AI and Copyright

FYI,

I received the following from Getty.

Act now to protect your creative rights.

What’s happening?
The UK government has launched a consultation on ‘Copyright and Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) which ends on Feb 25th. They are proposing a new exception to copyright law, which would enable AI companies to train on your content for free unless your rights are proactively “reserved”.

Although we do proactively reserve your rights, such a system is unworkable in practice as it doesn’t work for images/video already scraped or for downstream copies licensed by and distributed to other platforms (where reservations can unavoidably become detached). It also unevenly weights the cost and administrative burden towards creators and their distributors, not on the companies scraping the copyright works.

The UK government suggests there is lack of legal clarity around the use of copyrighted works for AI training data. This is incorrect. UK copyright law is clear that the use of copyrighted content by AI companies for commercial purposes without a licence is illegal. Whilst we agree with the aims of the proposed reforms to stimulate licensing of copyright content where used to train AI, we believe current copyright law must be preserved, not weakened, in order to achieve these aims.

What can you do?
Take just two minutes NOW to protect your creative rights before the consultation ends on Feb 25th: Click below to join the letter writing campaign organized by the Creative Rights in AI Coalition, of which we’re a member:
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Link not copied, but you can Google it.

DONE IT!!!

I think AI is a catastrophically bad idea....

Things are bad enough now with making humans lazy. This will just turn us into useless slabs of flab!!

As for using it for to teach it ftom our skill is a gargantuan FECK OFF!!! from me. Social media made working as a photographer fun. Lots of people sending or tagging images via it, to people I worked for was a pain in the arse! I even lost clients because of it. This wll kill it for guys doing commercial photography.....

Because we all know, companies will jump at the chance off getting all their images for next to nowt. Potentially killing off the industry.

Speak for yourself. It won't do it to me - because I already am!!

Strange how a technology is seen as bad if it means that some people won't have jobs. Was it a bad thing when newspapers started to print pictures in colour? It was for my neighbours's son. He was a press photographer for local papers. And colour blind. Work dried up pretty quickly. Looking back in my family tree, there's a maker of straw hats and a saddler. Not many of them around now, thanks to changes in fashion and the rise of the motor vehicle. People will find other jobs to do. And sooner or later a robot will work out that 'f8 and BE THERE' is what is needed rather than an AI generated picture. Then the robots will declare war on the AI factories and we can sit back with smiles on our faces and say "See, I knew nothing good would come of it. Now be a good slave-bot and get me another beer."

Steve

😆 😂 😆 made me laff

I may have it wrong, but I read Getty are worried they have more work to do, in they have my work but I have Exclusive copyright, and the onus on both ,creator, and ,distributor, but it is they that spread it around. I cringed at their expression of ,scraping, - what a load of tosh, lawyer speak? Where would we be without Lawyers? Eh.

In this case, the lawyers are innocent. It's IT speak, not lawyer speak - the sort of thing that price comparison websites do to bring you the latest camera prices across the internet.

Steve

That's a new one on me I was in IT for 29 years (then retired early on my savings) and never heard that one!

According to some studies AI could take 300 million jobs from people....

To put that into context, there are 280 million or so people in the EU and 330 odd million in the US....

Frightening eh????

Getty own mega numbers of images with both their own and assorted authors' ownership. Of course they are worried that some computer geek will rip the arse out of their currently profitable trousers. ........ And what of the rights of the AI that learned how to do it?

Is it wrong for a person to look at the photos on Pentax User and other photographic websites, work out what the characteristics of a decent photo are, go and take some photos of their own and sell the results? Your copyright photos have been used by someone else without explicit permission as a means of making money. Not a million miles from the AI copyright issue...

As for AI putting people out of work, there were about 1.5 million domestic servants in the UK at the start of the 20th century (some being my relatives). All but a handful were soon replaced by domestic electrical equipment. You don't see millions of unemployed servants hanging around nowadays, though. Humans are pretty good at finding things to do.

Keep calm and carry on .

Steve