That's a much clearer line though, it's much simpler to know if you were paid to create this content or not. Use of AI isn't, especially if it's deep in some tool you used.
Does blurring part of the image with Photoshop count? What if Photoshop used AI behind the scene for whatever filter you applied? What about some video editor feature that helps with audio/video synchronization or background removal?
This is a problem of provenance (as it's known in the art world) and being certain of the provanence is a difficult thing to do - it's like converting a cowboy coded C++ project to consistently using const... you need to dig deep into every corner and prefer dependencies that obey proper const usage. Doing that as an individual content creator would be extremely daunting - but this isn't about individuals. If Getty has a policy against AI and guarantees no AI generation on their platform while Shutterstock doesn't[1] then creators may end up preferring Getty so that they can label their otherwise AI free content as such on Youtube - maybe it gets incorporated into the algorithm and gets them more views - maybe it's just a moral thing... if there's market pressure then the down-the-chain people will start getting stricter and, especially if one of those intermediary stock providers violates an agreement and gets hit with a lawsuit, then we might see a more concerted movement to crack down on AI generation.
At the end of the day it's going to be drenched in contracts and obscure proofs of trust - i.e. some signing cert you can attach to an image if it was generated on an entirely controlled environment that prohibits known AI generation techniques - that technical side is going to be an arms race and I don't know if we can win it (which may just result in small creators being bullied out of the market)... but above the technical level I think we've already got all the tools we need.
You may be interested in the Content Authenticity Initiative’s Content Credentials. The idea seems to be to keep a more-or-less-tamperproof provenance of changes to an image from the moment the light hits the camera’s sensor.
It sounds like the idea is to normalize the use of such an attribution trail in the media industry, so that eventually audiences could start to be suspicious of images lacking attribution.
Adobe in particular seems to be interested in making GenAI-enabled features of its tools automatically apply a Content Credential indicating their use, and in making it easier to keep the content attribution metadata than to strip it out.
Maybe this could motivate toolmakers to label their own products as “Uses AI” or “AI Free” allowing content creators verify their entire toolchain to be AI Free.
As opposed to today, where companies are doing everything they can, stretching the truth, just so they can market their tools as “Using AI.”
You can't use them - other tools that match most of the functionality without including AI tools will emerge and take over the market if this is an important thing to people... alternatively Adobe wises up and rolls back AI stuff or isolates it into consumer-level only things that mark images as tainted.
This is a great point and I don’t know. We are entering a strange and seemingly totally untrustworthy world. I wouldn’t want to have to litigate all this.
This is depressing, we’re going to intentionally use worse tools to avoid some idiotic scare label. Basically the entire GMO or “artificial flavor” debates all over again.
If you edit this image by hand you’re good, but if you use a tool that “uses AI” to do it, you need to put the scare label on. Even if pixel-for-pixel both methods output the identical image! Just as a GMO/not GMO has no correlation to harmful compounds being in the food, and artificial flavors are generally more pure than those extracted from some wacky and more expensive means from a “natural” item.
Does blurring part of the image with Photoshop count? What if Photoshop used AI behind the scene for whatever filter you applied? What about some video editor feature that helps with audio/video synchronization or background removal?