Getty and Nvidia bring generative AI to stock photos

Getty Images and Nvidia are deepening their AI partnership with the launch of Generative AI by iStock, a text-to-image platform specifically designed to make stock photos. 

Generative AI by iStock builds on Getty’s first foray into AI image generation, Generative AI by Getty Images. The difference is that the image platform from iStock — a stock photo service owned by Getty — helps individual or single-seat users, unlike Getty Images, which is more of a multiuser enterprise solution.

Trained using Nvidia’s Picasso model, Generative AI by iStock only learned from Getty’s creative library and iStock’s stock photo library. It did not train on Getty’s editorial image library to prevent it from generating trademarks or known personalities.

Grant Farhall, Getty’s chief product officer, tells The Verge that Generative AI by iStock targets small and medium businesses that need to find stock photos. 

“It allows users to be more efficient in their workflow and get more precise photos that they need, even something that they can’t feasibly do with a camera,” Farhall says. He used the example of someone looking for photos to illustrate climate change: they can prompt Generative AI by iStock to create a picture of penguins walking through a city street; instead of hiring a photographer and finding a flock of penguins, the AI can make that for them. 

Pricing will be $14.99 for 100 prompts, with each prompt generating four images.

Another big difference between the Getty Images AI platform and the new iStock service revolves around legal indemnity. Unlike Generative AI by Getty Images, users will not have unlimited indemnification. The iStock platform will have a cap of $10,000 per asset, the same license it offers for its current library. As with Getty’s first generative AI platform, contributors whose content was used to train the model can participate in a revenue sharing program.

The iStock platform will also gain Inpainting and Outpainting features “soon,” Alexander Lazarou, a Getty spokesperson, told The Verge. Inpainting lets users mask an area of an image and then fill it in with a person or object from a text prompt. Outpainting expands a photo for different aspect ratios and fills those new regions.

Correction January 8th, 12:43PM ET: Inpainting and outpainting are launching “soon” and will not be offered at launch, as this article initially stated. This story also said “customers” could participate in revenue sharing; it is photo contributors who participate in the program.