How can I protect my art from being scraped by GenAI?

Written by Prem Shah | January 30, 2025

Intellectual Property

Generative AI, or GenAI as it’s popularly known, has been a thorn in the side of creatives for the last couple of years, many of whom have seen their art used and/or replicated by AI image generators with seemingly no recourse, or protection for their rights. Whilst ostensibly the human creators can rely on copyright to protect their works, there has been some ambiguity about the extent to which these rights are enforceable against GenAI, and we have seen very little thus far in terms of legislative intervention to solve the problem.

The UK government, and Sir Keir Starmer in particular, have heralded the importance of AI for the UK, and strongly hinted that we will be getting what we really need – some legislation to address the issue, whilst supporting the growth of the creative industries and AI sectors and recognising the value of human creativity.

Under government proposals, AI companies will be allowed to train their algorithms on copyrighted works under a new copyright exemption for text and data mining. Whilst on the face of it this appears to give the upper hand to AI firms, there will also be an opt out for creatives who can reserve their rights and declare that they do not want their work to be used in an AI training process. The government envisions that this will lead to more licensing of content, which would provide a new revenue stream for creators. Whether this proposal stands up to scrutiny in a practical setting, we will have to wait and see, but getting some concrete legislation through the door is a vital step to redressing the AI landscape and providing more certainty to creatives.

Another avenue which will hopefully provide some certainty regarding the GenAI landscape is the forthcoming Getty Images v Stability AI case, which is listed for 9 June 2025. As a reminder, Getty Images has brought an action against Stability AI for allegedly using over 12 million photographs, videos and illustrations from Getty Images’ websites in training its GenAI image generator, Stable Diffusion. Getty Images claims that Stability AI has infringed the copyright in its works by scraping them from Getty Images’ website and using them to train Stable Diffusion. Furthermore, Getty Images claims that the outputs generated by Stable Diffusion are infringing as they reproduce a substantial part of the works.

Whatever the outcome of the case, it is guaranteed to shape the legal and commercial backdrop for GenAI moving forwards, and will hopefully provide some much needed clarity for creatives and businesses alike.

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