AI, the good, the bad and the ugly…
As a working photographer AI has brought some benefits, in the likes of some of the software that I use, the best known being photoshop. Also there are plenty of doomsday theories out there, one of which is that “50% of all scientists involved in AI, believe that there is a 10% chance that AI could be the end of us” That helps me sleep easy in my bed!
Now the ugly and it could impact anyone with copyright materials publicly available. In the case of professional photographers it’s usually photographs on their website. While these images are publicly viewable they can’t be used without the consent of the photographer, which will usefully involves a licensing fee. In the new Ai world things have just got interesting.
A stock photographer based in Germany has asked for his images to be removed from an AI data training set used to train AI image generators. After checking on the website Have I Been Trained? Robert Kneschke discovered that some of his images were indeed being used for the purposes of AI training in something called the LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) data pool. I’ll not pretend to know what that is.
After discovering his images in the LAION data pool, Kneschke requested the removal of his pictures, as indeed any self-respecting photographer would do believing his / her copyright had been infringed. Unexpectedly, he received a letter from a law firm acting on behalf of LAION stating that it “only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet,” meaning that as they don’t keep image data there is nothing to delete. They also went further and requested €887 for his “unjustified claim” Now, in my head I know morally who is in the right, but that means nothing in law.
This will go to courts in Germany as it stand and could even go to the European Court of Justice if either side contest the outcome. Either way it could have a big impact on anyone with IP or copywriter materials publicly available.
