Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Stability AI Inc, accusing it of misusing more than 12 million Getty images to train its Stable Diffusion AI image-generation system.
The Delaware federal court lawsuit follows a separate Getty case against Stability in the United Kingdom, as well as a related class-action complaint filed by artists in California against Stability and other companies in the fast-growing field of generative AI.
Getty did not respond to questions about the Delaware lawsuit. Stability representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. In the market for images for editorial use, Reuters News competes with Getty.
Last August, London-based Stability AI released Stable Diffusion, an AI-based system for generating images from text inputs, as well as image generator DreamStudio. In October, the company announced that it had raised more than $100 million in funding and was valued at $1 billion.
Seattle-based Getty accused Stability of unauthorized copying of millions of its photos and using them to train Stable Diffusion to generate more accurate depictions based on user input.
Getty Images claims that its images are especially valuable for AI training due to their image quality, variety of subject matter, and detailed metadata.
Getty stated that it has licensed “millions of suitable digital assets” to other “leading technology innovators” for AI-related purposes, and that Stability violates its copyrights and competes unfairly with it.
Stability is also accused of infringing on Getty’s trademarks, citing images generated by its AI system with Getty’s watermark, which Getty claims may cause consumer confusion.
Getty asked the court to order Stability to stop using its images and sought monetary damages equal to Stability’s profits from the alleged infringement.