Getty and Its Licensed Smart Software Art

September 26, 2023

Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid. (Yep, the dinobaby is back from France. Thanks to those who made the trip professionally and personally enjoyable.)

The illustration shows a very, very happy image rights troll. The cloud of uncertainty from AI generated images has passed. Now the rights software bots, controlled by cheerful copyright trolls, can scour the Web for unauthorized image use. Forget the humanoids. The action will be from tireless AI generators and equally robust bots designed to charge a fee for the image created by zeros and ones. Yes!

A quite joyful copyright troll displays his killer moves. Thanks, MidJourney. The gradient descent continues, right into the legal eagles’ nests.

“Getty Made an AI Generator That Only Trained on Its Licensed Images” reports:

Generative AI by Getty Images (yes, it’s an unwieldy name) is trained only on the vast Getty Images library, including premium content, giving users full copyright indemnification. This means anyone using the tool and publishing the image it created commercially will be legally protected, promises Getty. Getty worked with Nvidia to use its Edify model, available on Nvidia’s generative AI model library Picasso.

This is exciting. Will the images include a tough-to-discern watermark? Will the images include a license plate, a social security number, or a just a nifty sting of harmless digits?

The article does reveal the money angle:

The company said any photos created with the tool will not be included in the Getty Images and iStock content libraries. Getty will pay creators if it uses their AI-generated image to train the current and future versions of the model. It will share revenues generated from the tool, “allocating both a pro rata share in respect of every file and a share based on traditional licensing revenue.”

Who will be happy? Getty, the trolls, or the designers who have a way to be more productive with a helping hand from the Getty robot? I think the world will be happier because monetization, smart software, and lawyers are a business model with legs… or claws.

Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2023

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Copyright, Legal matters, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.