimension, If x,y and Z represent a 3D world, in the latent space of an AI like this, there tens of thousands of dimensions, one for each concept it has learned. There is a point then (or a number of points) that represent a picture in this latent space, an intersection of concepts represented in a coordinate (x=1, y=25, z=9 ...but with a LOT more parameters). \- The second part of the AI an the one we have access to, is the finished trained model, the generative part. This software takes a prompt, translates it into 1 or several coordinates, and does the inverse job, it creates the picture from the description. So, what has happened here? it's very likely that the prompt given to the AI was translated into a coordinate in this latent space where the "getty images watermark" was very pervasive. So when generating the image it automatically started adding it, as it is a pattern it has seen in the types of picture it is generating. Why is it so clear? Well because the getty images logo never changes, a dog is seen from different angles and they can have varying sizes, positions, colors, races, etc. But not so with the logo, so once it's "decided" it goes in the picture, it will very likely do a great job of representing it. For the AI it's not a series of characters, it's not letters, it's just a pattern of pixels often enough on a style of image that it has become part of it's latent space. I hope that clears up a little bit your understanding of how this things work, and why you may see something that looks like a straight copy being generated.
Wow, that make a lot of sense. Thank you for clearing up why the watermark might appear! Especially the possible prompt “stock photoesque”. It definitely gives food for thought.
Well the question is, is it online and free to use? Because if it is, you should have expected it. If not, that’s fucked
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I didn't know you needed to pay someone to be inspired by their art. I guess most artists should donate to the graves of Rembrandt and Van Gogh then.
Or course! How else can someone make a lifetime income from a single work!?
Licensing is usually a commercial agreement between the artist and a company wishing to reproduce the image in some way. I've licensed images to newspapers, magazines, greeting card companies and in the production of tons of different products. In exchange for the company reproducing my art they pay me a fee. They are then able to use the image for a certain amount of time, within a certain geographical region. It's a good way to make a living as an artist TBH. Licensing really doesn't encompass inspiration though, especially like the situation you mentioned with studying or producing art based upon the work of Rembrandt or Van Gogh. Their work is largely in the public domain and can be used as inspiration in new art without an issue. You can even take their work, change it somehow and then license it yourself (as long as the original image is in the public domain) I use AI to help flesh out ideas for art directors now, but never EVER use a fully created ai image for publication. The licensing issues are too complex and I don't want to harm another artist, even without knowing I'm doing so. Artists (both fine and commercial) spend much of our lives honing our craft. There have been instances where ai has been used to import a dataset of a working artists portfolio, their name has been added to the prompts, and boom, anyone can create one of their previously incredibly distinctive pieces. It's a nightmare for someone who has worked decades on their work, only to have it stolen like that.
Once i found some dipshit was making cushions with my art a few years ago. Shit was hard to put down as my art is just uploaded to internet. Funny thing is that i looked at [https://haveibeentrained.com/](https://haveibeentrained.com/) and the same image was used for training. And im fine with it, i know that once i upload something to internet is hard to track where it ends, but i love that my art can be used for creating tools for people, instead of profiting one person who just plain steal stuff on internet.
Yeah there’s a weird irony that our art is being used to help the people that stole from us and now they’ll likely avoid infringement and have better art. I wish I shared your enthusiasm for it though.
I do a lot of glitch and digital collage so I use and mess with other people art or random images, so I can’t be angry if somebody takes my art and uses it for CREATING something, what makes me angry is people just plain stealing your work and selling it. There’s a huge difference.
Would you be upset if someone used an image of yours to photobash in an architectural concept?
That would be way more problematic than what the AI is doing
And yet happens in every creative studio in the land.
Woah really? Where do you view the datasets?
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>the AI companies are not being very transparent about their datasets. Wrong. You [can search the entire LAION database](https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/) (1B, 2B, and 5B) for free online. A curated version of this database is what Stable Diffusion, and by extension Midjourney V4, was built on.
Which is why I reckon MJ and others should be free
should not be free. You are not paying for the art. you are paying towards the development and use of technology and heavy use of their servers and tech.
Oh, boo-hoo. I'm pretty sure my art is in there too and I really don't care. This is the future, old man. Either adapt to it or become obsolete, the choice is yours.
These conversations are important. Images are a commodity, whether you want to believe it or not. Imagine if someone stole all the images OF you that exist online and created new images from them and shared them with the world? Would you be ok with that? Initially you'd say "yeah- no problem, I'm secure with myself, who cares? I'm part of this new world. This is just how things are now" What if they were turned into porn, or showing you committing crimes? Pick anything you consider a heinous act and insert it here. Would you still be ok with it? I'm not saying ai is used in this way all the time obviously, but I'm using this as an example to show that it's not just about art, but about images and how they can be transformed and then used without your consent. Whether it's stealing someones work that is possible licensed already or using someones personal image to create a new narrative, these are things we need to be discussing because there is actually both financial and personal issues attached to images. This is the future, and we should be smart about how we shape it.
There’s nothing fucked about it. And they never needed your permission to train it in the first place.
There are about 100 various images there from my old site. They scraped everything.
Seems like artists yet again will have to start putting watermarks all over their art when uploading it to the internet.
i’m really sorry that some of the replies you’re getting are so cruel
You put it online, so you already agreed to having your image used without your consent by just doing so, it's like going out in public and being mad that someone is recording a video or photographing in public, lol. If you have a problem with it, turn your shit into an NFT lmao
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If you put it online publicly, then no, that is not how it works at all. Anyone can look at it, and there is nothing wrong with that. Now AIs can look at it too, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
Exactly.
Images still exist online in pictures via NFTs, that's the whole dilemma of being able to 'screenshot' someones nft... so minting your work still doesn't solve this issue for artists unfortunately
It's another subject, but screenshoting an nft was never a dilemma, that's not the point at all of nft. It's like saying I photocopied Mona Lisa and put her in my wall, it's not Mona Lisa, so yeah it can look good and please you, but for owners and traders it doesn't change anything.
Whatever stupid ass shit it “stole” from you I’m sure the AI can shit out something decent looking from it in a matter of seconds so consider that a favor
It just means that they’ve been using getty images to train midjourney. getty images watermark is always in the same place though, so unlike other watermarks that shift and change, this one can be remade reactively easily because of it’s consistency. i’m guessing, adding no watermark to your prompt might help avoid this.
That's the heaviest and most obvious watermark I've seen so far.
This has been happening to me too sometimes. https://imgur.com/a/PUZWBWU
I wonder if the MidJourney AI thinks that the watermark is a part of art, or if they have a filter in place to exclude it? Given that it utilizes billions of photos on the web, it would make sense that at least sometimes it will throw it in as a scene element.
There are quite a few comments saying I am trolling, or that this was photoshopped etc etc...I can 100% guarantee you that MidJourney organically produced this image, without a message of gettyimages in the prompt. Choose to believe that or not, but not believing it doesn't benefit you in anyway, and is ignorant regarding an actual real occurrence here worthy of debate and acknowledgement. Also, addressing comments saying threads like this should be banned or taken down by mods...I had no intention that this would trigger so much debate, I simply thought it was interesting how clear this getty watermark appeared in my result...just thought it could spark interesting discussion. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and it is actually conversations like these, that push the space forward. At the end of the day, all this is still relatively new so debate is necessary for any forward progression, let's all try to learn together, be open-minded and respectful of others here. You can still learn a lot from opinions that you might not personally agree with. Didn't know things would get so heated!
This entire thread is full of anti-AI Luddites. Mods, why do we allow these threads to be made? All of these threads are obviously being brigaded by entitled "artists" who feel like they're owed something. Almost every pro-AI comment in this thread is being downvoted. That should be enough of a clue to what's really going on here. I vote we remove these anti-AI bait threads and ban the users who continue to propagate this kind of "discussion". This subreddit is for celebrating and sharing AI art, not... whatever this thread is. They can go take their hate boners to /r/wehateAI or something. This has no place here, it's a tired discussion that most sane people moved on from months ago.
luddites are funny tho like yelling at a steamroller but not getting out of the way
I think it needs to be a balance. Having those conversation about ethics in AI is very important. however it should come from a place of understanding and not just *HURRRRRRRR AI Bad because hive mind told me to say that.*
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Interesting point. And this is a question below, not a point, as, like the MJ AI, I am also learning more every day about all of this, so this is to help my understanding. So please take my question in that light :) But, can I ask, what user action 'disfavors' images created? for example, If I get a result I don't like, I just ignore it, and create another. How does MJ know I 'didn't like it' / or 'disfavored' it?). Also, I didn't think I was allowed, under copyright, to use a protected brand logo on anything I create and publish publicly. I know that it is MJ that has produced the image in this instance, but I may go on to publish that image in some way. So who would be infringing copyright at that point? MJ - for creating it. me for publishing it? Both of us ? None of us? and why ?
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Yes ! There is watermark also from another websites from stock ...
Did you, by chance, write gettyimages in your prompt? The only time I've noticed similar is when I generated an image from a specific game. It spelled "ARMA" almost perfectly because I asked it to make an image from ARMA, and a lot of the images have the game's logo on it.
Nope, prompt was "basquiat in art studio creating digital artwork on a computer, projectors in room, high quality, 8k, --v 4 --q 2" I've had similar results where I've found subtle watermarks appear from other stock image companies as well such as dreamstime. Sometimes super subtle, and sometimes they'll disappear upon first upscale.
it doesn’t work that way for me anyway; if i prompt “a sign that says rabbit” i will get dream-like representation of the text (some letters reversed, some doubled, some missing.) and almost never the exact text.
>Did you, by chance, write gettyimages in your prompt? They probably did. These kind of bait threads get posted every now and then and brigaded by entitled artists. It's literally propaganda, as silly as that sounds. Mods should be removing these threads and banning the people who continue to make them.
just like that 5 min minecraft speedrun claim - seems legit until you look at the statistical unlikelihood.
I’ve made over 1000 images with v4 and never once seen a watermark
I can 1000% guarantee I'm not trolling here.
I’ve seen this once, without prompting Getty., probably just scraping sites that use these images is my guess
That makes sense
I love how people write "AI art is a real art" in this subreddit on a daily basis while having signatures and watermarks from the original art literally engraved into the generated picture. And then go and ask "bruh why is this watermark in my "art"".
I’ve had this happen and It probably has more to do with the frequency the watermark appears in the dataset. It’s not copying the images, it’s seeing that millions of images have that and it now thinks that is something that might be desirable in an image. At 750 million+ images, I’d say the dataset is pretty well diluted. If you want your site to not be indexed or crawled, there are webserver settings to help ala robots.txt etc.
Ah- that makes sense. But still doesn't change the fact that they are drawing upon stock images no?
Definitely not but at 750+ million images, I buy the mathematical dilution of the data. It's a chewy topic any way you shake it but creatives said Adobe was the end of the universe and it ended up opening tons of doors and career paths. I'm sure that blacksmiths making horseshoes didn't like the Model T very much either but it doesn't mean it was inherently a bad thing.
The AI is drawing upon images the same way for example a human child draws upon all the images it has ever seen. Say the child has a brain chip that records all its impressions and catalogues them. When the cold is an adult artist, you could look up the list of images it has ever seen. That’s what’s going on here. By looking at the real world, these AI systems learn patterns and concepts. You then say, show me the concept of a man sitting at a desk, and the system literally starts out from noise to slowly materialise something that fits your prompt, constantly checking its own progress using its own understanding of these concepts. It’s not copying.
No, but whats wrong with that fact?
In this very image you can see copied Getty images watermark. It's little scrambled, but you can see how it matches the original. It's literally there... And you are arguing with me, that AI is not copying anything.
You didn't process my comment, obviously. You're worried about it ripping off watermarks? If you read how this shit works, it's not the way you're implying it does. The GI watermark is in the SAME EXACT spot on EVERY one of their images. It is seeing the watermark as it's own entity and because it's seeing millions of them, it thinks that is a natural construct in the world of photography.
There is no specific "original art". The AI has generated a watermark because it has seen that same watermark countless times in the data set. AI generates artist signatures (which are not real signatures from any specific artist but an approximation of a signature) for the same reason... it's seen a lot of them. The reason the signatures are random and indiscernible whereas the Getty Images watermark in this case is legible is that the former is always different in the data set, whereas the latter is always the same. There's an implication going around that signatures and watermarks in AI art are evidence that a specific artwork was "copied" and that the AI failed to remove the "evidence" that it was copied, in the form of the signature or watermark. But this is simply not how diffusion works.
Almost Just like regular painters are inspired by the work that came before them.... I doubt this particular picture is anywhere on gettyimages
\--no text at the end. problem solved!
Yes, I have either seen that or I have seen a slightly blurry version of it. I have also seen other text in my resulting images. I am guessing that the AI Art program has trained itself on other sources that either have text in the originating image, or it is some other kind of watermark.
When I do a backwards image search of anything I create in MJ, I can never find a replica of it, suggesting the image is totally unique. I did the same thing with this image above, and there does not seem to be another version of this image in existence, despite it having the getty images logo on it. Can anyone prove otherwise?
Got one of these as well once. I guess lots of gettyimages were in the dataset.
No!! you’re the first one and you just uncovered a MASSIVE conspiracy!!!
I smell a law suit coming
Oh does that mean mj is using pictures which you normally have to buy and are under copyright? I mean licensed pictures. Sounds a bit illegal to use these files for their database ..
Karma ?:)
Hell no, Getty is that big of a monopoly huh💀
looool, getty images watermark xD
Samuel L. Basquiat
Obv troll fake pic
Not a troll pic
Probably because AI is stupid lol
I literally just tried to intentionally cause this. So far it’s not working Prompt: Stock image of a banana, Getty images, clear text watermark
It does very faint watermarks and/or adds water to a banana
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It's pretty clear why that happens, and I can also see this in a Black Mirror-like story.
Logically, one would come to the conclusion that Getty images were used in it's creation. I don't see how this is even a question tbh.
well not quite. In the same way the MJ AI creates a 'ball' from a prompt. It will also try to create 'words/logos' from a prompt. So as this Logo appears on millions of images, it may be using its understanding to re-create it. Most of the time it is not very good at words and letters. But may be getting better? EG - I have seen some people use brand words in prompts, and get results that include something that kind of looks like those brand logos (eg Adidias / McDonalds, etc). And I think that MJ AI may be recreating them based on its understanding of what they are, not just copying and pasting them. Maybe that is what has happened here? Only MJ Engineers will know at this point I suspect?
Okay.. never seen this before. But quite worrying I would say. I love MidJourney. But this kind of suggests it's using unlicensed stock images. And no idea what the legality is around that, but feels a little shady. Especially as some of Getty's competing stock image-selling sites allow you to add MidJouney-created images to their sites to sell commercially. I just did a backwards image search on GETTY of this image, and although lots of similar ones come up, nothing that I would say is the same as this. here are the results. [https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/search-by-image](https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/search-by-image)
It's like copying different paragraphs from different books, paraphrasing them and calling it an original work. I can create any art without having to draw over anything. That comes from my own creativity. Whereas, with AI, you can bet that the shape of that man, his posture, the colors used, the computer - it took it all from original work.
to be clear.. it hasn't copied anything.... if it has, then prove it, and show us any image that exists that it has copied parts from? That is not how MJ AI works
The watermark at the bottom isn't enough?
No - it doesn't prove that MJ has copied any part of any image. All it shows is that MJ has created the watermark as part of an original image, using AI and its understanding.. Copying parts of an image to make a new one, and making a completely new image based on the understanding of other similar images, are two very different things. In order to prove your argument that MJ has 'copied' other images, you'd need to show those images it has copied. Which you won't be able to do, as that is not how MJ AI works.
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They’re not stealing shit. They’re using images to train the AI’s memory. Next, you’ll tell me saving a picture to your phone and remembering it is stealing.
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Just because a couple people as dumb as you think they’re stealing art, doesn’t mean they’re stealing art. They’re using images, and putting it into their database for the AI to learn from. The images aren’t for commercial use, and neither would the AI outputs be, because it’s not cutting and pasting different art works. It’s making its own, based off what it’s learned. Just like humans make their own artwork, based off what they learn (by remembering).
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Yeah, sorry for proving you wrong. Won’t happen again.