Concerns over copyright and artists’ livelihoods have caused photography agencies to remove images created by artificial intelligence models from their databases.
The worries come from the fact that the AIs hoover up vast amounts of human-generated art to train themselves and use this database of knowledge to generate photorealistic images related to almost any text prompt. This has led to ethical debate and highlighted the legislative grey area about who owns the copyright of an image generated by an AI that bases its output on prior work.
Large stock photography agencies including and Shutterstock have announced in recent weeks that they will remove images created by AI models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney because the legal situation on copyright is unclear.
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A Getty spokesperson told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ that “there are open questions and real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models, as well as unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery”.
Although the creators of some AI models, , have said that copyright of output will belong to the user who enters the prompt into the AI, smaller photo agencies are feeling the pressure to follow the large companies in banning the content. Dittmar Frohmann, the owner of stock agency , says his company is deliberating whether to follow Getty and Shutterstock, but is likely to take the same approach.Â
“I’d rather follow them because we’re a tiny company,” says Frohmann. “I’d rather believe their legal departments than the guy that I have to pay and who looks into it for like an hour.”
at the University of Surrey, UK, says that while in theory you can legally copyright images generated by an AI in the UK, and the same should be possible in the US, it hasn’t actually been tested in the UK and the US Copyright Office has “a longstanding policy of not allowing copyright on AI-generated art”.
Abbott has , with no success, and claims that the US government’s stance stifles innovation. “AI is resulting in the generation and dissemination of countless works with social and market value, and this development should be encouraged,” he says. “Simply removing AI-generated images entirely from a platform is not a real solution to any of the challenges associated with this phenomenon.”
at law firm Decoded.Legal says the UK’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 in the country, which would probably cover AI-generated work, but there are complications. Not only could the output image be covered by copyright, but the input prompt also could, if sufficiently detailed. There are already that allow people to buy and sell detailed text prompts, and anyone able to prove that their text prompt is being used by someone else could have a copyright claim. Not only this, says Brown, but the creators of the AI systems themselves may have their own terms and conditions that could “further muddy the waters”.
“The work that you create, in my view could be protected by copyright,” he says. “But that isn’t settled. So you could be in for some expensive litigation.”
Some academics argue that nobody should own the copyright on AI-generated images. at King’s College London says that society currently seems to be valuing the ability of AI to create images above the creativity of human artists whose work was “stolen” to train it.
“Right now, the public are generally on the side of image-generating AI,” he says. “They see it as exciting and novel. I suspect that won’t last forever, and eventually we’ll see people shift their view towards it being derivative. Stable Diffusion isn’t defining its own styles, trends, methods or anything like that. We are marvelling at a system that can replicate human artists, but we’re yet to see an AI that can contribute something back to human culture.”
Frohmann says Photocase is likely to seek explicit permission from the people submitting images to their agency before allowing AI companies to use their archive for training their AIs, because these artists may well object to the idea of their work being used to develop an AI that could one day replace them. References to AI training is already being for larger companies like Getty.
Despite his stance, Frohmann says that ideologically he sees AI as a tool akin to editing software or to a physical camera that is being used by someone to create work, and that copyright should belong to the person prompting the AI. He also currently sees no threat to the livelihood of artists and photographers because of the quality of the output.Â
“If you look at the sum of it, it’s a whole lot of crap,” he says. “It’s the median of all the tastes. The images, if you look at them, they look good – but totally boring and predictable, and soulless.”
