[swatcoder]

As a funded corporation pursuing sales and not just a casual hobbyist doing a tech demo, I have to ask:

How did you get a license to use the image of these celebrities, let alone in commercialized deepfakes? Because that's kind of a hot topic right now and you're putting a giant target on your investors' assets if you didn't bother.

[yardenst]

Great point, when using the API the photos used to train and generate photos are provided by the customer, and they must have the correct permissions to use them

[swatcoder]

Am I correct to read that as "we didn't"?

If you make a tool that makes copyright infringement easy, and you demonstrate infringing use in order to market it, you're really asking for trouble.

If you care about your startup and its survival, I strongly suggest you focus your marketing on legitimate B2B use cases and avoid showing off how great it is at making deepfakes. It's one thing to turn a blind eye to misuse of your technology and a whole different thing to explicitly promote misuse as a product feature.

[p2hari]

Seriously, Gandhi had given permission to generate the photos on the website :). On one hand, openAI trains its data on copyrighted material. Now YC has funded this startup. A significant number of readers have rightly pointed out Copyright issues and the founders are saying it is up to customers and all those answers have been rightfully downvoted. I don't know what else to say here. How could this point be overlooked? If I had permission from the celebrity I would have taken a photo too. Then what is the need for this.

[Wistar]

That misses the point that was being asked which was about the celebrity photos and not the user photos.

[yardenst]

By customer I mean our own customer (a business) and not the end user

[leobg]

Though it’s obvious that the customer does not have these permissions in probably 95% of cases, maybe 100%. Because if both people agree, then you might as well just take a photo of them together. No need for AI then.

In Germany, a contract for such a service would be legally void.

(An example of this is the sale of radar detectors. Here, too, the companies claim that it’s the user’s responsibility not to use them for illegal purposes, i.e. speeding. But the courts don’t buy it. They say the companies know exactly what they selling, and they declare such contracts void. The fact that a user could, theoretically, use that detector in a way that would not be unlawful is irrelevant, since it’s empirically evident that the vast majority does not, and the very appeal of the product is precisely the unlawful behavior.)

[yardenst]

>Though it’s obvious that the customer does not have these permissions in probably 95% of cases, maybe 100%. Because if both people agree, then you might as well just take a photo of them together. No need for AI then.

That's not true if they cannot meet in person.

The legal aspects here are very interesting but I think they miss the point. This tech can be used to create photos with celebrities, but not only.

[Wistar]

Ah. I understand.