#getty-images

#getty-images

Stability AI, the creator of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, was largely victorious against Getty Images on Tuesday in a British legal battle over the material used to train AI models. The case originally looked set to produce a landmark ruling on AI and copyright in the UK, but it landed with a thud and failed to set any clear precedent for the big question dividing AI companies and creative firms: whether AI models need permission to train on copyrighted works.

AI image generators can create unique visuals within seconds from a single text prompt. Tech companies train these image generators on millions of images scraped most commonly from across the internet without attribution -- or, too rarely, licensed from individual creators or collections. When an AI image generator spits out an image from a user prompt, it's taking inspiration (or, in some cases, outright copying) from every human-generated image it's been trained on.