This summer, the question of who owns the words and images that train artificial intelligence is coming to a head in Britain. Getty Images, one of the world's largest photo agencies, is appealing a landmark High Court ruling from last November that largely cleared the AI firm Stability AI of copyright infringement. The judge found that training a model on protected pictures did not, in itself, breach UK copyright, because the finished model stores no copies of the originals.
Writers, photographers and musicians say this leaves them exposed: a lifetime of work can be scraped to build lucrative tools without their consent or a penny in payment. AI companies reply that learning from publicly available material is no different from a human studying it, and warn that heavy restrictions would simply push innovation abroad. Ministers are now testing a licensing "exchange" to let creators be paid — an attempt to reconcile two industries that each claim to be the future.