Stability AI lawsuit doesn’t cover industry mass theft

LONDON — Getty Images is spending millions of dollars to take on a “world of rhetoric” through its Stability AI suit, the photo licensing company’s boss Craig Peters says.

Peters told CNBC in an interview that both Stability AI — the U.K.-based startup best known for its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion — and other AI labs are stealing copyright-protected material to train their AI models for commercial gain.

These firms, he said, are taking copyrighted material to develop their powerful AI models under the guise of innovation and then “just turning those services right back on existing commercial markets.”

“That’s disruption under the notion of ‘move fast and break things,’ and we believe that’s unfair competition,” Peters added. “We’re not against competition. There’s constant new competition coming in all the time from new technologies or just new companies. But that’s just unfair competition, that’s theft.”

Peters said the AI industry is making the argument that if developers are forced to pay for access to creative works, this will “kill innovation.”

“We’re battling a world of rhetoric,” the CEO told CNBC.

Getty is suing Stability AI in both the U.K. and U.S. over allegations that the company copied 12 million images without permission or compensation “to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators.” 

Stability AI has contested the legal action, saying it doesn’t consider Getty’s claims to have merit. The company acknowledges some images from Getty Images websites were used to train its Stable Diffusion model. However, the firm denies it’s liable in respect to any of the claims Getty has made.

Stability AI declined to comment on this story when contacted by CNBC.

The firm has previously argued its use of copyright-protected material online is sound under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances — such as “transformative” uses that add new expression or meaning to original works.

Sukanya Wadhwa, an associate at intellectual property law firm Brandsmiths, told CNBC that the Getty Images case against Stability AI is “not a usual copyright infringement case.”

“The Court will need to first consider how and where the AI training has been done. If it’s outside the U.K., do the U.K. courts have the right authority to decide on copyright infringement?” Wadhwa said via email.

She added: “Stability AI will be arguing that the output AI-generated does not actually reproduce the original image at all, such that it cannot be copyright infringement.”

Technology startups like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral have flourished by taking vast amounts of data from the open web and using it to train their foundational AI models, which can produce lifelike texts, images and videos.

However, the strategies of these firms have raised concerns over their use of copyrighted material. Several lawsuits have targeted AI firms over alleged copyright infringements from The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI to several U.S. record labels’ claims against AI music generation services Suno and Udio.

Part of the reason Getty Images is pursuing legal action specifically against Stability AI and not other firms is because such legal pursuits are “extraordinarily expensive,” Peters added. “Even for a company like Getty Images, we can’t pursue all the infringements that happen in one week.”

“We can’t pursue it because the courts are just prohibitively expensive,” he said. “We are spending millions and millions of dollars in one court case.”

AI startups are being funded to the tune of several billions of dollars to develop their foundational models, with tech heavyweights like Microsoft, Google and Amazon ploughing cash into the field.

Nevertheless, Peters acknowledges that it’s not been an easy fight. “I think our case is very strong. But I’m going to caveat that: we had to file in the U.S. and the U.K., and to be candid, we didn’t know where this training took place,” he said.

“There are elements where we have to go through and then we’ve got to spend money for due diligence, and they resist and we’ve got to fight, and we go back and forth,” Peters added.

“The facts in aggregate at a global scale I think are absolutely in our favor. How they manifest themselves around the geographic and legal constructs that are there I think is still stuff that we’re going to have to continue to play out.”

The case is set for an initial trial to determine liability from June 9.