Creative companies are being criticized for their use of artificial intelligence

Generative AI for iStock and Wacom: What AI Really Needs to Stop? The Verge Says It Isn’t

The platform has Inpainting and Outpainting features. 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.

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. Someone looking for photos to demonstrate climate change can prompt Generative Artificial Intelligence from iStock to make a picture of penguins walking through a city street, instead of hiring a photographer and finding a flock of penguins.

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.

Wacom hasn’t responded to a request for more information about the campaign from The Verge. If it is replacing illustrators with AI tools, it’s biting the hand that feeds it at a particularly vulnerable moment.

“We can’t promise to be perfect in such a fast-evolving space, especially with generative AI becoming standard in tools such as Photoshop,” said WotC in its online statement. Our goal is to always support human made art and artists.

But even creatives who don’t expect to stop generative AI’s development want something more substantive from companies than “trust me bro,” especially when those companies rely on their patronage. Artists value honesty and accountability over stonewalling and evasiveness about whether AI tools are being used.

The situation has left bystanders visually checking projects for telltale signs of inhuman origin and organizations trusting artists to not lie about how their content was made. Both options are not perfect.

Despite the differences, however, both cases suggest that anti-AI pressure campaigns are an ongoing force in the creative world. For many companies, usingrative artificial intelligence has turned into a PR nightmare.