Available for Vertex AI customers on the allowlist, Imagen 2 enables users to craft and deploy photorealistic images using intuitive tooling and fully-managed infrastructure. 

Developed with Google DeepMind technology, Imagen 2 offers improved image quality and a range of functionalities tailored for specific use cases.

Key features of Imagen 2 include:

• Diverse image generation: Imagen 2 excels in creating high-resolution images from natural language prompts that cater to various user requirements.

• Text rendering in multiple languages: Overcoming common challenges, Imagen 2 supports accurate text rendering in multiple languages.

• Logo generation: Businesses can leverage Imagen 2 to create a variety of creative and realistic logos—with the option to overlay them on products, clothing, business cards, and more.

• Captions and question-answering: Imagen 2’s advanced image understanding capabilities facilitate the creation of descriptive captions and provide detailed answers to questions about image elements.

• Multi-language support: Imagen 2 introduces support for six additional languages in preview, with plans for more in early 2024. This includes the ability to translate between prompt and output.

• Safety measures: Imagen 2 incorporates built-in safety precautions, aligning with Google’s Responsible AI principles. It features safety filters and integrates with a digital watermarking service to ensure responsible use.

Enterprise-ready capabilities

Imagen 2 on Vertex AI is designed to meet enterprise standards, offering reliability and governance akin to its predecessor. With new features such as high-quality image rendering, improved text rendering, logo generation, and safety measures, Imagen 2 aims to provide organisations with a comprehensive tool for creative image generation.

Leading companies like Snap, Shutterstock, and Canva have already embraced Imagen for creative purposes.

Chris Loy, Director of AI Services at Shutterstock, commented: “We exist to empower the world to tell their stories by bridging the gap between idea and execution.

“Variety is critical for the creative process, which is why we continue to integrate the latest and greatest technology into our image generator and editing features—as long as it is built on responsibly sourced data,”

Danny Wu, Head of AI at Canva, added: “We’re continuing to use generative AI to innovate the design process and augment imagination.

“With Imagen, our 170M+ monthly users can benefit from the image quality improvements to uplevel their content creation at scale.”

As Imagen 2 makes waves in the creative industry, organisations are encouraged to explore its potential. Google Cloud anticipates users will harness the new features to elevate their creative endeavours and build on the success achieved with Imagen.

(Photo by G on Unsplash)

See also: Microsoft unveils 2.7B parameter language model Phi-2

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Many text-to-image generators have serious allegations over their practices. Earlier this month, AI News reported that Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI over alleged copyright infringement.

In an independent analysis of 12 million of the 2.3 billion images used to train Stable Diffusion, it was found to use a large number of images from stock image websites and platforms with high amounts of user-generated content like WordPress, DeviantArt, and Tumblr.

Many human artists have expressed concern about text-to-image generators harming their livelihoods. Understandably, they view it as an even bigger blow when their work is used – without compensation or credit – to train the generators.

Shutterstock claims its AI image generator is trained using assets that represent the diversity of the world we live in. The company says that it’s recognising the contributions of human artists by paying them royalties.

Paul Hennessy, CEO at Shutterstock, commented:

“Shutterstock has developed strategic partnerships over the past two years with key industry players like OpenAI, Meta, and LG AI Research to fuel their generative AI research efforts, and we are now able to uniquely bring responsibly-produced generative AI capabilities to our own customers.

Our easy-to-use generative platform will transform the way people tell their stories — you no longer have to be a design expert or have access to a creative team to create exceptional work.

Our tools are built on an ethical approach and on a library of assets that represents the diverse world we live in, and we ensure that the artists whose works contributed to the development of these models are recognised and rewarded.”

Shutterstock’s generator aims to be a “one-stop-shop” for creating images. Over 20 languages are supported and images can be created from just a single word and customised using a style picker.

You can get started with Shutterstock’s image generation platform here.

(Image Credit: Shutterstock)

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Stable Diffusion is one of the most popular text-to-image tools. Unlike many of its rivals, the generative AI model can run on a local computer.

Apple is a supporter of the Stable Diffusion project and recently optimised its performance on M-powered Macs. Last month, AI News reported that M2 Macs can now generate images using Stable Diffusion in under 18 seconds.

Text-to-image generators like Stable Diffusion have come under the spotlight for potential copyright infringement. Human artists have complained their creations have been used to train the models without permission or compensation.

Getty Images has now accused Stability AI of using its content and has commenced legal proceedings.

In a statement, Getty Images wrote:

“This week Getty Images commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London against Stability AI claiming Stability AI infringed intellectual property rights including copyright in content owned or represented by Getty Images. It is Getty Images’ position that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images absent a license to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators.

Getty Images believes artificial intelligence has the potential to stimulate creative endeavors. Accordingly, Getty Images provided licenses to leading technology innovators for purposes related to training artificial intelligence systems in a manner that respects personal and intellectual property rights. Stability AI did not seek any such license from Getty Images and instead, we believe, chose to ignore viable licensing options and long-standing legal protections in pursuit of their stand-alone commercial interests.”

While the images used for training alternatives like DALL-E 2 haven’t been disclosed, Stability AI has been transparent about how their model is trained. However, that may now have put the biz in hot water.

In an independent analysis of 12 million of the 2.3 billion images used to train Stable Diffusion, conducted by Andy Baio and Simon Willison, they found it was trained using images from nonprofit Common Crawl which scrapes billions of webpages monthly.

“Unsurprisingly, a large number came from stock image sites. 123RF was the biggest with 497k, 171k images came from Adobe Stock’s CDN at ftcdn.net, 117k from PhotoShelter, 35k images from Dreamstime, 23k from iStockPhoto, 22k from Depositphotos, 22k from Unsplash, 15k from Getty Images, 10k from VectorStock, and 10k from Shutterstock, among many others,” wrote the researchers.

Platforms with high amounts of user-generated content such as Pinterest, WordPress, Blogspot, Flickr, DeviantArt, and Tumblr were also found to be large sources of images that were scraped for training purposes.

The concerns around the use of copyrighted content for training AI models appear to be warranted. It’s likely we’ll see a growing number of related lawsuits over the coming months and years unless a balance is found between enabling AI training and respecting the work of human creators.

In October, Shutterstock announced that it was expanding its partnership with DALL-E creator OpenAI. As part of the expanded partnership, Shutterstock will offer DALL-E images to customers.

The partnership between Shutterstock and OpenAI will see the former create frameworks that will compensate artists when their intellectual property is used and when their works have contributed to the development of AI models.

(Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash)

Relevant: Adobe to begin selling AI-generated stock images

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The post Getty is suing Stable Diffusion’s creator for copyright infringement appeared first on AI News.

Stable Diffusion is developed by Stability AI and was initially released for researchers earlier this month. The image generator claims to deliver a breakthrough in speed and quality that can run on consumer GPUs.

The model is based on the latent diffused model created by CompVis and Runway but enhanced with insights from conditional diffusion models by Stable Diffusion’s lead generative AI developer Katherine Crowson, Open AI, Google Brain, and others.

“This model builds on the work of many excellent researchers and we look forward to the positive effect of this and similar models on society and science in the coming years as they are used by billions worldwide,” said Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI.

The core dataset was trained on LAION-Aesthetics, a dataset that filters the 5.85 billion images in the LAION-5B dataset based on how “beautiful” an image was, building on ratings from the alpha testers of Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion runs on computers with under 10GB of VRAM and generates 512×512 pixel resolution images in just a few seconds.

“We’re excited that state-of-the-art text-to-image models are being built openly and we are happy to collaborate with CompVis and Stability.ai towards safely and ethically releasing the models to the public and help democratise ML capabilities with the whole community,” commented Apolinário, ML Art Engineer at AI community Hugging Face.

Stable Diffusion goes head-to-head against other text-to-image models including Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Imagen.

An interactive space to test Stable Diffusion has been created here.

(Image Credit: Fabian Stelzer)

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London.

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The post Stable Diffusion text-to-image generator is now publicly available appeared first on AI News.