DALL-E 2 “trains” on about 650 million image-text pairs collected from the Internet, learning from that dataset the relationship between images and the words used to describe them. But while OpenAI filters out content-specific images (such as pornography and repetition) and implements additional filters at the API level, such as for well-known public figures, the company admits that the system sometimes creates work that includes trademarked logos or characters.
OpenAI will evaluate different ways to deal with potential copyright and trademark issues, which may include allowing such generations as part of fair use or similar concepts, filtering specific types of content, and working directly with copyright [and] trademark owners on these issues. This is not just an issue for DALL-E 2. As the AI community-created open source implementations of DALL-E 2 and its predecessor DALL-E, both free and paid services were based on models trained on less carefully filtered datasets.
One of them, Pixelz.ai, launched this week an image generation application powered by a custom DALL-E model that makes creating photos showing various Pokémon and Disney movie characters like Guardians of the Galaxy and Frozen trivial. When contacted for comment, the Pixelz.ai team told TechCrunch that they have filtered the model’s training data for profanity, hate speech and “illegal activity” and blocked users from requesting these types of images when they are generated. The company also said it plans to add a reporting feature that will allow people to submit images that violate the terms of service to a team of human moderators. But where intellectual property (IP) is concerned, Pixelz.ai makes users “responsible” for using or distributing the images they generate, whether it’s a gray area or not.
According to Bradley J. Hulbert, a founding partner of the law firm MBHD and an expert in intellectual property law, the image generation system is problematic from a copyright perspective in several ways. Even with the addition of other elements, the artwork of people clearly derived from “protected works” (i.e., copyrighted) is often found to be infringing by the courts, such as an image of a Disney princess walking through a grimy New York neighborhood. To avoid a copyright claim, the work must be “transformative,” in other words, altered to such an extent that the intellectual property is unrecognizable.
