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Finding Images

This guide is designed to assist with locating images of artworks in various formats.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Art Historical Research

Split image. On the left, an AI generated illustration of two classical figures withe the Google Lens logo. On the right, several similar images in the search results.

Artificial Intelligence, "Leonardo da Vinci drawing style" an image created by the Midjourney AI art tool. Search results in Google Lens.


Artificial intelligence technologies for image creation and analysis are making a huge impact on art, design, and the study of art history. What does this mean for academic research and for academic content creation? When using images in your scholarly work remember these key points:

Authenticity: When you use an image in your research, you must know and cite the source of that image. When using a general search engine, like Google images, always fact check your images and find the original source. These tools can help:

  • TinEye Reverse Image Search. Submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.
  • Google Lens. Google Lens lets you search by image. Using a camera or an image, Google Lens can try to find the original source of an image, or discover visually similar images and related content, gathering results from all over the internet. 

Pro tip: If these reverse search engines do not find a source, or any similar images, that can be a red flag that they are AI generated.


Copyright and Ethics: Who owns the rights to the AI created image? AI image generation tools are so new that there are few clear copyright guidelines. Recent decisions by the US Copyright office (February 2023 PDF, 7.3MB) and in Federal Court (August 2023 PDF, 663KB) state that individual AI generated images are not copyright protected.
 
When using images in your academic work it’s vital that you know the exact source of the image to determine authenticity and copyright. Use image databases curated by the library. Use reverse image tools to authenticate sources for images and always cite that source.

Books in print on AI, Art and Creativity

Additional resources on AI, Art and Creativity

AI image generation tools

  • Adobe Firefly. Adobe firefly creates image based on text prompts. Firefly is trained on the Adobe stock image library (with creator permission) and public domain images. This tool also adds content credentials to each generated image, making the source metadata of the image transparent. Firefly is free to download as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of tools.
  • DreamStudio AI:  A web-based suite of generative media tools - including image and video generation tools. 
  • Midjourney. Midjourney is one of the most popular AI image generators. Access is through the Discord app. The dataset(s) used to train this tool is not transparent, however Midjourney has been known to use the LAION dataset in the past. The LAION dataset uses copyrighted material.

Tools and resources for artists

Glaze. The Glaze project is a free tool developed at the University of Chicago to protect artists from having their work scraped and used by AI image generators. Glaze adds hidden (pixel) data to digital works and online images to 'confuse' AI scraping programs. 

Nightshade. Developed by the University of Chicago, Nightshade disrupts AI image datasets by adding 'poison pill' data that leads the AI image generator to misidentify images and concepts. 

Have I Been Trained. This online tool allows anyone to upload an image to discover if their work or personal photographs have been used in AI training datasets.