By Jess Jones
Amid the ongoing legal knots and evolving regulations surrounding generative artificial intelligence (AI), businesses would be right to be concerned about infringing copyright laws.
AI image generators have been the subject of much backlash, with accusations of scraping material from artists landing them in murky legal territory.
Earlier this year, several visual artists filed a class-action lawsuit against the companies behind AI image generators Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Dreamup, alleging that they violate copyright laws.
Separately, Getty Images has accused Stable Diffusion of unlawfully scraping images to train its models, with some content it produces even showing traces of the Getty watermark.
Dr Yair Adato, co-founder and chief executive of visual generative AI startup Bria AI, is trying to get ahead of this problem, through an AI model which only draws on licensed sources.
Businesses suffer from a “lack of accessibility to foundation models that have been trained on only licensed data and generate trusted output for commercial use”, Dr Adato said.
Bria’s suite of visual generative AI models draws from licensed sources like Getty Images, Alamy’s stock image collection and Envato’s creative assets.
As a result, businesses, engineers, developers and artists can use Bria’s arsenal of content and its generative AI ‘foundry’, known as Nvidia Picasso, free from the spectre of copyright infringement and legal gambles.
It is a win for both sides: developers gain access to commercially safe, high-quality images, while Bria’s soon-to-be-patented technology ensures fair compensation for creators and artists.
Adato sees this as more than just a technological milestone; it’s a “movement” shapinga sustainable future for generative AI, it claims.
“In that sense, we solved some of the hard problems that regulation needs to address now,” Adato said.
There is a growing emphasis on ethical AI and data compliance in the regulatory landscape.
“It’s a bit of a legal minefield out there right now,” Regina Sam Penti, partner at global law firm Ropes and Gray, said.
Peter Orlowsky, senior vice president of strategic development at Getty Images, said the company is “excited to be part of this initiative that will help companies and brands further explore generative AI by making it more accessible and safer to use”.
Bria insists that the ethical way also has an “optimal” financial rationale.
“Twenty years ago, there were solutions on the market that allowed music and video streaming for free, without rewarding the data owners,” Adato said. “Today, no one asks whether Spotify falls financially behind pirate bay.
“We believe that a responsible AI approach company keeping this technology accessible to the public will lead to long-term growth and innovation in the AI industry.”
