The lawsuit was brought by artists including Karla Ortiz, who has worked on major film projects. The artists argue that the AI companies induced copyright infringement and that the Stable Diffusion models are themselves infringing works. The case will now move forward to discovery, where the artists could uncover information related to the way in which the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials. The court also allowed trademark claims to proceed, based on allegations that the AI companies used artists' names as prompts to generate similar images.
Key takeaways:
- A federal judge has allowed key claims in a lawsuit against AI art generators to move forward, marking a significant win for artists who allege unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train AI systems.
- The judge found that Stable Diffusion, an AI tool that can create hyperrealistic images, may have been built significantly on copyrighted works and created with the intent to facilitate infringement.
- The lawsuit revolves around the LAION data set, built using 5 billion images allegedly scraped from the internet and used by Stability and Runway to create Stable Diffusion. It implicates Midjourney and DeviantArt for using the model in their products.
- The case will now move to discovery, where artists could uncover information related to how the AI firms harvested copyrighted materials for training large language models. This could potentially lead to massive damages for the companies involved.