TECH COMPANIES TRY TO TAKE AI IMAGE GENERATORS MAINSTREAM WITH BETTER PROTECTIONS AGAINST MISUSE

Artificial intelligence tools that can conjure whimsical artwork or realistic-looking images from written commands started wowing the public last year. But most people don’t actually use them at work or home.

That could change as leading tech companies are competing to mainstream the use of text-to-image generators for a variety of tasks, integrating them into familiar tools such as Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop, YouTube and ChatGPT.

But first, they’re trying to convince consumers, business users and government regulators that they’ve tamed some of the Wild West nature of early AI image-generators with stronger safeguards against copyright theft and troubling content.

A year ago, it was a relatively small group of early adopters and hobbyists playing with cutting-edge image generators such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E.

“The previous ones were an interesting curiosity,” but businesses were wary, said David Truog, an analyst at market research group Forrester.

Then came the backlash, including copyright lawsuits from artists and photo stock company Getty, and calls for new laws to rein in generative AI technology’s misuse to create deceptive political ads or abusive sexual imagery.

Those problems aren’t yet resolved. But now there’s a proliferation of new image generators from makers who say they’re business-ready this time.

“Alexa, create an image of cherry blossoms in the snow,” is the kind of prompt that Amazon says U.S. customers will be able to speak later this year to generate a personalized display on their Fire TV screen.

Adobe, known for the Photoshop graphics editor it introduced more than three decades ago, was the first this year to release an AI generator designed to avoid legal and ethical problems created by competitors who trained their AI models on huge troves of images pulled off the internet.