Can AI Copy Your Images? Hear It From a Lawyer

A class action lawsuit has been filed in rhe US against Stability AI and other AI art generators. If they are infringing copyright laws, could it bring an end to AI-generated art? What are the real issues? A lawyer explains in this eye-opening video.

You may have heard that in January 2023, Getty Images in the UK initiated a lawsuit against Stability AI for scraping millions of pictures from its image library. Getty Images believe that the AI art generator ignored copyright laws in pursuit of its standalone commercial interests.

You, like many others, might be using these services. As much fun as they are to experiment with, you might be wondering, aren’t the source images copyrighted? Stable Diffusion, owned by Stability AI, uses pictures as training data to generate image-to-image translations guided by text prompts. If using the source images like this is infringing copyright laws, then the implications are huge. The AI generator being free makes no difference. How the machine learning works and how it actually scrapes source images is a complicated issue. See the full video with helpful explanations of the legal issues with AI and the concepts that may be on the side of AI generators, such as fair use.

Kaisa Leinonen's picture

Kaisa Leinonen is a photographer specializing in homeware and interiors, still life and food content. Originally from Finland she is based in London, UK.

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6 Comments

A paradox of paradox' and a paradox.....last words for day

That's what I said months ago. No one ever talks about the input but many glamorize the output.

The other thing that's forgotten about is the algorithm. Without a creative algorithm, tools like this would just produce junk (I'm assuming that most people don't think what they are producing now is junk - but that's a discussion for another day).

I don't think It's really possible to stop the upcoming change, and I honestly I can't think of a law that would properly settle this down on a philosophy level. I think this is where we will struggle as a humanity next years and it will eventually devaluate art to quite strong degree. I'm bit scared but also excited to see what it brings.

I have a hard time thinking that AI images are in any way creative.

I'm pretty sure we've seen this sort of thing many times before - there are parallels we can look at from the music industry.

https://www.thisisdig.com/feature/biggest-copyright-lawsuits-in-music-hi...