I hope I’m not being too confrontational with this question to the artist types here.
Whose income is getting cut because AI can generate a competent/realistic looking jpeg file?
I’m thinking it’s the guys making Advertisements or selling stuff though Getty Images, not the Warhols and Pollocks of the world.
…the guys making the advertisements are making money through AI, not getting income cut. As are Getty, who have launched their own generative AI service that was “trained” on the work of thousands of contributing photographers.
Who got their income cut? The photographers who contributed to Getty, not Getty itself.
And that’s potentially a part of the issue. Photographers submit their work to be resold/licensed under a royalty agreement, but it’s used in a different way, to train the algorithm that erodes the value of the photos for royalty purposes. In other words ‘we get to use your work, and charge for the output that was based on it, without paying you for the input’
And it’s going to be the same in many creative industries - for example, you’re a voice actor and you’ve invested significant time, effort and cost in your training in order to make a living speaking various parts. Now the studio wants to pay you once, in order to just get enough of a sample of your voice to clone it so they can just use it forever and never have to pay you again.
Or maybe they don’t want to pay you even once - they just take samples of your voice from your existing works along with other samples of other voice actors and use that instead, maybe not to make an exact clone but to train a model that has flexibility to speak in a variety of styles.
…on a slight tangent, the stock photography marketplace has been screwed for a while now. I’ve got a handful of images available in Getty. But I never uploaded them: I uploaded them to the stock press agency I was on assignment for at the time. Then a year later, that agency got acquired by Getty along with their entire library of images. It was only about six images.And those images ended up getting published in the Daily Mail and I never saw a cent. Even outside of AI these corporate monoliths were ripping people off. AI just gives them the tools to double down on this.
That seems very strange. I would think that if Getty buys out the company you took photos for, they’d inherit the rights to those photos as the original company had them? So they would owe the same royalties for their use as the original company would?
It seems very strange if acquiring the company would give the new owner more rights to intellectual property than the old company had ever had.
If you were working on assignment, wouldn’t that mean that the agency owned the photos? Did you have a specific contract that stated you retained copyright?
…there isn’t anything strange here. I live in NZ, news photo stock agency based in the UK, the news photo stock agency got acquired by Getty, at some point the Daily Mail licensed some photos from either the original agency or Getty, and after a few hours dealing with both the local Getty Rep (who wasn’t really a Getty Rep, just the poor guy they had on the website who didn’t have a CLUE what was going on) and trying to contact Getty directly I just gave up because I’ve got better things to do with my time than try and claim maybe $30 bucks and change.
The new company didn’t get “new rights.” I still own the copyright. There were more prolific photographers with the agency who got Getty logins and became Getty freelancers, but most of the rest of us did not. They promised to be open and transparent, but I only found my images on the Daily Mail by accident, and by then it was just too much work for not much money.
Getty got as big as it did by essentially buying most of the competition. It was already a large well established company. But it aggressively went after other agencies and bought them out. Mine was just one of many.
An article from 2008:
There were basically three phases of stock photography in the digital age: firstly was the rise of microstock in about 2006 that “disrupted” the stock photography industry and crashed stock photo prices. Then from about 2008 bigger agencies began buying all of the smaller agencies. And we are heading into the third age now, the AI age. Payouts to photographers in stock will crash again, and any photographers exclusively shooting stock will have to adapt or get out.
I’m still confused.
You took a photo. Did the agency in question have the right to license that photo out without paying you a fee, or not?
If they did, then when they were acquired by Getty I’d expect Getty to have the same rights.
If they did not, then neither they nor Getty should be allowed to license the photo to a newspaper without paying you, and if they did that it sounds super illegal (though as you note it may not be worth pursuing legal action).
…of course it was illegal.
But what do you want me to do about it?
Yes they had the right to licence it, yes they had to pay me my fee, no, they didn’t pay the fee, they didn’t pay hundreds of us our fees, and yes they got away with it.
That’s not my point; I’m just trying to understand the situation. Although if they did this to so many people, perhaps a class action lawsuit makes sense (and perhaps one already exists).
Gotcha. That’s terrible, I am sorry that happened to you!
From your initial post I wasn’t clear on whether the issue was that the system was flawed, or that they were just ignoring the system entirely and practicing daylight robbery. Based on your description, it sounds like the latter is the case.
…it was considered, but not very deeply. Mostly in rants on messageboards. I just went back to the old Facebook group created by agency photographers and it happened to a lot of people and they weren’t happy about it.
But the prolific photographers with lots of images in the database got Getty freelancer status, which meant they got access to the dashboard, could upload images, and could access historical data to see what sold.
The rest of us? We were “assured” if we made any sales, they would contact us. But that didn’t happen.
Again on a tangent: here is one of my photos that was properly licensed by the Mail:
The agency paid me 175 pounds, or about $400 NZD (at the time) to take a few portraits.
The assignment that they didn’t pay was a general editorial job, “cover this event, we will upload to the pool, if anyone licences any of the images we will pay you your fee.”
So I did, then promptly forgot about it until I found the images online. Not sure if they were sold before or after the sale to Getty, I’m assuming it was before because of the date of the event. Which made the whole thing messier.
Its the latter 
For example, this case:
TLDR version: Carol Highsmith, a photographer, releases photos into the public domain, specifically the Library of Congress.
Getty added the photos to the library…then sent sent Carol Highsmith an invoice demanding payment because she used her own image on her website.
She sued Getty: and lost.
We wouldn’t have stood a chance.
But this is straying off topic.
On topic: things were really bad before AI came onto the scene.
For stock photographers? Its practically game-over now.
I find it endlessly hilarious that the people (not necessarily you) who railed so hard about people trying to gatekeep what is considered to be art when people were dismissing splatter on a tarp or a banana taped to a wall–who insisted that art can’t be narrowly defined–now suddenly have a narrow definiton of art designed to gatekeep out something that they don’t like.
There is also the problem of using an (apparently) loaded term like “art”. Would there have been the current backlash from some quarters if the term “AI art” hadn’t started being used? If it was popularity called “AI imagery” or “AI illustration” instead? If nothing at all was different except for the word? Would you have people adamantly insisting that “AI imagery isn’t imagery” or “AI illustration isn’t illustration” instead of “AI art isn’t art”? I’ve used the term “Schrodinger’s Art” before–the concept that someone doesn’t know if an image they are looking at is art or not until they are told how it was made.
I ask: how do you define “AI art”? Is it AI images that attempt to reproduce the style of an existing human artist? Because that encompasses only a very small percentage of what people are actually making with AI image generators. More people are using it to illustrate concepts, or generate memes, or make funny or weird stuff. Do all of those things fall within your claim of being an “inherent problem”?
The most prolific forum of AI art (AI imagery? AI illustrations?) I follow is the Cursed AI group on Facebook, with over 800 thousand members and more than a thousand posts a day. Scroll through that if you want a real-world look at a section of the range of purposes people actually use generative AI. Do you assess every image with every goal to be inherently problematic, or just a narrow segment that tries to copy “real art”?
This is a concern, of course, but I don’t see stock photography as the art that people are suggesting needs to be celebrated and protected against AI intrusion.
Stock photography is commercial work. Skilled work that not everyone can do, for sure, and it is absolutely in danger from AI generated pictures. But it isn’t the type of art that elevates the soul of humanity. Would the art world be irreparably damaged if stock photography went the way of buggy whips?
Like every technological change, someone is going to get chewed up and spit out, but that alone isn’t a reason to stop change.
At least as a legal argument I agree strongly with the artists here. But is it so clear cut as, “Listen Judge, the AI painting outputs look just like my artwork, clearly it was used without my permission.”
What are the bars of proof required here?
Hollywood won’t even touch a script with foreign providence because any film they make resembling that plot would make them liable which is why they hire teams to generate the next action picture with The Rock and Kevin Hart rather than a plucky kid from Whistlestop, Montana heading to the big city to pursue dreams of directing by passing out copies of his award winning script. It is my suspicion this reality is why THAT art is mostly treated as a commodity now.
Maybe I want to see pictures of people and things that actually exist. Seems fairly soul crushing that I won’t be able to see that any more. Even if it’s a posed model, it’s still an actual person, not some awful distorted image.
Yes, it’s not fine art that is at immediate risk from this stuff, it is ‘the arts’, and particularly the type of art that has ongoing commercial value. Photography, graphic design, illustration, writing, scripting, and some of the performing arts. I think it’s probably a little unfair to classify those things as outside of the realm of things that elevate the soul of humanity - cinema, for example, has a legitimate claim at being able to do that.
The danger here arises, I think, from the fact that there isn’t just a linear two-way exchange between the art-creating people and the art-appreciating consumers - it’s embedded within a commercial framework where, for example, studio executives view it as a set of numbers that they would like to trend in certain directions; it’s not a simple question of supply and demand, it’s mediated by a structure that is perfectly willing to participate in a race to the bottom, and now it has a potentially powerful set of running shoes.
At the risk of derailing my own thread, what role do you guys see AI Art playing in a perfect world?
Surely everyone here is fine with ChatGPT creating a funny meme.
Is it the profit from a generated image that inherently steals from anyone who would have been paid to create it? How is that different than any changing tastes? Like airbrushing went out in the 80’s so those artists had to learn new skills if they wanted off the tourist shirt painting street circuit.
On reflection my argument stems from what I see as hysteria of a new technology we will safely incorporate. Civilization will not fall. This is like the day the synthesizer was invented and piano people got pissed and everyone agreed it wasn’t music but this new thing would kill music any way.
A lot of the ‘it’s just like that thing in the past’ arguments seem to pick out one, often relatively minor, thing that underwent change in the past, and it was OK in the end. I’m not sure those arguments really work when what we have in front of us right now is a thing that promises (or threatens) to change a very large number of things, all at the same time, very fast.
Like the Steam Engine?