According to a source, Getty Images has prohibited the sale of AI-generated art produced using image synthesis models. Further, it includes Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, and Mid journey through their site.
The Verge chatted with Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images, to get more details on the new policy. According to Peters, there are legitimate worries. Also, it is about the copyright of the models’ outputs and some rights issues involving the imagery, the picture metadata, and the people in the images.
Usage of Getty Images
After paying a license fee, publications (like Ars Technica) frequently use the extensive collection of stock and historical photos and drawings. Moreover, it is from Getty Images to accompany their stories.
Getty’s action comes after smaller art community websites earlier. This month banned image synthesis because their sites overuse artificial intelligence (AI)-generated art. That threatened to outnumber work produced without the use of those tools.
Permission by Getty’s Images Competitor
Although Vice recently reported the site was eliminating AI artwork. Shutterstock’s content submission guidelines have not changed. Getty Images competitor Shutterstock permits AI-generated artwork on its website.
Getty Pictures
The capacity to copyright AI-generated artwork has not been in court. There is an ongoing online discussion on the morality of using artists’ unpermitted works to train neural networks. That can produce artwork that is nearly human-level in quality.
Getty decided to sidestep the problem completely. With its prohibition to safeguard the company’s reputation and its clients. Ars Technica discovered AI-generated art while searching the Getty Images repository.
Can copyright protect AI art?
AI-generated images have not entirely overcome Copyright concerns despite claims made by the makers of well-known AI picture synthesis models. Note the quotes Smithsonian story with the incorrect title “US Copyright Office Rules AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted” is frequently misinterpreted.
In that case, the Copyright Office rejected a researcher’s application to register an AI system as the non-human owner of copyright. A copyright holder must be a person or a group of humans.
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Currently, AI image synthesis businesses operate under the presumption that individuals or companies can register their copyright for an AI creation. It is the case with the work produced by any other artistic tool.
There is some solid precedent here, and the Copyright Office cited a significant 1884 judicial judgment. That upheld the copyright status of images when it rejected the registry of copyright to an AI in its 2022 ruling.
Stay tuned for future updates!
