Stable Diffusion is one of the most popular generative AIs in recent times, especially in the second half of 2022, when these models of creating images from textual descriptions began to grab headlines and arouse the interest of the general public. The most popular is probably the Dall-E 2, which we already tested a few months ago, but it shares the limelight with the aforementioned Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

However, it is true that with the advent of ChatGPT, interest seems to have turned to text-generating AI, especially for your plans for the future, which will soon become part of all kinds of applications and services, from Internet browsers to productivity software. However, over time, it is more than likely that new uses will emerge and eventually everyone will share the spotlight.

Be that as it may, there is controversy surrounding generative artificial intelligences, specifically any that have been trained with copyrighted content. The problem is not, strictly speaking, that these AIs are trained with said content, but rather that, due to their operating system, they have a bad habit of reproducing, in an overly literal way, the exact content they were previously trained with.

Until now we have heard of some cases of individuals condemning the companies that create these AIs, but now we are faced with a case of greater depth. And it is as we can read in The Verge, Getty Images sued Stability AI, creator of Stable Diffusion. Reason? As you can imagine, the popular photo agency and image bank accuses Stable Diffusion of using its content for training.

More specifically, Getty Images accuses Stability AI of “Blatant infringement of Getty Images intellectual property on a staggering scale«. They claim that Stability AI has copied over 12 million images from its database.”without permission…or compensation…as part of their efforts to build a competitive business“, and that the startup violated the company’s copyright and trademark.

A few days ago we told you that Google proposed a generative AI for music based on text descriptions, but decided not to disclose it, at least for now. We can assume that the main reason is related to this problem. Since MusicLM has been fed by many thousands of hours of music, surely much of it is copyrighted, the search engine company will want to avoid lawsuits such as the one filed by Getty Images against Stable Diffusion.