Getty Images and Stability AI face off in British copyright trial that will test AI industry

The desktop and mobile websites for Stable Diffusion are pictured, Oct. 24, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

LONDON — Getty Images is facing off against artificial intelligence company Stability AI in a London courtroom for the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry.

Opening arguments before a judge at the British High Court began on Monday. The trial could last for three weeks followed by a written decision from the judge expected at a later date.

Stability, based in London, owns a widely used AI image-making tool that sparked enthusiasm for the instant creation of AI artwork and photorealistic images upon its release in August 2022. OpenAI introduced its surprise hit chatbot ChatGPT three months later.

Seattle-based Getty has argued that the development of the AI image maker, called Stable Diffusion, involved “brazen infringement” of Getty’s photography collection “on a staggering scale.”

Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images. Getty was among the first to challenge those practices when it filed copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States and the United Kingdom in early 2023.

“What Stability did was inappropriate,” Getty CEO Craig Peters told The Associated Press in 2023. He said creators of intellectual property should be asked for permission before their works are fed into AI systems rather than having to participate in an “opt-out regime.”

Getty’s legal team told the court Monday that the case isn’t a battle between the creative and technology industries and that the two can still work together in “synergistic harmony” because licensing creative works is critical to AI’s success.

“The problem is when AI companies such as Stability AI want to use those works without payment,” Getty’s trial lawyer, Lindsay Lane, said.

She said the case was about “straightforward enforcement of intellectual property rights,” including copyright, trademark and database rights.

Getty Images “recognizes that the AI industry is a force for good but that doesn’t justify those developing AI models to ride roughshod over intellectual property rights,” Lane said.

Stability AI had a “voracious appetite” for images to train its AI model, but was “completely indifferent to the nature of those works,” Lane said.

Stability didn’t care if images were protected by copyright, had watermarks, were not safe for work or were pornographic - it just wanted to get its model to the market as soon as possible, Lane said.

“This trial is the day of reckoning for that approach,” she said.

Stability lawyers are expected to make their opening arguments Tuesday. They say in a prepared written argument that Getty’s claims “represent an overt threat to Stability’s whole business, and the wider generative AI industry.”

Stability has argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the training of the AI model technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon. The company also argues that “only a tiny proportion” of the random outputs of its AI image-generator “look at all similar” to Getty’s works.

Once the trial concludes later this month, the judge’s decision is unlikely to give the AI industry what it most wants, which is expanded copyright exemptions for AI training, said Ben Milloy, a senior associate at UK law firm Fladgate, which is not involved in the case.

But it could “strengthen the hand of either party - rights holders or AI developers - in the context of the commercial negotiations for content licensing deals that are currently playing out worldwide,” Milloy said.

Similar cases in the U.S. have not yet gone to trial.

In the years after introducing its open-source technology, Stability confronted challenges in capitalizing on the popularity of the tool, battling lawsuits, misuse and other business problems.

Stable Diffusion’s roots trace back to Germany, where computer scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich worked with the New York-based tech company Runway to develop the original algorithms. The university researchers credited Stability AI for providing the servers that trained the models, which require large amounts of computing power.

Stability later blamed Runway for releasing an early version of Stable Diffusion that was used to produce abusive sexual images, but also said it would have exclusive control of more recent versions of the AI model.

Stability last year announced what it described as a “significant” infusion of money from new investors including Facebook’s former president Sean Parker, who is now chair of Stability’s board. Parker has experience in intellectual property disputes as the co-founder of online music company Napster, which temporarily shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and popular rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations.

Hollywood director James Cameron, whose films include “Titanic” and “Avatar” is also a Stability board member.

The new investments came after Stability’s founding CEO Emad Mostaque quit and several top researchers left to form a new German startup, Black Forest Labs, which makes a competing AI image generator.

By: Kelvin Chan And Matt O’Brien

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.