The age old saying "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" has no better example than this: Getty Images has announced it is releasing its own AI Image Generator that's been trained on its own images and will be exclusive to its service. Matt O'Brien at AP News has more.
CEO Craig Peters said the new service, called Generative AI by Getty Images, emerged from a longstanding collaboration with California tech company and chipmaker Nvidia that preceded the legal challenges against Stability AI. It’s built upon Edify, an AI model from Nvidia’s generative AI division Picasso.
It promises “full indemnification for commercial use” and is meant to avoid the intellectual property risks that have made businesses wary of using generative AI tools.
Getty contributors will also be paid for having their images included in the training set, incorporated as part of royalty obligations so that the company is “actually sharing the revenue with them over time rather than paying a one-time fee or not paying that at all,” Peters said.
AP News
Getty took the natural approach when the likes of DALL-E and Stable Diffusion hit the scene late last year: file lawsuits. And it's worked for all intents and purposes. It's seeking $150,000 for each infringed work and it's going through the courts. But Getty's approach has shown they mean business but also want business in this space. So its rolling out its own.
While it is still easy to determine these AI-generated images from the real deal, Getty has an enormous amount of data it can use to train its own AI. This means with enough of a leap in the technology, we may seriously see photos of anything that can never be seen as fake because they're too good. In some ways it will be amazing to see what these systems can generate. And in others it scares the crap out of me because we literally will no longer be able to trust our eyes 100% of the time.