Abstract In this work we propose a new automatic image annotation model, dubbed diverse and distinct image annotation (D2 IA). The generative model D2 IA is inspired by the ensemble of human annotations, which create semantically relevant, yet distinct and diverse tags. In D2 IA, we generate a relevant and distinct tag subset, in which the tags are relevant to the image contents and semantically distinct to each other, using sequential sampling from a determinantal point process (DPP) model. Multiple such tag subsets that cover diverse semantic aspects or diverse semantic levels of the image contents are generated by randomly perturbing the DPP sampling process. We leverage a generative adversarial network (GAN) model to train D2 IA. Extensive experiments including quantitative and qualitative comparisons, as well as human subject studies, on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed model can produce more diverse and distinct tags than the state-of-the-arts