Amazon is debuting its Titan Image Generator in preview for AWS Bedrock customers. The new Titan generative AI model can create new images from a text prompt or existing image, and automatically adds watermarking to protect intellectual property. The move into generative imaging puts Amazon in competition with a growing field that includes large firms like Adobe and Google. Unlike those companies and others, the e-retail giant is at present focusing exclusively on enterprise customers. Amazon Bedrock is a managed service giving developers access to a range of foundation models from companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic, and Amazon itself.

At AWS re:Invent 2023 this week, the company said in an announcement that Bedrock has updated models from those companies as well as Anthropic, Cohere and Stability AI. Having introduced the Bedrock concept in April, Amazon says Bedrock clients already include BMW Group, Coinbase, GoDaddy, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, Omnicom, the PGA Tour, Salesforce and Siemens.

Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon VP for data and machine learning services, said from the re:Invent stage that “[You] can use the model to easily swap out an existing [image] background to a background of a rainforest [for example],” and “can use the model to seamlessly swap out backgrounds to generate lifestyle images, all while retaining the main subject of the image and to create a few more options,” TechCrunch reports.

Like the majority of companies in the GenAI space, Amazon hasn’t specified the visual data Titan was trained on, but Sivasubramanian did say “that Amazon will protect customers accused of violating copyright with images generated by Titan Image Generator, in keeping with its AI indemnification policy,” TechCrunch writes.

A recent Acrolinx survey of Fortune 500 companies found that “nearly a third said that intellectual property was their biggest concern about the use of generative AI” and “another poll found that nine out of 10 developers ‘heavily consider’ IP protection when making decisions on whether to use generative AI,” notes TechCrunch.

Vasi Philomin, VP of generative AI at AWS, told The Verge that Titan’s watermarking was among the voluntary commitments Amazon agreed to at the White House in July. Philomin said the watermark “will not interfere with the visual, have no latency, and cannot be cropped or compressed out.”

Amazon is making an API available that end-users can connect to, feeding in the image to check provenance.

VentureBeat points out that Amazon’s watermarking solution veers from the Content Credentials system developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) that other tech firms have embraced, raising issues about interoperability validation.