The U.K. May Sacrifice Copyright Law to Attract AI Big Business

AI Big Business in the U.K.

Text-to-image generators are a new and messy technology and this week another major step was taken that some argue is damaging to your copyrighted photographs.

If this discussion sounds familiar, that’s because it is a situation PetaPixel’s News Editor Matt Growcoot discussed a few weeks ago:

“For photographers, they need to ask themselves a couple of questions: how would you feel if you saw an AI image that was based on your photo? The second question is, what are you going to do about it?” he writes.

“No group of creators regularly has their rights trampled over in the internet age quite like photographers. AI image generators are poised to be the next chapter in that ongoing saga.”

If you were to provide any of the text-to-image generators like DALL-E 2, for example, the idea of a photo in the style of Ansel Adams, it would provide you with results that look like they were taken by the legendary photographer. But how does it know what those photos look like? Clearly, the AI was trained on those images which means they were fed into the system. But those images are copyrighted, so why is this process okay?

Growcoot’s call of alarm may be coming true sooner than we thought.

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Image credits: Header generated using Open AI’s DALL-E 2.

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