
Ahh...
The "monkey grabbed the camera and took the photo" law suit comes to mind.
Getty Images has banned people from uploading AI-generated pictures to its massive stock image collection, citing concerns over copyright. Text-to-image tools, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, Craiyon, and Stable Diffusion, have opened the floodgates for machine-made artwork. Anyone can either pay a small fee or use a free model to …
I'm not a photographer (and I don't really care about imaginary property that much) but that story disgusted me. How those gorilla huggers convinced a judge to award copyright and royalties (past, present and future) to their foundation for that photo is a testament to ridiculous times.
By that logic, Naruto the ape should have been charged with theft for taking the camera.
The judges were never convinced but PETA had unlimited funds to appeal and David Slater had to settle because after years of being sued he ran out of money.
In the UK theft is a criminal offense - the state carries out the prosecution at tax payers' expense. Naruto destroyed the camera which is criminal damage, a civil offence and Mr Slater would have had to file charges at his own expense.
On the one hand the copyright interests on training data affecting the output is a very obvious issue. On the other, the stock image shops are middle-men who can easily be bypassed by AIaaS.
Now the stock image shops are clearing the decks by removing AI images from their own shelves. What happens next?
I sell photography on a few stock sites and other places and I've noticed recently a lot of people (myself included) having work taken down without comment or explanation other than 'This may violate the copyright of Company XXXX'. Note the 'may'. Something obviously has them all running scared. There's no way in hell any of my images infringed anybody's copyright but I had no recourse to appeal and no explanation given.