The Push to Develop Generative A.I. Without All the Lawsuits

Companies like Getty have begun developing A.I. models with their own data, part of a broader push to build artificial intelligence with licensed content.

Companies like Google and OpenAI built their artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators by gobbling content from the web, spurring legal fights over copyright claims.

Now, some of those copyright holders are trying to get in on the A.I. boom. The major stock photo suppliers Getty Images and Shutterstock, among others, are building A.I. image generators with their own data, bypassing the legal worries that have shadowed the industry.

While the largest tech companies have been locked in a dizzying A.I. race, visual media marketplaces, content creators and artists are pushing for licensing so that they can be paid for work that helps train A.I. models and influences the technology they worry could one day displace them. It’s part of a larger effort to transform how A.I. models are developed, one that would train them with licensed data rather than with content that is scraped without permission.

While many image generators are often used by consumers for amusement, like creating the viral image of the pope in a white puffer jacket, the tech industry has coalesced around the idea that more advertising agencies and other companies would use these tools for marketing if there was no legal uncertainty surrounding them.

That’s the target market for Getty. Its partner, Picsart, which is building an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository, is trying to appeal to small- and medium-size businesses. The company is mostly known for a photo-editing app used by more than 100 million people, most of them Gen Z-ers.

Picsart built an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository. Credit...via Picsart

Picsart wanted to use licensed data to build the model because, for both the company and prospective customers, lawsuits are “a drag to the business, it’s a distraction,” Craig Foster, its chief financial officer, said. “I don’t want any part of that.”

After ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI, and Stable Diffusion, a popular image generator from the British start-up Stability AI, wowed consumers in 2022, Google, Meta and other companies rushed to release similar A.I. capabilities. It didn’t take long for lawsuits to follow.

Publishers, authors and artists said they found signs that their works had been scraped to train the A.I. models. The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train A.I. chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft said they used the articles under “fair use.”

There’s also been legal wrangling over models that convert text into images. Cartoonists and a photographer sued Google in April, saying the company trained Imagen, its image generator, with their copyrighted works. Google has said that “American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways.”

“With each different version of technology that comes out, copyright law is put to the test,” said Alan Fisch, an intellectual property lawyer at Fisch Sigler. Without clear legal rules in place, licensing data is “one way to reduce risk,” he added.

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.

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.

Yair Adato, the chief executive of Bria, said dividing revenue with all of the partners and helping to attribute work back to artists was essential to preserve the role of content creators.

Without “value for creation, everything will be very average and very boring,” he said.

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.

Bria AI, an Israeli start-up, was allowed to build an A.I. model with Getty images.Credit...via Bria AI

The rising quality of models that generate images and videos has many artists concerned for the fate of their industries. And it is not always clear if A.I. companies have used their content to train the underlying models. The Times has reported that Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, was trained partly on YouTube videos, but the company has not been transparent about data sources.

That lack of transparency concerns filmmakers like Joe Talbot, who directed the award-winning film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” He said artists needed to be consulted about technology being built on the backs of their work.

“I worry,” he said, “about my fellow film brethren being able to etch out a decent existence.”

Shutterstock, which has a massive library of images and video clips, started a contributor fund in 2022 to compensate artists when their work was licensed for A.I. The amount a contributor is paid depends on how much an A.I. provider pays Shutterstock. Their royalties are a proportion from each deal, and the amount rises if the client uses more of their images. The company declined to specify exact percentages, the average value of a photo or typical payouts.

Outside of A.I., regular photos on Shutterstock often sell for $14.50 each, and photographers receive 15 to 40 percent of the total, depending on how many they license in a year.

Shutterstock 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.

Companies like Shutterstock and Adobe are now paying photographers to take pictures for A.I. training, but the earning potential can be modest and inconsistent. Adobe has offered photographers less than $100 to shoot as many as 1,000 photos for A.I., Bloomberg News reported. And the rush to develop polished generated images could erode long-term job prospects in photography.

That has left room for other companies trying to help artists be paid when their work is used for A.I. The start-up OpenLicense built a marketplace where A.I. businesses can find data and artists can be compensated and track which models are using their work. Payments scale with how often a photo is used. If a photo is referenced a million times to generate images, the artist can expect as much as $12,000 in royalties, said Joshua Soto, the co-founder and president of OpenLicense.

The company has started working with artists on Imageshack, an image-hosting site it has teamed up with.

Mr. Soto said the company was “trying to bridge the benefits” of A.I. between developers and artists.

That relationship was recently put under more strain when Adobe, the software giant behind Photoshop, updated its terms of service with vague language in June. Some customers believed the words to mean that Adobe would scrape their work to keep building its generative A.I. system, Firefly.

The company denied the claim several times. But the episode highlighted artists’ pervasive fears over how A.I. could disrupt their livelihoods — a worry that has led some to oppose the technology. But Mr. Soto, a onetime graphic designer, said that engaging could make the best of a challenging situation.

“Your content is going to get used either way,” he said. “You might as well be in a position where you are part of that process and explicitly saying which content you want used.”

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