Getty Images gets into the AI game

Picture a lonely polar bear stranded on an ice floe—bet you’ve seen it a dozen times. The impact of even the most evocative photos can be dulled with overuse. Maybe a group of penguins walking along a city boulevard could serve as a more original climate visual, Getty Images Chief Product Officer Grant Farhall suggested.

That’s an example of how he sees Getty Images’s newly released AI image generator being used when the photo bank’s existing massive library of content falls short.

“Unless you have access to a bunch of penguins and can convince downtown New York to shut off a block so you can march them down and take some photos, that’s really hard to produce,” Farhall told Tech Brew. “But that’s where the AI generator can create really compelling visuals to explore that type of concept.”

Getty Images teamed up with Nvidia to train a model exclusively on some of the 477 million assets the company has in its catalog. It claims to have done so in a way that is safe for clients to use without fear of copyright infringement. That part is especially important to Getty, which previously banned AI art from contributors on the platform and sued image AI giant Stability over the unauthorized use of its intellectual property.

“[Our customers] don’t want to be lying awake at night, worrying about what may be coming downstream because they used a visual in their marketing or creative,” Farhall said. “What we were looking to do was provide them something that they could apply across that creative process from ideation right through to production, but in a way that gave them that peace of mind and that commercial safety.”

Synthetic stock photos: AI has forced creative photo banks like Getty to reckon with a new era of stock photos as machine art has flooded their platforms. Many have already embraced the new tech; Shutterstock rolled out its own AI generation tools, and Adobe has been weaving its own purportedly copyright-safe service, Firefly, through its products.

Like with Adobe’s Firefly, Getty said artists will be compensated for any inclusion of their content in the training data. Images generated through the tool will not be added to photo libraries for others to license, but could be used to make the tool smarter in the future, Farhall said. Customers will receive Getty Images’ standard royalty-free license for generated images, the company said.

Farhall said much of the demand for the tool has centered on behind-the-scenes creative production—things like ideation, brainstorming, or storyboarding. But there is also client interest in using it for the finished product and “creating efficiencies in their processes.”

A first step: The new tool is an important foundation for Getty’s bigger vision around AI, Farhall said. The company wants to make it available to more customers and eventually allow them to train their own models with their unique color palettes and branding. “This is going to be a focal point for the company,” he said.

At the same time, all these grand ambitions don’t mean that Getty itself is about to transition into a tech company.

“Getty Images will remain and has remained a visual content company first and foremost,” Farhall said. “We apply technology to provide those visuals to our customers. And AI is not changing that stance.”