Image can now produce a usable illustration in seconds.
Design budgets have fallen in publishing, advertising and small business alike.
The legal position, however, is still unsettled in most countries.
These systems were trained on millions of images, many of them under .
Artists argue that training is a use of their work and should be .
reply that the model stores patterns, not copies.
Courts in different countries have started to answer this differently.
A second question concerns the rather than the training.
In several places an image with no human author cannot be protected at all.
A company that builds a brand on such images may not own them.
Some publishers now demand a record of how every image was made.
Licensed training sets, paid for in advance, are appearing as a safer option.
They cost more, and for a commercial client that cost buys .