Evaluating and Mitigating IP Infringement in Visual Generative AI
This addresses legal concerns for entertainment companies and AI developers by preventing IP infringement in generated content, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models.
The paper tackles the problem of visual generative AI models producing content that infringes on intellectual property rights, such as characters from major entertainment companies, and proposes a defense method that identifies and mitigates such infringement using guidance techniques during diffusion without retraining models.
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.