CEO Ted Leonard tells Reuters that he is in talks with “multiple tech companies” to license the website’s 13 billion photos and videos, earmarked for training text-to-image models. Leonard says he can do this because last October the company changed its terms of service to grant it “unrestricted rights” to sell any uploaded content for the purpose of AI training.

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The news that Photobucket is considering selling users’ content to generative AI comes amid reports that large tech companies like OpenAI and Google are running out of data to harvest for AI products.

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But is it Even Legal?
Daniela Braga, CEO of Defined.ai, a company that licenses data to big tech firms, tells Reuters that she avoids acquiring content from platforms such as Photobucket because the licensing rights are murky.

“I would find it very risky,” Braga says. “If there’s some AI that generates something that resembles a picture of someone who never approved that, that’s a problem.”