Getty Images Bans Upload of AI-Generated Footage

Getty Images has banned the upload of images generated by artificial intelligence. That’s what a top executive of the image bank told The Verge. The problem would be that the copyright situation of such images is unclear.

This concerns a ban on the images of picture makers such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, reports The Verge. According to Getty Director Craig Peters, there are copyright concerns on such generated images and the site wants to protect its customers by banning AI images altogether.

The intended tools can generate an image that does not yet exist by means of a text command and work with a training set of images from the public web. Some of the images used are copyrighted. There is as yet no case law regarding the copyright of AI generated images and there are no laws about it.

Getty won’t say if it’s had copyright issues yet, but it does claim that AI-generated images make up a small portion of the overall image bank. Getty to enforce the ban through partnership with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity and by allowing users to report the images.

Getty watermark in Trump images from Lexica shows copyrighted images used in training data. Source: Lexica