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A new platform called Wirestock is allowing photographers and artists to take control of AI data training. The platform lets artists opt-in and be paid for their work to be sampled by AI companies.
Artists will be able to upload their images to Wirestock in a similar manner to traditional stock sites. The platform will then license the images out via Getty, Adobe Stock, and Canva and give them the option to allow AI companies to train on that work in exchange for payment.
“All major [AI] players are quickly shifting to using ethically licensed content,” Wirestock CEO Mikayel Khachatryan told Venture Beat. “This is partly due to legal pressures but also because it’s a practical solution for companies needing reliable data,” he added.
According to Khachatryan, payment could range from mere cents up to $15-20 per image for specific requests. You’re not exactly going to get rich from this, but perhaps this is a step in the right direction.
Lawsuits
Some artists have already banded together to begin class action lawsuits against some of the larger generative AI companies, such as Stable Diffusion, for data scraping copyrighted works without permission to train their AI data sets.
Getty Images also issued its own lawsuit. However, it has quickly jumped on the gen-AI bandwagon itself, with its own AI generator on stock sites that it owns.
Ethical AI
Adobe made headlines by announcing just how ethical its Firefly AI generator was, stating that it only used Adobe stock to train it. However, recently, it has come to light that this claim wasn’t exactly the whole story, and Firefly isn’t quite as ethical as it purports.
Adobe stock photographers never actually consented to have their images used for AI data training. This is one situation where it might be legal, but the ethics are rather more complicated.
Too little, too late?
It does seem as though Wirestock is a step in the right direction, with the creators directly compensated for their intellectual property. However, given what is at stake here, one could argue that the amounts being paid are far lower than they should be.
It was recently revealed that Apple and OpenAI paid Shutterstock to use their client’s work for data training. According to Reuters, they paid quite a large sum, somewhere between $25 million and $50 million. I doubt the creators of those images saw much of that amount if anything.
As AI image and video generators improve, real-life artists, photographers, filmmakers, and designers are placed in an increasingly precarious position, at least in commercial terms. We are going to have to decide if a quick buck or two now is worth it compared with earning nothing in the future.
[via venture beat]
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