At CES 2024, Getty Images, the stock media company, unveiled a new service that uses AI models trained on Getty’s iStock stock photography and video libraries to create new licensable images and artwork.
The new service, called Generative AI by iStock, is powered in part by technology from Nvidia. It has been designed to prevent the creation of known products, people, places, or other copyrighted elements, with availability in 75 languages. It can modify existing images as well as generate new ones and can be integrated with existing apps and plug-ins through an API.
Customers can access the service for $15 per 100 generated images.
Grant Farhall, iStock’s chief product officer, emphasized the goal of Generative AI by iStock to provide customers with an affordable and user-friendly AI option for their creative processes, ensuring legal protection against copyrighted content. He highlighted the potential risk of copyrighted content slipping into the dataset and potentially ending up in customers’ work.
A variety of images created with Getty’s new Generative AI by iStock. Image Credits: Getty Images
Generative AI by iStock is Getty’s second GenAI tool and comes at a time when the debate over copyright issues related to AI heats up.
AI models, which learn from vast amounts of artwork, e-books, essays, and more to generate human-like text and images, often reproduce those examples when prompted in specific ways. This can pose a problem when the examples are under copyright and the creator of the model did not obtain permission or pay a fee to use them, as seen in the case of fake Disney posters generated by Microsoft’s chatbot.
Noted AI critic Gary Marcus and visual effects artist Reid Southen discussed in a recent piece in IEEE Spectrum how AI systems, including OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, replicate data even when not prompted to do so, with no publicly available tool or database for users to consult to identify possible infringement.
While some companies argue fair use doctrine as protection, this issue is unlikely to be resolved soon, as evidenced by lawsuits filed by artists against AI companies arguing copyright infringement.
Getty Images has also sued AI companies for allegedly copying and processing millions of images and metadata owned by Getty. As a response, a few vendors have begun offering to cover the legal fees of customers involved in copyright lawsuits arising from their use of GenAI tools. Generative AI by iStock offers a similar policy, providing $10,000 in legal coverage for any licensed visuals generated by its customers as a last resort.
