I've seen a lot of confidence on HN and other tech communities that a court would never rule that training an AI on copyrighted images is infringement, but I'm not so sure. To be clear, I hope that training AI on copyrighted images remains legal, because it would cripple the field of AI text and image generation if it wasn't!
But think about these similar hypotheticals:
1. I take a copyrighted Getty stock image (that I don't own, maybe even watermarked), blur it with a strong Gaussian blur filter until it's unrecognizable, and use it as the background of an otherwise original digital painting.
2. I take a small GPL project on GitHub, manually translate it from C to Python (so that the resulting code does not contain a single line of code identical to the original), then redistribute the translated project under a GPL-incompatible license without acknowledging the original.
Are these infringements?
In both of these cases, a copyrighted original work is transformed and incorporated into a different work in such a way that the original could not be reconstructed. But, intuitively, both cases feel like infringement. I don't know how a court would rule, but there's at least some chance these would be infringements, and they're conceptually not too different from distilling an image into an AI model and generating something new based on it.
But think about these similar hypotheticals:
1. I take a copyrighted Getty stock image (that I don't own, maybe even watermarked), blur it with a strong Gaussian blur filter until it's unrecognizable, and use it as the background of an otherwise original digital painting.
2. I take a small GPL project on GitHub, manually translate it from C to Python (so that the resulting code does not contain a single line of code identical to the original), then redistribute the translated project under a GPL-incompatible license without acknowledging the original.
Are these infringements?
In both of these cases, a copyrighted original work is transformed and incorporated into a different work in such a way that the original could not be reconstructed. But, intuitively, both cases feel like infringement. I don't know how a court would rule, but there's at least some chance these would be infringements, and they're conceptually not too different from distilling an image into an AI model and generating something new based on it.