Getty bans AI-generated art over copyright concerns • The Register

Getty Images has banned people from uploading AI-generated images to its massive image collection, citing copyright concerns.

Text-to-image tools like 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 mockup to create images from text descriptions.

All you have to do is tell the AI ​​system in writing what kind of scene you want it to create, and the software will generate it for you. The quality of these images has gotten so good that they are now used by professionals to create magazine covers and advertisements, win art competitions, and so on.

You can see them as interesting tools for generating images or as the end of art as we know it.

There are real copyright concerns about the results of these models

The copyright of these machine-made images remains unclear. The neural networks trained to generate images are trained with photos and artwork scratched online from sites like Pinterest or Artstation. Internet users can easily create digital art in the style of living or dead artists included in the training dataset in just a few seconds.

This raises the question for some: If an AI closely apes an artist – or rips them off – how legally secure is that then? If a computer is trained using someone else’s images using someone else’s software, and then that output is sold by someone else, what are the ownership, rights and liability implications?

Amidst this uncertainty, Getty has updated its policy to now ban submissions created by AI software in its holdings libraries; It will no longer host and sell these types of images. If there is one thing that collection libraries like, it is clearly defined ownership and copyrights of material in their libraries – without which they are unwilling to license works for others to use. This is too much legal mess.

“There are real copyright concerns about the results of these models and unresolved rights issues related to the images, the image metadata and the people in the images,” said CEO Craig Peters said The edge.

“We act proactively for the benefit of our customers,” he added.

Peters declined to answer questions about whether Getty Images has been threatened with legal trouble by people contesting AI-generated content.

He said the changes were made to “avoid risk [customers’] Reputation, brand, and bottom line.” A quick search of the company’s iStock website for keywords like “AI-generated” or “midjourney” reveals that thousands of images have been removed. There are many more less obvious images lurking on the platform created by a computer’s imagination.

Peters said Getty Images will rely on users to identify and report AI-generated images, and the company is currently working with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity to create filters that can automatically flag potentially problematic content.

Other image giants like Shutterstock also appear to be limiting the artworks created by AI. motherboard noticed Shutterstock had quietly removed images that were described as “AI-generated” or directly linked to tools like Midjourney.

The registry has reached out to Shutterstock for comment. ®