Tackling Copyright Issues in AI Image Generation Through Originality Estimation and Genericization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel genericization method and a metric for originality to reduce copyright infringement in AI-generated images, significantly decreasing the likelihood of producing copyrighted characters.

Contribution

It proposes a new genericization technique combined with an originality metric, and implements PREGen to effectively mitigate copyright issues in AI image generation.

Findings

PREGen reduces copyrighted character generation by over 50% when prompts include character names.

PREGen nearly eliminates generation of copyrighted characters without explicit prompts.

The originality metric quantifies data uniqueness, aiding in copyright risk assessment.

Abstract

The rapid progress of generative AI technology has sparked significant copyright concerns, leading to numerous lawsuits filed against AI developers. Notably, generative AI's capacity for generating images of copyrighted characters has been well documented in the literature, and while various techniques for mitigating copyright issues have been studied, significant risks remain. Here, we propose a genericization method that modifies the outputs of a generative model to make them more generic and less likely to imitate distinctive features of copyrighted materials. To achieve this, we introduce a metric for quantifying the level of originality of data, estimated by drawing samples from a generative model, and applied in the genericization process. As a practical implementation, we introduce PREGen (Prompt Rewriting-Enhanced Genericization), which combines our genericization method with an existing mitigation technique. Compared to the existing method, PREGen reduces the likelihood of generating copyrighted characters by more than half when the names of copyrighted characters are used as the prompt. Additionally, while generative models can produce copyrighted characters even when their names are not directly mentioned in the prompt, PREGen almost entirely prevents the generation of such characters in these cases. Ultimately, this study advances computational approaches for quantifying and strengthening copyright protection, thereby providing practical methodologies to promote responsible generative AI development.