• Getty Images alleges that Stability AI has infringed its intellectual property rights.
• The media company’s CEO Craig Peters seems more intent on setting a precedent as regards the use of media to train AI models.
• Stability AI is also the target of a class action lawsuit in California.

Media company Getty Images has launched legal proceedings against makers of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI.

The media company claims that Stability AI infringed its intellectual property rights in a statement published to its website.

“It is Getty Images’ position that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images absent a license to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators,” reads the statement.

The core of the issue is that Stability AI didn’t request a license to make use Getty Images’ library in order to train its artificial intelligence systems. As The Verge reports, analysis of Stability AI’s training data by Waxy reveals that the firm pulled images from a variety of sources from the web to train its systems. The logo for Getty Images can also be seen in some examples of images generated by the system.

What is rather interesting is that while Getty Images’ chief executive officer Craig Peters is taking Stability AI to task here, it’s not so much about claiming damages (although that is no doubt a goal) as it is about setting a precedent.

“I don’t think it’s about damages and it’s not about stopping the distribution of this technology,” Peters told The Verge. “I think there are ways of building generative models that respect intellectual property. I equate [this to] Napster and Spotify. Spotify negotiated with intellectual property rights holders — labels and artists — to create a service. You can debate over whether they’re fairly compensated in that or not, but it’s a negotiation based of the rights of individuals and entities. And that’s what we’re looking for, rather than a singular entity benefiting of the backs of others. That’s the long term goal of this action.”

Whether Getty Images will be successful remains to be seen. We are curious to see how this matter impacts the act of scraping websites. While this practice isn’t illegal, in recent months its use to train AI platforms that in turn generate revenue for the creators, have brought the practice into spotlight and folks are asking questions.

The legal proceedings from Getty Images aren’t the only headache for Stability AI. The firm is also the target of a class action lawsuit as are Midjourney and Deviant Art.

There are three plaintiffs in that matter all artists namely Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz

“The lawsuit alleges direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement related to forgeries, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violation of class members’ rights of publicity, breach of contract related to the DeviantArt Terms of Service, and various violations of California’s unfair competition laws,” Kotaku quoted in a report.

With much chatter regarding artificial intelligence be it as regards image generation or ChatGPT, 2023 is sure to be a bumper year for AI.