There’s no denying it’s a thrill to see a piece of text transformed into an image, apparently by magic. It’s the kind of technology many of us dreamed of as kids. While the creative freedoms are exciting, legal frameworks and business ethics have yet to catch up with the fast pace of AI development. At Alamy, we must approach AI in the right way to protect the interests of our content creators.
We know that Alamy images have been scraped to train headline-grabbing and increasingly popular image generation tools, without our permission and without licence. We represent the work of 150,000 contributors from all around the world on our platform, and as a business we were founded to democratise photography. That means we must find a way to embrace new possibilities for creators, while ensuring copyright holders are credited and recompensed for their input.
What is Alamy doing?
- Alamy is considering its legal position around material that has been scraped. We are writing to some of the leading AI image generation companies to ask them to acknowledge the content they have used without licence and to correct this. We’re supportive of the legal action being taken by Getty Images. We’ve also been involved in efforts as part of Cepic, DMLA, BAPLA and alongside partner organisations such as DACS, to persuade governments and regulators to look again at this area. Consultations in the UK are ongoing.
- It’s important to recognise that AI is as much about potential commercial promise for contributors as it is about threat. We’re happy to licence images for a fee to developers who want to train AI models ethically and democratically for purposes other than image generation – such as healthcare, education and voice assistance. We will be splitting this revenue with contributors whose images are included.
- We’re becoming partners ourselves in AI image generation and editing models being developed ethically. These are in early stages of development, however we believe they could in time become a new and fair revenue stream for Alamy contributors.
- While the sources for AI image generation by many platforms are at worst scraped without permission and at best unclear, we cannot accept AI generated material on Alamy. It already breaches our standard terms and conditions because it is not necessarily free from rights. We are in the process of removing all of this content that we can identify.
What’s next?
We’ll be making announcements in the next few days around changes to our contributor terms to make it clear that we don’t accept AI generated content, and to outline the model for sharing back licence fees we do get from ethical AI companies.
Our partnerships around ethical AI image generation will develop over the next few months and we will be keeping you informed about the commercial opportunities for contributors from that, and the tools being developed for customers.
Alamy will be making representations to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in the UK as part of consultations on proposed AI regulation policy and we’ll continue to discuss these issues with our partners, friends, contributors and competitors.