“Painting AI” is causing waves of controversy. The popularity of AI painting tools like DALL-E and Midjourney is helping thousands of amateur artists use AI to create paintings through given keywords. These paintings were even put up for sale on sites like Shutterstock and Getty Images — and the sites started to “take off”.
On Shutterstock, image searches tagged “Midjourney” return AI-generated paintings – many with high popularity scores and marked as “frequently used.” But late Monday, search results for the keyword “Midjourney” appeared to have dropped, returning mostly images of the tool’s logo.
Shutterstock and Getty Images began to delete the “AI paintings” for sale
Some other images use tags such as “AI generated” – for example, one image is an illustration of a futuristic building described as “ AI generated to illustrate the city ” futuristic, vintage photo, vintage poster ”. The image is part of a collection dubbed “Midjourney” that has been removed from the website. However, other images with similar labels appear to remain on the site.
Shutterstock and Getty Images did not respond to requests for comment.
According to Ars Technica, neither Shutterstock nor Getty Images have an explicit tie to AI-generated images in their terms of service, and Shutterstock users typically earn about 15 to 40 percent of what the company generates when sell images.
On Wednesday, Getty Images said it had banned the upload and sale of AI-generated images due to copyright concerns.
Getty Images says it has banned the upload and sale of AI-generated images due to copyright concerns
“ There are genuine concerns regarding the copyright of the outputs from these models and unresolved rights issues to the images, image metadata, and individuals contained in the images. photos ,” Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told the Verge.
Some creators expressed displeasure with these tools, claiming that they use huge datasets of images pulled from the web. Artist David O’Reilly recently posted on Instagram calling DALL-E a “scam” and saying it ” undermines the work of artists of many schools, most obviously photographers, illustrators and concept artists who shared their work online and never asked to put their work into a machine learning model .”
In other words, works are created as a result of an algorithmic process of mining original artwork from the internet without credit or compensation to the original artists. Others worry about the impact on indie artists working for commissions, since if anyone can create artwork, that could mean a loss of revenue.
It’s “ironic” when AI-generated photos appear on a website where these tools used to mine data to create their “work”. As the issue of profiting from images taken from other works based on algorithms is controversial and unresolved, users of these tools are unlikely to give up their intention to seize this opportunity. to make money fast.