Getty and Shutterstock are looking to take control of their own intellectual property. These image companies are creating their own AI models.

As reported by The New York Times (The Push to Develop Generative A.I. Without All the Lawsuits, written by Nico Grant and Cade Metz and available here), companies like Getty and Shutterstock have sued over the use of their IP by AI models. Now, these image companies are creating their own AI models with their own data, part of a broader push to build AI with licensed content.

In early 2023, Getty Images, the world’s largest privately owned archive, noticed that its famous watermark was being recreated in some A.I.-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.

So, 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 start-up, to build an A.I. model. Bria will split revenue from its generator with Getty and its other partners.

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 on the dollar for every dollar it made.

Shutterstock, which has a massive library of images and video clips, has taken a different route to A.I. than its rival Getty has, selling images to major A.I. providers like 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, the chief enterprise officer of Shutterstock.

Later this year, the company will roll out two A.I. models: one with the software maker Databricks for images and another with Nvidia for 3-D images.

It’s no surprise to me that these image companies are creating their own AI models – especially since the outcome of their IP litigation is in doubt, with the AI companies claiming “fair use” of the content. I expect we’ll see more companies develop their own AI models on their own content – any type of content – to get their own piece of the genAI revenue pie.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that image companies are creating their own AI models? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot looking at a picture of a landscape on a computer monitor”.

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