Experts disagree about what the ruling means for AI training on copyrighted material

London's High Court has dismissed the major portions of Getty Images' lawsuit against generative AI firm Stability AI for training its image-generation model on copyrighted images, which some legal experts say could weaken intellectual property laws. However, others saw daylight for trademark and copyright protection in the judge's ruling.

The High Court of Justice handed down its decision on Tuesday. Justice Joanna Smith affirmed just a portion of one of several arguments that Getty made in the lawsuit it filed in 2023, namely that the presence of Getty watermarks on certain images generated by Stability's Stable Diffusion models constituted trademark infringement. As for everything else, Smith found Getty failed to prove its claims. 

Getty sued Stability for copyright infringement in part because those watermarks showed up in AI-generated images, which the photo agency argued was clear evidence that London-based Stability had scraped its massive library of photographs ...