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Journalism of Courage
In what can be called the latest blow to the creators of Stable Diffusion, visual media company Getty Images has initiated legal proceedings against it. The US-based company has accused Stability AI of copyright violations.
As reported by The Verge, the stock photo company has alleged that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed” millions of images that were protected by copyright. The company said that the creators of the AI model used the images to train its software. According to the report, Getty Images has begun the proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London.
CEO of Getty Images, Craig Peters, told the tech portal that before initiating the lawsuit the company had issued a formal notification to Stability AI informing it about the forthcoming lawsuit.
According to the report in The Verge, Peters said that Stability AI made no effort to reach out to Getty Images before utilising its contributors’ material. He said that the company was taking necessary steps to protect the company’s and its contributor’s intellectual property rights. The same report also said that the Stability AI team informed it that they did not receive any information about the lawsuit and that it was not in the position to offer any comments.
The latest lawsuit comes a day after three artists filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, along with AI-based art platforms DeviantArt and Midjourney for allegedly violating copyright laws. The artists had launched a class action on behalf of all artists and illustrators affected and sought compensation for damages caused by the three platforms.
In the last few months, several AI-backed content-generating tools have surfaced. Even as their popularity soars, these tools continue to court controversies one after the other. The deep learning text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion, was introduced in 2022. The platform is essentially used for images based on text descriptions.
