Microsoft Bing has brought us its own Dall E based AI image generator, but there doesn’t appear to be much protection for artists against copyright infringement, other than the company promising to limit access to artists’ work, should they send in a complaint.

I spotted the Bing Image Creator already being advertised in my Windows 11 search bar this morning, and I have a strange feeling it’s targeting my recently revived obsession with dinosaurs. It knows I’ve been playing Jurassic World Evolution 2, anyway, and has been encouraging me to generate “unique dinosaur images”, hence the header image—did you know T-Rex may have had lips? 

But wait a second, that wording is a bit odd. Unique dinosaur images… What, as opposed to non-unique dinosaur images? Because of course, a non-unique dinosaur image would just be someone else’s dinosaur image. 

A plagiarised image, then.

In the Bing Image Creator FAQ, it goes into detail as to how Microsoft is “addressing responsible AI”, but its artist protection statement feels almost like an afterthought. There’s just a single sentence dedicated to Microsoft’s handling of plagiarism:

“We will allow living artists to report their name to us for limiting the creation of images associated with their names.”

It does not go into detail about where the reference images are being sourced, though the assumption is that it’s scraping from Bing image search.

Bing is coming down hard on explicit content, however, reeling off all the ways its preventing exploitative images, gore, and the like from being generated.

It seems the community isn’t happy with the strictness of the regulation, though.

One Reddit post by user ClinicalIllusionist popped up recently, entitled “Just got access to Bing’s Image Creator and already got banned for trying to generate an image of ‘an excited Redditor trying Bing’s new Image Creator’.” That doesn’t seem too risqué to me, but I suppose that depends on the generator’s representation of “an excited Redditor”.

User x246ab also commented “I have legitimately been unable to get it to produce a single image for me. Literally did ‘American Flag’ and it was like, ‘Nah we need someone to review this’.” 

At least we can say Bing is cracking down on untoward use of its generator, though I imagine artists won’t be too happy regarding the report-to-limit policy.