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A work created by Stable Diffusion: »Rights of thousands, maybe millions, of artists have been infringed«
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Source: Stable Diffusion
The picture agency Getty Images is suing the company Stability AI for copyright infringement by its popular image generator Stable Diffusion.
Getty accuses Stability AI of illegally copying and processing "millions of copyrighted images" without a license.
This was only to the economic advantage of the company and to the detriment of the authors, as Getty announced in a blog post on Tuesday.
Image generators like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E by OpenAI or Midjourney are based on artificial intelligence (AI) and can create an image from a short text command that has never existed before.
In recent months, the programs have experienced their commercial breakthrough and are now being used by more and more people.
Researchers describe the programs as a milestone in the field of machine learning, a sub-area of AI.
(Read more about how the programs work and how they could transform the creative industries here.)
In order for the programs to deliver good results, the underlying artificial intelligence has to be trained with a huge amount of images.
This is where Getty's lawsuit comes in.
According to its own statements, the agency has licensed images to technology companies several times in the past so that their AI could learn from them.
Getty has filed the lawsuit in the UK, according to The Verge.
Stability AI therefore did not want to comment.
In the past, AI companies have referred to regulations such as the Fair Use Doctrine in the US.
Under certain circumstances, this allowed protected material to be used, for example if it served public education or one's own creative creation.
»No one asked us if we wanted to be in this database«
The artists Karla Ortiz, Sarah Andersen and Kelly McKernan had already filed a lawsuit against Stability AI in the USA last Friday.
In this case, it is also directed against the company Midjourney, developer of another image generator, and against DeviantArt, a kind of social network for artists with its own image generator.
The plaintiffs accuse the developers of AI image generators of "infringing the rights of thousands, maybe millions of artists," as they explain on a website set up specifically for the case.
For example, the plaintiff Ortiz wrote for the Marvel film »Dr.
Strange« characters drawn.
She accuses the developers of AI image generators of adding the works of professional artists and draftsmen to their databases and thus improving them.
"Nobody asked us if we wanted to be in this database," Ortiz criticized in an interview with US broadcaster CBS News.
Stability AI announced a feature in December to address criticism from artists.
They should be given the opportunity to object to the processing of their images for AI training, but they have to register on a special platform to do so.
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