Judge Allows Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against AI Image Generation Companies to Move Forward

Artists in a class action lawsuit against popular AI image and video generation companies have received a positive ruling from a judge. The artists, including Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, and others, have accused companies like Midjourney, Runway, Stability AI, and DeviantArt of copyright infringement for offering AI image generator products based on the Stable Diffusion AI model trained on their copyrighted works. The judge, while not ruling on the final outcome, stated that the allegations of induced infringement are sufficient for the case to move forward toward the discovery phase. This phase could reveal more details about the training datasets and inner workings of the AI image generator companies. The artists are celebrating the ruling as a significant win and are eager to learn more through the discovery process.

The case revolves around the use of Stable Diffusion, which was allegedly trained on a dataset called LAION-5B, containing over 5 billion images scraped from the web. However, the dataset only contained links and text descriptions, meaning the AI companies would have had to separately gather copies of the images to train Stable Diffusion. The judge denied claims filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which prohibits circumventing controls on copyrighted materials. However, the artists argued that the AI models used prompts, including artists’ names, to generate images, potentially constituting copyright infringement.

The ruling has raised questions about the legal implications of AI art generation and the boundaries of copyright law. While it is generally permissible for human artists to create new works in the style of copyrighted artists, the use of AI models trained on specific copyrighted works blurs the line. The case will likely shed light on the training practices and model outputs of AI art generators. Overall, this ruling marks a significant step forward for artists seeking to protect their copyrighted works in the face of AI-generated content.