During a keynote at its re:Invent conference today, Amazon debuted the Titan Image Generator, which can create new images or customize existing images via a text description. It’s now available in preview for AWS customers on Bedrock, Amazon’s AI development platform. TechCrunch reports: Amazon says that Titan Image Generator was trained on a “diverse set of datasets” across a “broad range of domains” and can be optionally fine-tuned on custom datasets, and includes built-in mitigations for toxicity and bias. (Barring testing, the jury’s out on just how effective those mitigations are, of course.) The company declined to say exactly where those datasets came from however — and whether it obtained permission from or is compensating all the creators of the images used to train Titan Image Generator. […] Sivasubramanian did claim onstage, however, that Amazon will protect customers accused of violating copyright with images generated by Titan Image Generator — in keeping with its AI indemnification policy. That’s surely music to the ears of AWS customers worried about regurgitation, or when a generative model spits out a mirror copy of a training example.
Images created with Titan Image Generator will also come with a “tamper-resistant” invisible watermark by default — an attempt to mitigate the spread of AI-generated misinformation and abuse imagery, Sivasubramanian says. (Deepfakes from the Gaza war and AI-generated child abuse images are the latest illustrations of how major the threat’s become.) It’s not clear exactly what sort of watermarking technique Amazon’s using and which tools beyond Amazon’s own API will be able to detect it; we’ve reached out to Amazon for clarification. Sivasubramanian noted watermarks are a part of the voluntary commitment around AI that Amazon signed with the White House in July.
