Jul 20, 2024

The push to develop generative artificial intelligence without all the lawsuits SECTIONS By NYT News Service Rate Story Synopsis While the largest tech companies like Google and OpenAI have been locked in a dizzying AI race, visual media marketplaces, content creators, and artists are pushing for licensing so that they can be paid for work that helps train AI models and influences the technology they worry could one day displace them. Agencies Companies such as 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 AI boom. Major stock photo suppliers Getty Images and Shutterstock, among others, are building AI image generators with their own data, bypassing the legal worries that have shadowed the industry. Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill Courses Offering College While the largest tech companies have been locked in a dizzying AI race, visual media marketplaces, content creators and artists are pushing for licensing so that they can be paid for work that helps train AI models and influences the technology they worry could one day displace them. It's part of a larger effort to transform how AI models are developed, one that would train them with licensed data rather than with content that is scraped without permission. Although many image generators are often used by consumers for amusement, such as 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 AI 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 Generation Zers. Picsart wanted to use licensed data to build the model because, for both the company and prospective customers, lawsuits are "a drag to the business, it's a distraction," said Craig Foster, its chief financial officer. "I don't want any part of that." Discover the stories of your interest After ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI, and Stable Diffusion, a popular image generator from the British startup Stability AI, wowed consumers in 2022, Google, Meta and other companies rushed to release similar AI capabilities. It didn't take long for lawsuits to follow. Publishers, authors and artists said they found signs that their works had been scraped to train the AI models. The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train AI chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft said they used the articles under "fair use." There has also been legal wrangling over models that convert text into images. Cartoonists and a photographer sued Google in April, saying the company trained Imagen, its image generator, with their copyrighted works. Google has said that "American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways." "With each different version of technology that comes out, copyright law is put to the test," said Alan Fisch, an intellectual property lawyer at Fisch Sigler. Without clear legal rules in place, licensing data is "one way to reduce risk," he added. In early 2023, Getty Images, the world's largest privately owned archive, noticed that its famous watermark was being re-created in some AI-generated images from Stable Diffusion. It sued the tool's maker, Stability AI, in February 2023, saying it had copied more than 12 million images from Getty's collection. Stability said it did not infringe on Getty's intellectual property rights. Getty worked with the chipmaker Nvidia to build its own image generator, calling it "a worry‑free model built for business." Through Getty's website or another interface, customers can type in a prompt for the image they want to see and specify its quality and style. Then, they can select the shape and color of the image, and the generator will present multiple options. Getty, along with 20 other stock image companies, is providing images for Bria AI, an Israeli startup, to build an AI model . Bria will split revenue from its generator with Getty and its other partners. Bria CEO Yair Adato said dividing revenue with all of the partners and helping to attribute work back to artists was essential to preserve the role of content creators. Without "value for creation, everything will be very average and very boring," he said. Getty has said it will pay photographers when it uses their images to train a model. It will also give photographers a portion of the subscription revenue it receives from clients. The company told Wired it paid about 30 cents for every dollar it made. The rising quality of models that generate images and videos has many artists concerned for the fate of their industries. And it is not always clear if AI companies have used their content to train the underlying models. The Times has reported that Sora, OpenAI's video generator, was trained partly on YouTube videos, but the company has not been transparent about data sources. That lack of transparency concerns filmmakers such as Joe Talbot, who directed the award-winning film "The Last Black Man in San Francisco." He said artists needed to be consulted about technology being built on the backs of their work. "I worry," he said, "about my fellow film brethren being able to etch out a decent existence." Shutterstock, which has a massive library of images and video clips, started a contributor fund in 2022 to compensate artists when their work was licensed for AI. The amount a contributor is paid depends on how much an AI provider pays Shutterstock. Their royalties are a proportion from each deal, and the amount rises if the client uses more of their images. The company declined to specify exact percentages, the average value of a photo or typical payouts. Outside of AI, regular photos on Shutterstock often sell for $14.50 each, and photographers receive 15% to 40% of the total, depending on how many they license in a year. Shutterstock has taken a different route to AI than its rival Getty has, selling images to major AI providers such as OpenAI since 2021 and receiving $104 million in licensing revenue last year. But it says licensing habits are changing. "We are well aware that the days of needing huge volumes of data to train models are over," said Aimee Egan, chief enterprise officer of Shutterstock. Later this year, the company will roll out two AI models: one with software-maker Databricks for images and another with Nvidia for 3D images. Companies such as Shutterstock and Adobe are now paying photographers to take pictures for AI training, but the earning potential can be modest and inconsistent. Adobe has offered photographers less than $100 to shoot as many as 1,000 photos for AI, Bloomberg News reported. And the rush to develop polished generated images could erode long-term job prospects in photography. That has left room for other companies trying to help artists be paid when their work is used for AI. Startup OpenLicense built a marketplace where AI businesses can find data and artists can be compensated and track which models are using their work. Payments scale with how often a photo is used. If a photo is referenced 1 million times to generate images, the artist can expect as much as $12,000 in royalties, said Joshua Soto, co-founder and president of OpenLicense. The company has started working with artists on Imageshack, an image-hosting site it has teamed up with. Soto said the company was "trying to bridge the benefits" of AI between developers and artists. That relationship was recently put under more strain when Adobe, the software giant behind Photoshop, updated its terms of service with vague language in June. Some customers believed the words to mean that Adobe would scrape their work to keep building its generative AI system, Firefly. The company denied the claim several times. But the episode highlighted artists' pervasive fears over how AI could disrupt their livelihoods -- a worry that has led some to oppose the technology. But Soto, a onetime graphic designer, said that engaging could make the best of a challenging situation. "Your content is going to get used either way," he said. "You might as well be in a position where you are part of that process and explicitly saying which content you want used." Read More News on