Massive media company Getty Images is launching a new AI image-generating tool and offering indemnity to users as the argument concerning intellectual property throughout the globe heats up.
The U.S. company, who serves one million customers, has around 135 million copyrighted images, but now it has revealed its new AI-generation tool, which creates images on demand.
With launching the new tool, developed in partnership with chip company Nvidia, Getty announced it would shield around 800,000 users with an uncapped indemnification tied to the product so that users will have no or very little legal responsibility.
Getty is following Microsoft’s lead, who also recently said it would provide indemnity coverage to safeguard users from prospective copyright claims when using its newly integrated generative AI CoPilot services. The new Microsoft product will run in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint products.
Getty chief executive Craig Peters shared that the organisation is looking forward to growing this segment and that its investment in AI will have great returns.
“We fundamentally believe creatives’ . . . expertise, and the investment that they put into this content, should be rewarded,” Peters said.
The new Getty product will go toe to toe with OpenAI’s image-generating tool DALL-E, which was recently updated and will add image-recognition capabilities to ChatGPT.
The rise in popularity of AI products like OpenAI, Midjourney, and Stability AI is surging, and the tools themselves continue to advance at a brisk pace, but legal questions regarding copywriting continue to expand and grow.
Getty themselves lodged a copyright claim against Stability AI, saying it had “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright”.
When Peters considers the future of AI-generated images, he said the way onward is establishing IP-protected products that reasonably compensate human artists.
Further, he said that criticism against fair compensation from companies saying it would be “impractical,” the widespread popularity and monetisation of AI generator tools such as the new Getty product “proves that argument doesn’t hold any water.”
