Getty Images Wants $1.7 Billion From its Lawsuit With Stability AI

An original Getty photograph, left, an AI image generated by Stable Diffusion complete with Getty logo, right.

Getty Images is seeking up to $1.7 billion in damages from Stability AI, according to the AI image generator company’s latest accounts.

Getty, one of the world’s largest photo agencies, launched its lawsuit in January 2023. Getty suspects that Stability AI may have used as many as 12 million of its copyrighted photos to train the AI image generator Stable Diffusion. Getty is seeking $150,000 per infringement and 12 million photos equates to a staggering $1.8 trillion.

However, according to Stability AI’s latest company accounts as reported by Sifted, Getty is seeking damages for 11,383 works at $150,000 per infringement which comes to a total of $1.7 billion. Stability AI has previously reported that Getty was seeking damages for 7,300 images so that number has increased. But Stability AI says Getty hasn’t given an exact number it wants for the lawsuit to be settled, according to Sifted.

“The Company does not consider that the claims in any of these matters have merit, and is contesting the claims in each of the cases,” Stability says in its accounts. Both Getty Images and Stability AI declined to comment on the report.

Multiple Lawsuits

The Getty Images case is not the only suit that Stability AI faces: it is also being sued by a group of artists, including photographer Jingna Zhang, who also accuse the AI image generator of violating their rights.

Both legal cases revolve around Stability’s use of the LAION dataset, an open-source archive of five billion images scraped from the open web and utilized by Stability AI to build its products. It’s also suspected that other AI companies have used LAION, too.

Since generative AI is a new technology, there is no legal precedent on copyright and training data; these lawsuits will likely continue for years. Indeed Stability says in its accounts: “All of the above cases are currently at an early stage in proceedings. Based on the current status of the cases, the company’s management does not consider that there is any probable loss.”

The CEO of Getty Images Craig Peters recently said called the practice of scraping photos from the open web as “pure theft” and says AI companies are competing in the same markets as human creative who created the training data.

Image credits: All images courtesy of Getty Images v. Stability AI