PHOTO GIANT GETTY TOOK A LEADING AI IMAGE-MAKER TO COURT. NOW IT'S ALSO EMBRACING THE TECHNOLOGY

Anyone looking for a beautiful photograph of a desert landscape can find many choices from Getty Images, the stock photography collection.

But say you’re instead looking for a wide angle shot of a “hot pink plastic saguaro cactus with large arms that stick out, surrounded by sand, in landscape at dawn.” Getty Images says you can now ask its artificial intelligence image generator to make one on the spot.

The Seattle-based company is taking a two-pronged approach to the threat and opportunity that AI poses to its business. First, it sued a leading purveyor of AI-generated images earlier this year for what it alleged was “brazen infringement” of Getty’s image collection “on a staggering scale.”

But this week, it also joined the small but growing market of AI image makers with a new service that enables its customers to create novel images trained on Getty’s own vast library of human-made photos.

The difference, said Getty Images CEO Craig Peters, is this new service is “commercially viable” for business clients and “wasn’t trained on the open internet with stolen imagery.”

He contrasted that with some of the first movers in AI-generated imagery, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney and Stability AI, maker of Stable Diffusion.