Generative AI has now become a significant part of mainstream attention and is poised to revolutionize the world. Nevertheless, it encounters a formidable obstacle in the form of copyright law and its application to computer-generated creations. AI systems rely on databases of pre-existing works and draw inspiration from them when producing their outputs. As per Ars Technica, numerous class-action lawsuits present an existential threat to this technology.
Getty Images, a stock photo company, is among those who have filed a class action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion AI, citing that the AI program copied more than 12 million licensed photos without permission. Furthermore, the generative photo bot trained on so many unlicensed Getty photos that it notoriously reproduced the watermark.
Generative AI programs that produce text and images based on other works often rely on fair use as their primary defense. The court examines how similar the reproduced work is to the original and evaluates whether the AI program has created transformative works. As Ars Technica reports, this raises a crucial question about generative AI programs’ potential to produce transformative works.
Furthermore, fair use considers how the reproduced work affects the demand for the original. According to Grimmelmann, people plan to use Stable Diffusion in conjunction with other tools to create high-quality brochures, similar to how they would have used licensed stock photos or commissioned illustrations in the past.
The copyright issues with Stable Diffusion and other generative AI software stem from the fact that AI is still relatively new, and there are legal uncertainties. Nonetheless, companies like Microsoft and General Motors have already embraced the technology. Therefore, despite copyright concerns, AI will undoubtedly become more prevalent in consumer technology as time passes.
