Artificial Intelligence (AI) Useful for E-Learning Design and Development?

Lee-Ann, you raise an interesting point. The answer is going to depend on the license terms under which you obtained the photo.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that most stock photo companies allow you to modify (non-editorial) royalty-free images they license to you, subject to certain restrictions (e.g., not making it seem like the person in the photo is supporting a particular political position, or creating "harmful" content). 

In practical terms, it would seem like it makes no real difference if I edit the photo or the AI edits the photo, but I was surprised to see that at least one large stock photo company has a clause in their license agreement specifically addressing AI use.

Unfortunately, it's written just vaguely enough that I can't quite tell what it means. It *seems* (to my untrained, non-lawyer eyes) to be saying you can't use their images to TRAIN an AI. I'm not really sure if lawyers would consider using the image in a Midjourney prompt as training the AI (I wouldn't consider it to be such a use, but I'm not a lawyer). There's also the question of whether letting the AI see it would be considered redistribution of the stock photo (something that's usually not allowed).

Taking a super-strict/restrictive stance that disallows any use of stock photos with AI tools would ultimately be counterproductive to the stock photo companies, in my opinion. What would happen is that this would create an incentive to just use the AI tools without the stock photo input. Once the AI tools are capable enough that we can get the specific image we want for our use case from the AI, why would we need the stock photo company at all? But this very fear is likely to cause overreaction from the stock photo companies and an attempt to maintain the status quo by disallowing AI use in the short term.

There is also an understandable fear among photographers and artists that supply photos, illustrations, vector drawings, and other images to the stock photo companies that this source of income is under threat from AI art tools. There is a movement among artists to require AI companies to obtain the artists' permission before using any of the artists’ images to train an AI. If enough artists band together and are able to establish this as a new rule, then it will become embedded in license agreements and laws. In the meantime, stock photo companies may feel an obligation to the artists who feed images into their libraries to take stances such as “no AI use” that the artists want, even if in the long term, such a stance is counterproductive to the company.

All of which is just a long-winded way of saying that it's going to be interesting times for a while until all this settles out.