Tech Trailblazers: Getty Images’ AI lead Andrea Gagliano on storytelling and transparency

The project also foreshadowed what would become a recurring theme later in Gagliano’s career: that the real power of AI is to be found in its potential to help human beings envision alternative visions of the past, the present and the future.

“AI has the power to help us imagine things that we really haven’t imagined before, both good things and bad things, hurtful things and powerful things,” she says.

Since October of last year, Gagliano has been the senior director of AI and ML at Getty Images. She’s been with the company since 2020, with previous stints at Apple and accounting firm Ernst & Young. Getty is one of the world’s largest suppliers of stock images, and it’s also long been a vital resource for marketers and advertisers, who use the company’s vast content library for various applications, like say, pulling imagery for a site landing page, saving on what would otherwise be an expensive and time-consuming photo shoot.

Like its competitors Adobe and Shuttersock, Getty has been quick to embrace generative AI in recent years, catalyzed in large part by the mainstream embrace of text-to-image models like Midjourney and OpenAI’s Dall-E. Almost one year ago to the day, the company introduced Generative AI by Getty Images, developed in partnership with Nvidia.

The tool’s primary selling point was that it had been trained exclusively on Getty’s own, licensed imagery, which meant that creators and brands could use it without having to worry about getting caught in the legal or ethical webs that have ensnared other developers.

“We’re excited to launch a tool that harnesses the power of generative AI to address our customers’ commercial needs while respecting the intellectual property of creators,” said company CEO Craig Peters said in a statement at the time. “We’ve worked hard to develop a responsible tool that gives customers confidence in visuals produced by generative AI for commercial purposes.”

Despite the industry’s rapid adoption of AI, using the tech to generate strong returns – while avoiding legal and technical stumbling blocks – has proved challenging for marketers and advertisers. As such, some have speculated that it could just be another doomed hype bubble, not unlike the metaverse.

But in her work with clients, Gagliano says she’s witnessed the potential for AI-generated imagery to infuse stagnant creativity with much-needed energy and movement.

The proverbial “blank page problem,” she says – something that most of us have experienced, when the will to create is there but the words or the picture won’t seem to materialize before us – can often be overcome with the help of AI.

“What we’re seeing is that a lot of people are taking existing imagery – something that they like but isn’t perfect – and then … modifying it in a way that meets their needs really easily and really quickly,” she says. “So you’re bypassing that blank page problem.”

While Gagliano celebrates the power of AI-generated imagery to enhance visual storytelling, she also acknowledges that it can be abused – to tell misleading or harmful stories, rather than ones that inspire and promote positive change.

The myriad problems surrounding AI deepfakes have become a super-salient social and political issue over the past year or so. The EU has taken steps to mitigate some of those harms in its AI Act, and a smattering of US states, including Caifornia, are attempting to do the same. Thus far, however, there is no comprehensive US legislation to restrict the creation or spread of deepfakes.

In this legal vacuum, it’s largely been up to the private sector to speak out against the unethical use of generative AI – or not. Many big tech companies and social media platforms have enacted policies requiring the labeling of at least some forms of AI-generated content.

Getty, for its part, adds watermarks to all AI-generated images created by its proprietary tool. In this respect, Gagliano hopes that the company’s approach to generative AI will have some degree of positive influence in the space more broadly.

“We’re trying to increase the industry standards so there’s more rigor around this at an industry level and a regulatory level to make sure that it’s really, really clear to viewers what is real and what is fake,” she says.

In her view, the responsibility for ensuring transparency doesn’t end at developers but extends throughout the distribution cycle – a brand sharing AI-generated imagery in an ad or on social media, for instance, has an ethical duty to clearly label it as such.

By extension, Gagliano also says that brands’ use of generative AI will have ripple effects that radiate outwards through the culture. She implores marketers to consider the training practices employed by the models they’re using, as well as whether creators are being fairly compensated. Getty, for its part, compensates artists whose work appears in the training data of its AI model.

“[Marketers] are creatives at heart themselves,” she says. “And while their content may not be used to train these models, other creatives’ content is.”

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