#Getty search by image software

As Petapixel notes, the results for searches under the term “midjourney” (one of the more notable AI rendering programs) have dropped from thousands to nearly nothing as of this writing. In any case, now that Getty has applied its ban, the AI-photo pool on the site has nearly disappeared. Getty CEO Craig Peters also explained in a near-identical statement to The Verge that, “There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery,”Ĭoming from a company with a long history of playing truly dirty games with how it applies copyright to images from creators, or illegally claims copyright over public domain imagery, or does many other pretzel-like twists with copyright law, these statements are interesting, to say the least. As Getty states in its note to creators, this is a factor in its decision: “There are open questions with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and there are unaddressed rights issues with respect to the underlying imagery and metadata used to train these models,” What’s more, the images created by these AI systems are currently not subject to copyright under U.S law. In their own statement, Getty claims that it’s being careful to make the distinction: “These changes do not prevent the submission of 3D renders and do not impact the use of digital editing tools (e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) with respect to modifying and creating imagery.”

#Getty search by image software

Presumably, Getty and others will be careful to distinguish between digital art created nearly instantly by AIs through their own algorithmic processes and digital art made by humans using software tools. Instead, as our post explains in detail, they’re automatically created visual representations of simple text prompts that users can submit to AI art-rendering sites such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion among others. These types of images are not pieces of digital artwork put together by hand by human artists. We’ve also explored what this kind of technology means for the future of photography. The agency shared with photo site Petapixel a note that it had sent out to all of its contributors about the new AI image ban.įor a tiny bit of background on this, we suggest checking out our post on our own experiments in AI-rendered image generation for a look at results that range between surreally creepy and outright absurd. For its part, Getty Images, the world’s largest stock photo repository, has now decided that it won’t accept new submissions created by AI-image generators and that it will delete those found to already be on the site. This has changed since then and looks like it will continue evolving considerably. Also bear in mind that this just represented images openly labeled by their uploaders as being AI-rendered.

In fact, a search of Shutterstock alone, under the term “AI-generated” yielded well over 18,000 results until recently. This had already started previously with smaller, more niche, and quality-oriented photo sale sites such as PurplePort, whose owners applied their own ban quickly and explained their reasoning in a blog post about it.Īt that point, however, sites like Getty, Shutterstock and others were still allowing these types of visuals freely. Now, in an apparent effort to counter some of this flood to their image-selling platforms, a few of the major stock photo sites that until recently allowed AI-generated imagery to be sold on them have begun applying ban hammers and restrictions. Some have even won art prizes, and the overall trend is only heading in the direction of more use. As we’d reported previously in our post on the future of photography, AI-generated images and art have started to saturate stock image websites, social media and other mediums.