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Getty Images announced a lawsuit against Stability AI, the company behind the popular artificial intelligence art tool Stable Diffusion, alleging that the technology company committed copyright infringement.
The stock image giant accused the stability AI of copying and processing millions of its images without obtaining the proper license, according to a Press release aired on Tuesday. London-based Stability AI announced it had raised $101 million in funding for open source AI technology in October and released version 2.1 of its Stable Diffusion tool in December.
“Getty Images believes that artificial intelligence has the potential to stimulate creative endeavors. Accordingly, Getty Images has licensed leading technology innovators for purposes related to training artificial intelligence systems in a manner that respects intellectual and personal property rights,” Getty wrote in the statement. “Stability AI did not seek any such license from Getty Images, and instead, we believe that it chose to ignore viable licensing options and long-standing legal protections in the pursuit of its independent business interests.”
Getty declined to comment further on the lawsuit to CNN, but said it requested a response from the artificial intelligence firm before taking any action. Stability AI did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
AI and traditional media art providers have struggled to coexist in recent months as computer-generated imagery becomes more available and advanced, using human-created imagery and art as training data.
Once available only to a select group of techies, text-to-image AI systems are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. These systems include Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, from OpenAI.
Shutterstock, a competitor to Getty Images and another stock image platform, Announced It plans in October to expand its partnership with OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, and improve AI-generated content while launching a fund to compensate artists for their contributions.
These tools, which often offer a few free credits before charging, can create all sorts of images with just a few words, including those that clearly evoke the works of many, many artists, if not as if they were created by them. Users can invoke those artists with words like “in the style of” or “by” along with a specific name. Current uses for these tools can range from personal entertainment and hobbies to more business cases.
In just a few months, millions of people have flocked to text-to-image AI systems that are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers, and images to illustrate news. An image generated by an artificial intelligence system called Midjourney recently won an art contest at the Colorado State Fair, causing quite a stir among artists, who worry these systems could steal their art without due credit.
“I do not want to participate at all in the machine that is going to make what I do cheaper”, danger danielan illustrator and printer who learned that several of his works were used to train Stable Diffusion, he told CNN in October.
Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque told CNN Business in October via email that the art is a small fraction of the LAION training data behind Stable Diffusion. “Art represents much less than 0.1% of the dataset and is only created when the user deliberately calls it up,” he said.