New AI Image Generator Startup Takes a ‘Responsible’ Approach to Copyright
A new AI image generator has been launched today. Bria AI has licensed visual content from Getty Images, Alamy, and Envato to build its platform as it aims to solve the copyright problems facing generative AI.
Bria AI, based in Israel, says that its foundation model will facilitate financial remunerations for creators and artists — likening the payment model to Spotify which makes micropayments to musicians based on streams.
Furthermore, Getty Images, which is embroiled in a lawsuit against the makers of Stable Diffusion, became a minority investor in Bria last year and helped with the licensing deal.
Bria AI says that not only has it licensed visual content from large image libraries, but has also collaborated with “boutique stock photo agencies around the globe, individual artists, and photographers.”
In an interview with Digiday, co-founder and CEO of Bria AI, Yair Adato, says that its strategy of only using permissible content and compensating copyright holders is “responsible.”
“That attribution model is per impact,” Adato says. “It’s solving the copyright problem and the explainability problem because it’s [showing AI and human images] back-to-back. It’s solving the privacy problem… We solved the problem from the roots.”
Adato likens the remuneration system to agent fees; the AI model acts as the agent for the content creator through Bria AI.
The newly-launched website will be familiar to anyone who has used Stable Diffusion’s DreamStudio or OpenAI’s DALL-E. But Bria AI also shows stock photos that can be remixed. For example, the user can generate different backgrounds into the stock photo.
Early text-to-image diffusion models such as Bria AI lag far behind ones such as Midjourney in terms of quality but the models tend to improve at a rapid pace.
While Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion are still the frontrunners in the AI image generator market, serious questions hang over all of them because of the copyrighted images those companies used in their training data without gaining consent from the copyright holders.
Edward Klaris, a managing partner at media law firm Klaris Law, tells DigiDay that Bria’s solution “makes sense from an ethical kind of view, a legal point of view, an international point of view, and a business point of view.”
