London AI firm says Getty copyright case poses 'overt threat' to industry

Stability allows users to generate images using text prompts, and its directors include James Cameron, the Oscar-winning film director of Avatar and Titanic. But Getty called the people who were training the AI system "a bunch of tech geeks" and claimed they were indifferent to the problems their innovation might create. Stability countered by alleging that Getty was using "fanciful" legal routes and spending approximately 10m to fight a technology it feared was "an existential threat" to its business. As a result the program, called Stability Diffusion, outputs images with Getty Images watermarks still on them. Getty alleges that Stability was "completely indifferent to what they fed into the training data".