James Vincent, writing for The Verge:
Like most modern AI systems, Stable Diffusion is trained on a vast dataset that it mines for patterns and learns to replicate. In this case, that core of the training data is a huge package of 5 billion-plus pairs of images and text tags known as LAION-5B, all of which have been scraped from the public web. . . .
We know for certain that LAION-5B contains a lot of copyrighted content. An independent analysis of a 12 million-strong sample of the dataset found that nearly half the pictures contained were taken from just 100 domains. The most popular was Pinterest, constituting around 8.5 percent of the pictures sampled, while the next-biggest sources were sites known for hosting user-generated content (like Flickr, DeviantArt, and Tumblr) and stock photo sites like Getty Images and Shutterstock. In other words: sources that contain copyrighted content, whether from independent artists or professional photographers.
Anyone can use this AI art generator — that’s the risk
Vincent points out that Stable Diffusion even sometimes inserts the “Getty Images” watermark in its generated imagery. Not a good look.