The largest photobanks have banned the uploading and selling of neural network-generated illustrations, and here’s why:
On Sept. 21, 2022, Getty Images imposed a ban on uploading and selling images created with illustration generation services like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Earlier in September, several other photobanks, including Newgrounds, PurplePort and FurAffinity, imposed a similar restriction.
Getty Images CEO Craig Peters said the company banned such images from its platform to avoid possible copyright infringement and, as a result, claims against the service’s clients.
Peters did not say whether his company has received any lawsuits over the images created by neural networks.
The fears of photobank owners are related to the fact that neural network developers train them to create illustrations from a lot of images, some of which are protected by copyright. In theory, the AI-generated images could contain fragments of the works of real artists.
The large photobank Shutterstock has not yet completely banned images created with the help of AI generators, but it has begun to remove such illustrations.
Do you use images generated by neural networks in your work?
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