Stock image provider Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, the makers of an AI tool that generates images. For Getty Images, the company “illegally copied and processed millions of copyrighted images and associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images.”
Everything suggests that this initiative on Stability AI could happen very often in the future. By way of summary, the prosecution is focused on the extraction of images from the digital library of the archiving platform without payment of a license or compensation to the creators of the images. Apparently, the AI imager was not directly informed of the legal action. The site Mashable had the following response from a company spokeswoman: “Please know that we take these matters seriously. It is unusual that we have been informed about this planned legal action through the press.”
“We are still awaiting service of any documents, If we receive them, we will comment appropriately,” the Stability AI spokesperson sentenced. Stable Diffusion is the popular tool for image generation by artificial intelligence. When entering a text message, such as “dog lying in the sun”, the tool generates unique images based on the text.
Getty in a fight that has just begun
The artificial intelligence of this tool learns what kind of images to create by consuming massive amounts of images found on the Internet. This makes them smarter and more accurate as time passes and information is gathered. Companies that use AI for image generation, such as DALL-E and NightCafe, similar to Stability AI, rely on human-generated art styles.
Everything around intellectual property remains murky and unexplored territory. This is compounded by the growing popularity of these types of tools, which Getty Images is suffering from. They have put copyright law at the forefront of the conversation. Although different media have wanted to have an official statement from the stock image platform, they have had no luck. Getty Images, despite initiating this lawsuit, has refused to provide any details to the various requests from tech news platforms.
AI and copyright
“The area of AI-generated images and copyright is complex and will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” was posited from Stable Diffusion’s site. This answer comes out to explain, from the company, the copyrights for using the images generated by the tool. The firm also stated that the images created are open source and protected by CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Above all, the main thing is that we are in a completely new area in the field of intellectual property. Similarly, copyright law has no direct answer. Getty Images has opened a door that will have several chapters in the face of growing dissatisfaction with the rights actions of AI-generated images.
