Peters says that the creators of the pictures—and any those that appear in them—have consented to having their art utilized in the AI model. Getty can also be offering a Spotify-style compensation model to creatives for using their work. 

The proven fact that creatives might be compensated in this manner is nice news, says Jia Wang, an assistant professor at Durham University within the UK, who focuses on AI and intellectual-property law. Nevertheless it is perhaps tricky to find out which images have been utilized in generated AI images so as to determine who ought to be compensated for what, she adds. 

Getty’s model is barely trained on the firm’s creative content, so it doesn’t include imagery of real people or places that might be manipulated into deepfake imagery. 

“The service doesn’t know who the pope is and it doesn’t know what Balenciaga is, and so they can’t mix the 2. It doesn’t know what the Pentagon is, and [that] you’re not gonna find a way to blow it up,” says Peters, referring to recent viral images created by generative AI models. 

For example, Peters types in a prompt for the president of america, and the AI model generates images of men and ladies of various ethnicities in suits and in front of the American flag. 

Tech firms claim that AI models are complex and might’t be built without copyrighted content and indicate that artists can opt out of AI models, but Peters calls those arguments “bullshit.” 

“I feel there are some really sincere those that are literally being thoughtful about this,” he says. “But I also think there’s some hooligans that just wish to go for that gold rush.”