LAION demands money from photographer who requested removal of photos

https://petapixel.com/2023/04/26/ai-image-dataset-demands-money-from-photographer-who-requested-removal-of-his-photos/

by janandonly • 3 years ago

43 13 3 years ago

petapixel.com

eternalban• 3 years ago

Zetobal• 3 years ago

FYI midjourney is also based on stable diffusion

ronsor2• 3 years ago

Brief reminder that Petapixel has had a noticeable bias during the rise of generative AI.

lisasays3• 3 years ago

“We had already pointed out to your client that our client is entitled to claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) UrhG in the event of an unjustified claim,” writes the lawyers acting on behalf of LAION.

OK, so they're legally entitled to throw this back into the faces of whoever makes these kind of requests.

Still - it does seem rather petty. Common sense (and basic decency) would tell us to take a less knee-jerk approach. A simple form letter (explaining the lack of legal merit to their claim) should suffice to quell at least 80 percent of these claims. If the claimant persists, then yeah, you could thrown down the gauntlet like this.

Otherwise, it comes off as rather haughty and aggressive (and as the Germans would say, zickig) to breathe acid at (apparently simply uninformed) claimants like these.

Imnimo• 3 years ago

“At the time, our client had refrained from asserting this claim, but now feels unable to be lenient here. She incurred legal fees for defending against the obviously unjustified warning you issued, which our client will not bear herself.”

lisasays3• 3 years ago

The issue is definitely not obvious to a non-tech person. It isn't even obvious to me why text-image pairs should be considered, by default, public domain and fully commercializable by any and all.

The bigger point is that in all probability, the client's costs were minor (<10k), and these kinds of bumps and scrapes that happen (and what one needs to budget for) when choosing to to push forward with a large-scale and obviously controversial project.

So discretion (and concern for the project's overall public image) would call for using a feather rather than a sledgehammer here, as I see it.

masswerk• 3 years ago

I guess, from a technical perspective, it should be pretty simple: if you can extract an image (or major features applicable for protection), the image is stored in the model. For this purpose, it's yet another compression algorithm.

(Conversely, if this isn't applicable, does this mean that providing protected content in compressed form, say, as a zip archive, is also exempt? In a sense, it's yet another model with an output probability of 1.0.)

ctrlv• 3 years ago

Seems like something an AI wanting to preserve itself would do

LurkerAtTheGate• 3 years ago

LAION “only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet,” arguing that it does not keep the image data so there it can’t delete the file.

So, the Pirate Bay defense?

ronsor2• 3 years ago

The difference is the Pirate Bay was a list of links to obviously pirated content. LAION is a list of links to content that is, for the most part, hosted at its original source or a place authorized to host it.

dang• 3 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

AI used photographer’s photos for training, then slapped him with an invoice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35712131 - April 2023 (144 comments)

LAION demands money from photographer who requested removal of photos

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