Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, September 25, Getty Images recently announced a ban on uploading and selling illustrations generated by AI art tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. This is the latest and largest user-generated content platform to introduce such a ban after similar decisions have been made by some websites.

Craig Peters, chief executive of Getty Images, said the ban was driven by concerns about the legality of content generated by AI and a desire to protect customers on the site.

"there are real concerns about the copyright of the output of these models and the unresolved rights of individuals contained in images, image metadata and images," Craig Peters said. Given these concerns, the sale of artificial intelligence art or illustrations could pose legal risks to Getty Images users. "We are proactively working for the benefit of our clients," he added.

The creator of the AI image generator says the technology is legal, but there is no guarantee that its status will not be questioned. Software like Stable Diffusion is trained for copyrighted images crawled from the Internet, including personal art blogs, news sites and photo sites like Getty Images. Crawling is legal in the United States, and the output of the software seems to be covered by the principle of "fair use". But fair use has weak protection for commercial activities such as selling pictures, and the works of some artists have been plagiarized and imitated by companies that make artificial intelligence image generators, calling for new laws to regulate the field.

Craig Peters declined to say whether Getty Images was legally challenged by selling content generated by artificial intelligence. He said such content on the platform was "extremely limited" and reiterated that the company had introduced the policy only to "avoid risks to [customer] reputation, brand and bottom line".

CTOnews.com has learned that Shutterstock, one of Getty Images's biggest competitors, appears to have restricted some searches for artificial intelligence content, but has not yet introduced a specific policy banning the material. Other platforms have deleted AI images for reasons other than protecting customers. For example, the social-focused art website says it bans artificial intelligence works of art because it destroys the work of human artists.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Claiyon) sample the work of other artists to create content. The generated content can refer to hundreds or even thousands of works by other artists to create derivative images, "said a social art website." Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don't think it is in the best interest of our community to allow AI to generate content on the site. "

Asked whether the content generated by AI posed a threat to the livelihoods of illustrators and photographers who sold their work on Getty Images, Peters said the tools were only the latest example of technology expanding the number of images available.

"the world is already full of images. In view of the reduced cost and the simplicity of capture, transmission and use, digital cameras have produced an exponential growth in images. The introduction of smartphones and social media has taken this to a whole new level, shooting and releasing trillions of images, "Craig Peters said." Our business has never been about how easy it is to create images or the number of images generated. It's about connecting and cutting in. "

However, it can actually be difficult to delete AI content. Peters said Getty Images will rely on users to identify and report such images, and it is working with C2PA (content Source and authenticity Alliance) to create filters. However, no automatic filter is completely reliable, and it is not clear how easy it will be for Getty Images to enforce the new ban.

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