Getty Images Bankruptcy

[mike]

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigatio ... 026-10-21/

Competition from AI-generated images is offered as one cause. I assume we will see many other businesses close or restructure due to AI, especially digital content companies. Pretty sure I have numerious unused credits on istockphoto. I just don't use stock photos anymore. It's too easy to generate what you need or take your own pictures and have AI fix them up.

[JohnH]

Yeah, a lot of things are a lot simpler now that copyright laws basically don’t exist anymore.

[Szdfan]

I honestly don’t feel too bad for Getty. They’ve had a long history of trying to enforce copyright on public domain pictures.

The bigger issues on how AI is disrupting businesses and careers is something worth thinking through.

[mike]

Yeah, a lot of things are a lot simpler now that copyright laws basically don’t exist anymore.

You can take a watermarked stock photo and ask AI to remove the watermark, and it will typically refuse. But if you simply ask it to make a similar image, it makes one that is all but indistinguishable. How do you defeat that kind of thing? You can't. AI is going to kill the business, especially as it improves.

[JohnH]

Yeah, a lot of things are a lot simpler now that copyright laws basically don’t exist anymore.

You can take a watermarked stock photo and ask AI to remove the watermark, and it will typically refuse. But if you simply ask it to make a similar image, it makes one that is all but indistinguishable. How do you defeat that kind of thing? You can't. AI is going to kill the business, especially as it improves.

It’s possible that copyright laws will start to exist again, too.