Make note, folks who have been demanding only “ethical” AI training. You’re demanding a world in which only Getty Images and other such existing incumbent copyright-holding corporations have decent AIs.
Make note about what? This is a good thing. They went through the efforts to acquire the rights for the training data, and people might have even been paid for the original work.
It’s not like this stops someone from paying artists or photographers to make art or photos for their training data, or creating some sort of group where contributors actively give the rights to their own artwork or photos for a model, like some sort of open source project kind of thing, people love that kind of stuff! You’re just acting like this is some awful thing, when it’s completely fine, and the way it should be.
To me the obvious answer would be to pay people a small amount per photo for pictures of various things and then use that as training data.
That’s expensive and companies would rather not pay while the law is unclear on using copywrited images in a training set
The thing is that for medium to large companies it’s probably less expensive to pay people a nominal fee for pictures than it would be to risk being sued by, say, Disney, Nintendo, WWE or Games Workshop (to use some famously litigious companies).
