Getty Images and a group of artists filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Stability AI for training their Stable Diffusion AI image generator on millions of copyrighted images without permission or licensing agreements.
Multiple copyright infringement lawsuits were filed against AI companies in January 2023. Getty Images commenced legal proceedings in London's High Court against Stability AI, claiming the company unlawfully copied and processed millions of copyrighted images to train their Stable Diffusion AI image generator without obtaining licenses. Separately, artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco federal court against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. The artists' lawsuit alleges that Stable Diffusion was trained on over 5 billion images scraped from websites including Getty Images, stock photo sites, shopping sites, and online communities without consent or compensation. Evidence of Getty's presence in the training data includes the AI's tendency to reproduce Getty's watermark in generated images. The lawsuits seek monetary damages and court orders to stop the alleged infringement. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters stated the company was not seeking to stop AI development but wanted to establish licensing agreements similar to how Spotify negotiated with music rights holders. An independent analysis confirmed that Getty Images and other stock photo sites constituted a large portion of Stable Diffusion's open-source training dataset.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that memorize and leak sensitive personal data or infer private information about individuals without their consent. Unexpected or unauthorized sharing of data and information can compromise user expectation of privacy, assist identity theft, or cause loss of confidential intellectual property.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed