Everyone’s a publisher now.
Publishing a photo for your company used to take a team. Today it takes a phone, or an AI tool, and about a minute. Image copyright and AI training had to catch up.
The challengeImage rights in the age of phones and AI
The client’s communications team couldn’t check every image, video and slide that employees publish. And with AI tools, people can now generate content without a camera at all. The rules hadn’t changed: who owns an asset, whose consent is needed, what a supplier’s contract allows. But the people applying them had. Most were not communications professionals. They needed to know enough to stop and ask, without becoming lawyers.
What we deliveredImage copyright and AI training as a journey
- 1An Alignment Brief with the client’s communications and legal teams: the situations where people most often get rights wrong, and the questions that would catch them.
- 2A Story Blueprint built on one idea: a journey through the assets people handle every day, with a travel guide called Miles.
- 3A 30-minute image rights and AI training course in stops: assets you create yourself, people in your pictures, the “exotic land of foreign assets” from image banks and agencies, and AI.
- 4Two challenges, including one where people find the clause at fault in a partner contract, a quiz, and the resources and contacts to use afterwards.
The idea, and why it workedFour questions anyone can ask before publishing
Miles treats image rights as a trip. At home, the question is who owns the photo you took of a new building. Usually, your employer. Next stop, people: if someone is identifiable, you need their written consent before you shoot. Then abroad, to assets made by image banks, agencies and partners, where the contract decides what you can do. Last stop, AI: fast and useful, but bound by the same rules, plus two of its own: present the company well, and review everything before it’s shared.
It worked because it taught a handful of questions people can ask about any asset, rather than a catalogue of cases they’d never remember.
