Evaluating and Mitigating IP Infringement in Visual Generative AI

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the extent of IP infringement in popular visual generative AI models and introduces a guidance-based mitigation method that prevents infringing content during generation without retraining models.

Contribution

It provides an extensive evaluation of IP infringement issues in visual generative AI and proposes a novel guidance-based defense method to mitigate such infringements during content generation.

Findings

Generative models can produce content resembling protected characters.

The proposed method effectively reduces IP infringement in generated images.

Guidance techniques can prevent infringement without retraining models.

Abstract

The popularity of visual generative AI models like DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Video Diffusion, and Sora has been increasing. Through extensive evaluation, we discovered that the state-of-the-art visual generative models can generate content that bears a striking resemblance to characters protected by intellectual property rights held by major entertainment companies (such as Sony, Marvel, and Nintendo), which raises potential legal concerns. This happens when the input prompt contains the character's name or even just descriptive details about their characteristics. To mitigate such IP infringement problems, we also propose a defense method against it. In detail, we develop a revised generation paradigm that can identify potentially infringing generated content and prevent IP infringement by utilizing guidance techniques during the diffusion process. It has the capability to recognize generated content that may be infringing on intellectual property rights, and mitigate such infringement by employing guidance methods throughout the diffusion process without retrain or fine-tune the pretrained models. Experiments on well-known character IPs like Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Superman demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed defense method. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/ZhentingWang/GAI_IP_Infringement.