September 22, 2022

Citing Copyright Concerns, Getty Images Bans AI-Generated Content

With a new world of visual potential lately opened by artificial intelligence (AI) image generators such as DALL-E and Midjourney, there is also a new world of potential legal complications. Looking to get ahead of problems before they begin, Getty Images — a massive supplier of stock photography — has banned the upload and sale of all content generated using AI art tools. The technology can quickly generate multiple takes on imagery from user-supplied text prompts, with results that range from silly, to pretty realistic, to fairly nightmarish, to truly the worst thing ever.

But where is the source material for these AI bots coming from? For the most part, it’s being scraped and remixed from the work of human artists, who use the Internet as a venue for their work to connect with audiences and potential buyers. Not only do some see this as disenfranchising to artists who have worked hard to develop a personal brand, but it also presents legal quicksand for image sites that decide to trade in AI-crafted content.

“Effective immediately, Getty Images will cease to accept all submissions created using AI generative models (e.g., Stable Diffusion, Dall-E 2, MidJourney, etc.) and prior submissions utilizing such models will be removed,” reads a statement circulated this week by the company to media and its image providers. “There are open questions with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and there are unaddressed rights issues with respect to the underlying imagery and metadata used to train these models.”

Read the full article at hyperallergic.com.