Photobucket's Huge Bucket of Images of Interest to AI Companies

Posted on April 6, 2024

Photobucket is home to a massive trove of images and those images are what AI companies want to train their AI models to make images themselves. This has made image hosting tools like Photobucket a hot commodity.

Reuters reports that Photobucket is receiving requests to license its images and videos for AI training. Photobucket has billions of images and videos that can feed data into AIs.

CEO Ted Leonard, who runs the 40-strong company out of Edwards, Colorado, told Reuters he is in talks with multiple tech companies to license Photobucket's 13 billion photos and videos to be used to train generative AI models that can produce new content in response to text prompts.

He has discussed rates of between 5 cents and $1 dollar per photo and more than $1 per video, he said, with prices varying widely both by the buyer and the types of imagery sought.

Photobucket has kept quiet about the firms seeking its data but Google, Meta, OpenAI and AI startups are likely among the callers.

Hopefully, no one has content hosted at Photobucket they don't want consumed by AI models. This issue issue is being discussed on Techmeme. The concerns are bigger for content that people think is somehow protected and content that is copyrighted or personal and gets uploaded somewhere and then becomes part of an AI data package.