Getty Images Sued Art AI Provider

One of the largest commercial providers of stock photos is taking action against the use of its image stocks for training AI systems. Getty Images has sued Stability AI, the company behind the open-source art generator Stable Diffusion.

Getty Images has sued Stability AI in a US court, accusing the company of massive copyright infringement. The developers of Stable Diffusion allegedly used more than 12 million images from Getty’s database to illegally “train” its AI system, The Verge reports.

Stable Diffusion works with Getty’s data without permission

According to Getty Images, Stability AI not only violates copyright but also trademark law and is said to have tried to use the “stolen” images to build a competing business. Getty had already announced in January that they also want to take action against Stability AI in Europe and are seeking a lawsuit in a court in London. However, this lawsuit has not yet been brought before the court.

‘Getty Images’ lawsuits against Stability AI address a fundamental question: Can third-party image databases be used to “train” algorithm-based artificial intelligence systems? Basically, tools like Stable Diffusion have to be fed with original images that are used as “training data”. In most cases, images have been collected from the web by “scraping” without taking into account any necessary permission from the originator.

Getty Images watermarks on AI images from Stable Diffusion

According to legal experts, Getty Images has good arguments, even if the developers of Stable Diffusion could rely on so-called “fair use” regulations since the images are used to “train” the AI, but artificially create new images on this basis generated instead of simply reproducing the originals.

Meanwhile, Stability AI is also threatened with trouble due to violations of trademark law. Stable Diffusion is known for the fact that the Getty Images watermark often appears in the images generated by the AI ​​because the system was trained with the data from the provider of a gigantic image database. Getty, therefore, argues that the company’s reputation could be damaged by the appearance of its watermark on low-quality AI-generated images.

It will probably take a very long time before the lawsuits brought by Getty Images against Stability AI lead to concrete results because the US court responsible for the state of Delaware is currently very busy and can only work very slowly. The legal steps in the UK are also likely to take some time.