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Getty Images will give hundreds of thousands of users access to a new artificial intelligence image-generating tool, as a global intellectual property debate intensifies around the fast-moving technology.
The US photo agency, one of the world’s largest with more than 135 million copyrighted images in its archives, on Monday launched an AI tool that can create pictures based on user prompts. It also set out a payment plan for those whose images were used to train the AI system.
Getty added a pledge to protect the more than 800,000 users with an uncapped indemnification tied to the product, meaning the agency will assume full legal and financial responsibility on behalf of its business customers for any potential copyright disputes.
The release follows a promise this month from Microsoft to provide indemnity coverage to any potential copyright claims arising from using its AI CoPilot services, which integrate generative AI into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint products.
Getty will also pay the artists who have helped train its AI system on a “recurring basis,” chief executive Craig Peters said.
“We fundamentally believe creatives’… expertise, and the investment that they put into this content, should be rewarded,” Peters said. The “dollars are going to be small at the outset,” he added, but said the market for generative AI products will grow and “these will develop into material revenue streams.”
Getty’s product launch comes on the heels of OpenAI’s update last week of its popular image-generating tool DALL-E.
AI art tools offered by companies such as OpenAI, Midjourney, and Stability AI are at the center of a debate around intellectual property ownership in the age of AI. Getty this year filed a copyright claim against Stability AI, maker of a commercial image-generating tool, in the UK High Court, claiming it had “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright.”
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