LONDON – Getty Images is confronting the artificial intelligence firm Stability AI in a London courtroom in what marks the first significant copyright trial in the generative AI sector.

Opening arguments before a judge at the British High Court are scheduled for Monday. The trial could last for three weeks.

The London-based company Stability owns a popular AI image generation tool that excited many with its capability to instantly produce AI-generated art and lifelike images after its launch in August 2022. Three months later, OpenAI launched its unexpected success, the chatbot ChatGPT.

Getty, headquartered in Seattle, claims that the creation of Stable Diffusion, the AI image generator, represents “brazen infringement” of its extensive photography library “on a staggering scale.”

Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images. Getty was among the first to challenge those practices when it filed copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States and the United Kingdom in early 2023.

“What Stability did was inappropriate,” Getty CEO Craig Peters told The Associated Press in 2023. He said creators of intellectual property should be asked for permission before their works are fed into AI systems rather than having to participate in an “opt-out regime.”

Stability has argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the training of the AI model technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon.

Similar cases in the U.S. have not yet gone to trial.

Stable Diffusion’s roots trace to Germany, where computer scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich worked with the New York-based tech company Runway to develop the original algorithms. The university researchers credited Stability AI for providing the servers that trained the models, which require large amounts of computing power.