Bing’s AI image generator allows artists to ‘limit’ its access to their art, but not outright block it
Microsoft’s copyright infringement policy seems to be lacking, while its safety regulations are a little overactive.
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Microsoft Bing has brought us its own Dall E based AI image generator, but there doesn’t appear to be much protection for artists against copyright infringement, other than the company promising tolimitaccess to artists' work, should they send in a complaint.
I spotted the Bing Image Creator already being advertised in my Windows 11 search bar this morning, and I have a strange feeling it’s targeting my recently revived obsession with dinosaurs. It knows I’ve been playingJurassic World Evolution 2, anyway, and has been encouraging me to generate “unique dinosaur images”, hence the header image—did you know T-Rexmay have had lips?
But wait a second, that wording is a bit odd.Uniquedinosaur images… What, as opposed tonon-uniquedinosaur images? Because of course, a non-unique dinosaur image would just be someone else’s dinosaur image.
A plagiarised image, then.
In theBing Image Creator FAQ, it goes into detail as to how Microsoft is “addressing responsible AI”, but its artist protection statement feels almost like an afterthought. There’s just a single sentence dedicated to Microsoft’s handling of plagiarism:
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“We will allow living artists toreporttheir name to us for limiting the creation of images associated with their names.”
It does not go into detail about where the reference images are being sourced, though the assumption is that it’s scraping from Bing image search.
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Bing is coming down hard on explicit content, however, reeling off all the ways its preventing exploitative images, gore, and the like from being generated.
It seems the community isn’t happy with the strictness of the regulation, though.
One Redditpostby user ClinicalIllusionist popped up recently, entitled “Just got access to Bing’s Image Creator and already got banned for trying to generate an image of ‘an excited Redditor trying Bing’s new Image Creator’.” That doesn’t seem too risqué to me, but I suppose that depends on the generator’s representation of “an excited Redditor”.
User x246ab also commented “I have legitimately been unable to get it to produce a single image for me. Literally did ‘American Flag’ and it was like, ‘Nah we need someone to review this’.”
At least we can say Bing is cracking down on untoward use of its generator, though I imagine artists won’t be too happy regarding the report-to-limit policy.
Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she’s waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.
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