A flat above a fried chicken shop in Notting Hill is an odd place to be at the heart of what has been called “one of the most important legal questions” of the 21st century. It is the registered office of Stability AI, an artificial intelligence group that is upsetting artists around the world.
Stability AI is run by Emad Mostaque, a computer scientist and former hedge fund employee. It operates the image-generating software Stable Diffusion, described in a US lawsuit as “a 21st-century collage tool that remixes the copyrighted works of millions”. Type in “Elon Musk in a Van Gogh painting” and it produces an amusing pastiche.
The three women artists behind the US lawsuit have backing. Getty Images, the stock photo group with 135mn copyrighted images on its database, last week started another legal action against Stability AI in the UK courts. Getty’s images, along with millions of others, are used to train Stable Diffusion so it can perform its tricks.