Amazon Enters AI Image Pool With Titan Image Generator

Amazon is throwing its hat into the AI image generation game with its own image generator, Titan Image Generator.

Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon Web Services vice president for data and machine learning, made the announcement Wednesday during his keynote at Amazon’s re:Invent conference. According to Sivasubramanian, Titan Image Generator features text prompt image generation similar to other AI image generators such as Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and Open AI’s DALL-E along with the ability to swap out backgrounds of images for further customization.

Titan Image Generator is the latest in Amazon’s diverse approach to AI investment. The company operates other proprietary AI services under the Titan banner, most notably Titan Text, its own text-generation tool similar to Chat GPT-4. It packs those programs alongside some produced by third-party developers into its Amazon Bedrock suite hosted on AWS.

The tech giant’s AI plans also include heavy financial investment in AI developers themselves, evidenced by Amazon committing up to $4 billion to Open AI competitor Anthropic in exchange for partial ownership of the company earlier this year.

While AI investment and development is booming within Silicon Valley circles, many questions remain regarding safety measures to prevent AI-generated images and text from being used for misinformation. The legality of how AI firms train their models persists as well, with multiple lawsuits from authors and artists alleging their intellectual property was used illegally to train multiple AI programs.

Sivasubramanian addressed some of those concerns in his presentation, stating that images generated on Titan Image Generator will include an invisible watermark to denote them as AI-generated. He claimed that it would also implement measures in the model to safeguard against toxicity and bias.

He offered little detail regarding the data sets being used to train the new tool. Rather, he focused on protections for users against copyright claims on images generated through Titan Image Generator, saying the company would indemnify customers against lawsuits alleging such claims. Open AI and Google stated they would offer similar indemnification measures in regard to their AI programs to their customers earlier this year.