The Push to Develop Generative A.I. Without All the Lawsuits

Companies like Google and OpenAI built their artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators by gobbling content from the web, spurring legal fights over copyright claims.

Now, some of those copyright holders are trying to get in on the A.I. boom. The major stock photo suppliers Getty Images and Shutterstock, among others, are building A.I. image generators with their own data, bypassing the legal worries that have shadowed the industry.

While the largest tech companies have been locked in a dizzying A.I. race, visual media marketplaces, content creators and artists are pushing for licensing so that they can be paid for work that helps train A.I. models and influences the technology they worry could one day displace them. It’s part of a larger effort to transform how A.I. models are developed, one that would train them with licensed data rather than with content that is scraped without permission.

While many image generators are often used by consumers for amusement, like creating the viral image of the pope in a white puffer jacket, the tech industry has coalesced around the idea that more advertising agencies and other companies would use these tools for marketing if there was no legal uncertainty surrounding them.

That’s the target market for Getty. Its partner, Picsart, which is building an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository, is trying to appeal to small- and medium-size businesses. The company is mostly known for a photo-editing app used by more than 100 million people, most of them Gen Z-ers.

Picsart built an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository. Credit…via Picsart