Getty legal action against AI firm is 'day of reckoning'

The High Court has heard that Getty Images’ legal action against an AI firm over alleged copyright infringement marks a “day of reckoning” for the use of photographs in training AI models.

- CALLUM PARKE

The US-based visual content company is suing Stability AI Limited in London, alleging that the firm unlawfully scraped millions of images from Getty’s websites without consent to train its Stable Diffusion AI model.

Getty claims this infringes copyright and that the images created by Stable Diffusion, which generates synthetic images from user commands, also breach copyright laws. Stability AI is opposing the claim, which it told the court was “an overt threat” to its business.

On the first day of trial yesterday, Lindsay Lane KC, for Getty, told the court the company “recognises that the AI industry overall may be a force for good”, but that did not justify AI companies “riding roughshod over intellectual property rights”.