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>"But I'm curious if Getty is actually going to make meaningful payments to the creators of the images that went into the training set, or if this is more of a "we could continue to pay our existing royalties to content creators, or we could keep most of the money for ourselves by selling access to a model trained on that content" type of situation.

Adobe is also dealing with this question with Firefly. So far they plan to pay creators annually, but how much each artists gets and how the amount is calculated is yet to be determined. Since a model is only as good as its training data, hopefully this can be a new revenue stream for artists?

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/13/adobe-starts-paying-bonuse...

obvious approach for corporations is to simplify the math.

the model is made from X images, from Y artists, each artist has a percent contribution to the total. between 0 and 100 percent.

so each time money is generated by the model, the contributors get their share.

as a bonus, it is easy to understand how that share was derived. so it is implicitly fair.

(please keep in mind that this “artist’s share” will be a percentage of the net revenue generated, and that this percentage will probably be a trade secret or some such.)

(any works from artists unable to be paid, meaning public domain or otherwise, will be handled by the corporation for the continuous and never-ending improvement of the platform that makes it all possible.)

> as a bonus, it is easy to understand how that share was derived. so it is implicitly fair.

I don't think I understand this. How does something being simple to understand make it fair?

because the corporation made the math simple. simple is fair, and honest, an honesty we can all understand.

And of course simple math is fair, which is why I have submitted millions of images to Getty Images in massive waves, because of course such a fair algorithm will find your image among my stack of millions. And when we grind out compensation, I get 1,000,000/1,000,001 and you get 1/1,000,001. Because of course I would never game your fair algorithm.

But then your images contributed 99.9999% of the training data. Getty has a vested interest in removing "polluting" images from the dataset.

The model would be almost entirely, if not entirely, on your images.

modern problems require modern solutions.

a company could always train a model on what constitutes a low value or malicious image. submissions get screened by the bouncer before going on to integration with the commercial model.

throw in a submission fee, and enough of the malicious submissions will be stopped to plausibly call this solved.

plus, new cash stream.

And some photographer now goes and tries to game the system by uploading 1,000,000 mostly dull and uninteresting images that they took by wandering around a city while holding down the shutter button?

until someone automates uploading 1x1 white pixels, thus ruining the model after a brief, glorious payday for some brilliant fool.

I'd say these vague promises of compensation are meant to encourage content producers pushing for the idea that licensing should be a legal requirement, thus cementing Getty's/Adobe's position as middlemen and prohibiting models trained on open sources (intelligence definition).

> is it a blanket fee of some fraction of a cent per image to every Getty contributor whose images went into the training set? Statistical analysis of prompts users submitted in the last month and assign more of the money to contributors whose images had matching keywords?

If this isn't already a scam it's about to be. Paying copyright holders money for this will cause people to produce mountains of low effort images, which then get the same payment as things people put actual work into, ensuring that the payments are negligible because they're diluted by such volume. And will reduce the quality of the model so nobody wants to use it.

And we know what the cheapest way to generate a large volume of low effort images is, which is probably not going to bode well for the purity of the system either.

> And we know what the cheapest way to generate a large volume of low effort images is

AI. I’m ok with closing the loop and AI folding on itself.

Paying copyright holders money for this will cause people to produce mountains of low effort images

At the same time though, Getty and Adobe have a vested interest in not allowing that content into their training sets. They are obviously curating here, so that their generator outputs better stuff than the generators of competitors. I'm sure they are wargaming out the possibility of MS/OpenAI and Google coming in. Or maybe even worse, Disney or the video game makers, entering this market.

So you would need to generate a mountain of low effort content, and then hope that some of it is good enough to make it through the curation process. It's not a guaranteed thing.

Getty Images is not exactly high art. It's already a collection of low effort images.

The threshold for getting accepted has to be much lower than the threshold for making much money, because the company needs the long tail (and so does the AI model), but a photographer previously only made money if their photos were popular.

Now as long as you can meet the minimum bar for inclusion, you get the same payment as anyone else, so the quantity of photos at that minimum level of quality goes way up.

In general for training ML models, more data is more important than high quality data.

They will totally train on every image they can get their hands on, and then finetune on a curated set of the best images.

It seems like embeddings could help with this. Generate an image. Embed it. Find the top-N closest training images. Pay those creators.

All those type of business tend to shave money out of the deal, it's true in affiliation, licencing, sub contracting, and so on.

More obfuscation will mean more shaving.