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Sunday, October 23, 2022

Getty Images Bans AI Generated Artwork

Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of legal challenges / Getty Images is worried about future copyright claims

By JAMES VINCENT   in TheVerge

Getty Images has banned the upload and sale of illustrations generated using AI art tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It’s the latest and largest user-generated content platform to introduce such a ban, following similar decisions by sites including Newgrounds, PurplePort, and FurAffinity.

Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the ban was prompted by concerns about the legality of AI-generated content and a desire to protect the site’s customers.

“There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models”

“There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery,” said Peters. Given these concerns, he said, selling AI artwork or illustrations could potentially put Getty Images users at legal risk. “We are being proactive to the benefit of our customers,” he added.

The creators of AI image generators say the technology is legal, but that’s no guarantee this status won’t be contested. Software like Stable Diffusion is trained on copyrighted images scraped from the web, including personal art blogs, news sites, and stock photo sites like Getty Images. The act of scraping is legal in the US, and it seems the output of the software is covered by “fair use” doctrine. But fair use provides weaker protection to commercial activity like selling pictures, and some artists whose work has been scraped and imitated by companies making AI image generators have called for new laws to regulate this domain. ... 

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