Getty Images files lawsuit against the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content
January 18, 2023 By Awanish Kumar
(Image Credit Google)
The makers of the well-known AI art tool Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, are being sued by Getty Images for allegedly violating copyright.
According to Getty Photographs, Stability AI "illegally copied and processed millions of images covered by copyright" to train its software, and the company has "commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London," according to a press release shared with The Verge.
Getty Pictures The company has issued Stability AI with a "letter before action," which is a formal notification of potential lawsuit in the UK, according to CEO Craig Peters, who spoke with The Verge in an interview. (The business did not specify whether legal actions would also be brought in the US.)
“The driver of that [letter] is Stability AI’s use of intellectual property of others — absent permission or consideration — to build a commercial offering of their own financial benefit,” said Peters. “We don’t believe this specific deployment of Stability’s commercial offering is covered by fair dealing in the UK or fair use in the US. The company made no outreach to Getty Images to utilize our or our contributors’ material so we’re taking an action to protect our and our contributors’ intellectual property rights.”
[caption id="attachment_82200" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
Text-to-image example from Stable Diffusion 2.0. Photo: Stability AI Github.[/caption]
When contacted by The Verge, a press representative for Stability AI, Angela Pontarolo, said the “Stability AI team has not received information about this lawsuit, so we cannot comment.”
The action is a step up in the ongoing legal conflict between content producers and AI companies over credit, profit, and the future of the creative industries. Stable Diffusion and other AI art technologies use human-made photos that are typically scraped from the web without the owners' knowledge or permission as training data. AI companies assert that this method is legal under regulations like the US fair use concept, but many rights holders disagree and believe it violates their copyright. Legal experts have differing opinions on the matter, but they all agree that such issues must be settled definitively in court. (This past weekend, three artists, including Stability AI itself, filed the first significant lawsuit against AI companies.)
Getty Pictures CEO Peters likens the current legal climate in the generative AI industry to the early years of the digital music industry, when businesses like Napster provided well-liked but illegal services before new agreements were made with license holders like record labels.
“We think similarly these generative models need to address the intellectual property rights of others, that’s the crux of it,” said Peters. “And we’re taking this action to get clarity.”
By Awanish Kumar
I keep abreast of the latest technological developments to bring you unfiltered information about gadgets.
