The Stable Diffusion image generator, released in 2022, has enjoyed a lot of interest in recent months. Its capabilities are surprising, because artificial intelligence allows you to generate any image, based only on a short text description. It is often difficult to notice that we are dealing with the work of a machine and not a man.
Artificial intelligence “learned” from other people’s photos from the Internet
The problem is that – according to the American agency Getty Images – AI can now be “inspired” by the work of photographers from around the world. All because at the stage of work on the program, artificial intelligence had to “train” on the basis of real photos that were downloaded from the network.
As the founder of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque himself once admitted that the AI is trained using a compressed file containing a trifle of about 100 TB of photographs collected from the Internet. Getty Images was supposed to find evidence that among them there were also works placed in the company’s photo bank.
As the researchers, who analyzed a sample of 12 million photos from a database of 2.3 billion used photos, almost half of them came from just 100 domains on the Internet. These include social networking sites, blogs and image banks, including Pinterest, Blogspot, Flickr, Wikimedia and many more.
Getty Images found that “Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of copyrighted images to the detriment of content creators.” The agency also claims that the authors of the AI generator ignored issues of legal protection of photographers’ works and license fees, which is why it decided to sue the company in the High Court in London.
Getty Images believes that the photos were used to create the program without the consent or knowledge of the photographers, and that these works can still be “inspiration” for artificial intelligence. A Stability AI representative told the BBC that those who consider it illegal use “do not understand the technology and the law”.
A similar copyright infringement lawsuit is already pending against Stability AI and two other defendants. The complaint was brought by three artists who believe that they have been wronged, among others by by the authors of the Stable Diffusion generator.
Source: Gazeta
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