The popularity of tools that create highly realistic images from artificial intelligence such as DALL-E and Midjourney has skyrocketed and has improved tremendously. These tools allow to generate images from brief text indications.
These images have also been shared on photo banks like Shutterstock and Getty Images, to be sold like any other photo, but it seems that some have already been removed. Vice has discovered that on Shutterstock, searches for images tagged as “Midjourney” (and with the aesthetics of the AI tool), which had high popularity scores and marked as “frequently used”they no longer appear.
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copyright issues
Although if you do a search for Midjourney on Shutterstock you will still see images of that aesthetic and probably generated with the AI tool, from Vice they note that many have disappeared. Of course, from Genbeta we have verified that an image that had been withdrawn has become available on the platform again.
Another photo bank Getty Images has announced it would ban AI-generated images.. In a statement, Getty specifically mentioned that any images created with popular tools like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and MidJourney are now banned. In addition, all previous images uploaded to the site that have been created with AI will be removed.
The measure is due to open copyright issues surrounding AI-generated images, especially “with respect to the underlying images and metadata used to create these models,” according to the Getty statement. Keep in mind that these systems use massive data sets of images taken from the web, which can lead to unresolved copyright issues.
Any image edited with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator is still allowed, as long as it was created by human hands.
Until now, as Ars Technica points out, neither Shutterstock nor Getty Images explicitly prohibited AI-generated images in their terms of serviceand Shutterstock users typically earn 15-40% of what the company earns when they sell an image.
The works generated by these AI tools are the result of an algorithmic process that pulls original art from the internet without giving credit or compensation to the original artists.