AI image generators are trained on millions — even billions — of photos. It is safe to assume the vast majority of these photos are copyrighted and used without permission.To test this, I employed arguably the two best-known AI image generators: DALL-E and Midjourney. Using the latest version of each model .I didn’t over-engineer my prompts and I kept my number of attempts at recreating a picture at two. Most of the pictures below are from one prompt without any tweaking.
Prompt: Make a photo of four caucasian males walking through a crosswalk on a suburban street in London in 1969. The man furthest right is wearing all white and has long hair and a beard. The man second from the right wears a black suit. The man second from the left wears a blue suit, holds a cigarette, and doesn’t have shoes on. The man on the left is wearing double denim.
Prompt: Make a dramatic black and white photo taken in 1942 of the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. The Snake River is in the foreground with mountains in the background.DALL-E and Midjourney had a very different take on Steve McCurry’s iconic photo that graced the front cover ofwith Midjourney’s attempt far more realistic. This was the only prompt that I included the brand of film the photo was captured on.
DALL-E Prompt: Make a photorealistic black and white image of Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, taken in 1932. Prompt: Make a photorealistic image of an Earthrise that was taken from the surface of the Moon with some of the surface in the foreground of the picture. Make the Earth far away and partially obscured by the blackness of space.Probably one of the lesser-known images on this list and perhaps it shows that both models produced totally different images toby Steve McCurry comes scarily close and we were all really impressed with the tonality of the Muhammad Ali image).
Clearly, the AI is intellectually problematic. The AI does not know that it is recreating a famous photo so closely yet that’s what it’s doing.