• The CREATOR Act, a bipartisan bill, aims to protect artists from unauthorized AI replication of their visual styles.
• Supported by Adobe, the CREATOR Act doesn’t prevent AI systems from being trained on an artist’s work without consent.

Last year, OpenAI released an image-generation feature, and many users went wild with it, prompting the company to create images in the signature styles of many studios and artists, including Studio Ghibli. These images have proliferated the internet, and in many instances, such as one posted by the White House, depicting a crying woman being handcuffed by an ICE agent, were never authorized nor in the spirit of the original artist (or in this case, a Japanese animation house) whose style is being aped.

As is often the case, technology is outpacing current laws, and there is nothing on the books that legally protects artists and designers from AI slurping up their work and using it to generate visuals in their style. A new piece of legislation, however, purports to give creatives some protection against AI-generated style theft.