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Two Major companies Adobe Inc and Nvidia Corp announced new tools that use artificial intelligence to generate images without infringing any form of copyright and legal issues. Let’s understand how they work.

Background: Why Artists are dissatisfied with AI-generated art? 

Recently artists on platforms such as ArtStation have staged protests to voice their discontent with the torrent of new AI-generated art, while China recently became the first country to ban AI-generated media without watermarks.

For example, two companies behind popular AI art tools, Midjourney and Stability AI, are in the crosshairs of a legal case that alleges they infringed on the rights of millions of artists by training their tools on web-scraped images. Stock image supplier Getty Images has taken Stability AI to court, separately, for reportedly using millions of images from its site without permission to train the art-generating model Stable Diffusion.

Beyond unresolved questions around artist and platform compensation, one of the more pressing issues with generative AI is its tendency to replicate images, text and more — including copyrighted content — from the data that was used to train it. Some image-hosting platforms have banned AI-generated content for fear of legal blowback, and experts have cautioned generative AI tools could put companies at risk if they were to unwittingly incorporate copyrighted content generated by the tools into any of products they sell.

How Adobe and Nvidia Corp is working to resolve the copyright issue?

Adobe Inc

Adobe Inc got into the generative AI game with the launch of a new family of AI models called Firefly.

Adobe says that artwork created using Firefly models will contain metadata indicating that it’s partially — or wholly — AI-generated. 

Adobe’s solution is training Firefly models exclusively on content from Adobe Stock, the company’s royalty-free media library, along with openly licensed and public domain content where the copyright has expired. In the future, users will be able to train and fine-tune Firefly models using their own content, Adobe says — steering the models’ outputs toward specific styles and design languages.

The company also is advocating for a universal “do not train” tag that would allow photographers to request that their content not be used to train models.

Nvidia Corp

On the other hand Nvidia Corp unveiled its own service, known as “Picasso,” that uses AI to generate images, videos and 3D applications from text descriptions. Nvidia trained the technology on images licensed from Getty Images, Shutterstock Inc, and Adobe, and plans to pay royalties.

What will be the larger impact on Artists?

This marks a milestone in the ongoing tension between the rights of copyright holders and emerging technology. Image-generation technology is “trained” on billions of images, but whether that use is legally permitted is not always clear.

Generative AI is an exciting tool that should be based on permissioned data, visuals, and individual privacy.

Photographers and artists may ultimately benefit by using the technology to license their artistic style.

The livelihoods of content creators depend on respect for intellectual property rights and the value of their creative endeavors. Innovation and creativity thrive in an environment where artists, photographers, videographers, and creatives everywhere can be fairly compensated for their work, especially when it is used for commercial purposes.