Generative AI by Getty Images

Getty pros:

• Surprisingly effective at generating stock-like photos
• Getty indemnifies you from any legal claims resulting from your use of the images it generates

Getty cons:

• Less creative and fun to use
• Can’t compete with Midjourney, DALL·E 3, or Stable Diffusion in terms of overall quality

Generative AI by Getty Images is surprisingly good—especially at creating stock-like photos. I tested it with classics like “woman laughing alone with salad,” and the results were pretty solid. At a glance, the best options were indistinguishable from real stock photos.

Image generators are… controversial.

Even aside from the ethics of using them, the legal situation is incredibly murky. The U.S. Copyright Office has generally ruled that AI images can’t be copyrighted, so your competitors could conceivably take your images and use them without repercussions. Honestly, if you run a business, just avoiding generative AIs is an understandable strategy. But if you really want to use them, then a platform like Getty Images that promises its Generative AI image generator is free from these sorts of headaches is the best option.

For more creative prompts, like “a Canadian man riding a moose through a maple forest,” and anything involving specific art styles, it was a bit rougher. I suspect this is down to the training data. Instead of a questionably-sourced collection of a few billion images, Generative AI was largely trained on Getty’s stock image catalog. According to Getty, this was all done above board, and it has a program in place to compensate artists whose work was used to train the model.

While that’s laudable, it does affect the kind of things you can generate. Generative AI won’t create anything featuring a real person, a trademark, or anything else that potentially violates intellectual property laws. I couldn’t even get it to generate a painting in the style of Vermeer, despite the fact he died in 1675. Overall, it makes Getty’s tool less fun and flexible to use—but much more practical for companies with a legal department.

Generative AI by Getty Pricing: Contact Getty for a demo and pricing