Freepik releases an ‘open’ AI image generator trained on licensed data

Freepik, the online graphic design platform, unveiled a new “open” AI image model on Tuesday that the company says was trained exclusively on commercially licensed, “safe-for-work” images.

The model, called F Lite, contains around 10 billion parameters — parameters being the internal components that make up the model. F Lite was developed in partnership with AI startup Fal.ai and trained using 64 Nvidia H100 GPUs over the course of two months, according to Freepik.

F Lite joins a small and growing collection of generative AI models trained on licensed data.

We’ve been secretly working on this for months! It feels good to finally share it!

LINKS:

• Regular version: more predictable and prompt-faithful, but less artistic: https://t.co/MyWsKer9Ir

• Texture version: is more chaotic and error-prone, but delivers better textures and… pic.twitter.com/GX5mIpYE8O

— Javi Lopez ⛩️ (@javilopen) April 29, 2025

Generative AI is at the center of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, including OpenAI and Midjourney. It’s frequently developed using massive amounts of content — including copyrighted content — from public sources around the web. Most companies developing these models argue fair use shields their practice of using copyrighted data for training without compensating the owners. Many creators and IP rights holders disagree.

Freepik has made two flavors of F Lite available, standard and texture, both of which were trained on an internal data set of around 80 million images. Standard is more predictable and “prompt-faithful,” while texture is more “error-prone” but delivers better textures and creative compositions, according to the company.

Here’s an image from the standard model generated with the prompt “A person standing in front of a sunset, in majestic surroundings.”

Freepik makes no claim that F Lite produces images superior to leading image generators like Midjourney’s V7, Black Forest Labs’ Flux family, or others. The goal was to make a model openly available so that developers could tailor and improve it, according to the company.

That being said, running F Lite is no easy feat. The model requires a GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM.

Other companies developing media-generating models on licensed data include Adobe, Bria, Getty Images, Moonvalley, and Shutterstock. Depending on how AI copyright lawsuits shake out, the market could grow exponentially.