Copyright Is Not Enough

In 2022, U.K. tech company Stability AI released Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) model. Its intention: “democratizing image generation” by “empowering billions of people to create stunning art within seconds.” Among the billions of images in the dataset on which Stable Diffusion was trained were millions of photographs and other visual works scraped from the stock photography website Getty Images. Getty acts as an intermediary, licensing works created by photographers around the world to third parties for use in publications, social media and advertising. Having been trained on many of these works, Stable Diffusion could generate images that looked very similar to Getty’s works and even bore a Getty-style watermark. Stability had not asked Getty for permission to use its images for training Stable Diffusion.