Open Source Image Resources
Aka Down with AI for Fanworks
After someone in a server I was formerly in brought up a point about how many of those against AI for fanworks often use it for fic covers (which I doubt to some extent…) I thought I’d put together this resource for anyone who wants images to play with through Open Source or Creative Commons non-AI means. Feel free and please do add to this list. These are the ones that came to me off the top of my head and with the help of a few friends.
Archive.org
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
You can use an Advanced Search function to find Out of Copyright and Creative Commons licensed images using the date fields like so:
National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
Getty Museum
Free images of public domain art in Getty's collections.
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art is proud to be an open access institution, offering the public the ability to download, share, collaborate, remi
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Data about The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use.
The Smithsonian
Learn more about Smithsonian Open Access
Creative Commons Images:
Pexels.com
Pexels used to be a go-to source for stock photos licensed via Creative Commons but it is absolutely overrun with AI images at this point. If you find something with some digging, however, you can check the posting date and correlate whether it might be a more recent AI image or not.
Please do add to this list if you like because I know I’m missing things. One good tactic if you want to find Open Source images is to just do a search engine query for “open source” along with the name of the institution you’re interested in.
