Artists' Copyright Lawsuit Progresses Against AI Image Generators in Court

A recent legal victory has been achieved by artists combating major AI image generator platforms, as a federal judge has allowed their copyright infringement claims to proceed. This ruling indicates that AI models like Stable Diffusion may infringe copyrights inherently through their operation. Cartoonist Sarah Andersen, illustrator Kelly McKernan, and concept artist Karla Ortiz have sued Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, alleging that their works were used without permission to train these generation models. The artists claim that this unauthorized use resulted in the reproduction of their original works in new AI-generated images.

In the ruling, a Northern California District Court judge has greenlit the claims of copyright infringement to move forward, highlighting that models like Stable Diffusion are essentially built upon copyrighted works and by virtue of their operation perpetuate copyright violation. The judge's decision allows the plaintiffs to request information during discovery regarding how image generation platforms obtained the materials used to train their AI models. These platforms, including Stability AI, utilized the LAION-5B dataset, containing billions of images sourced from the internet, in training models like Stable Diffusion.

The court ruled in favor of the artists, recognizing that their protected works were part of the LAION dataset, despite attempts by AI companies to restrict access to the dataset by requiring specific individual image identification. The judge determined that given the unique circumstances of the case, such detailed identification was unnecessary for the artists to state their claims effectively.

Although the artists faced setbacks in their claims against the AI startups, with allegations of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and unjust enrichment being dismissed, the core focus of the case now remains on copyright infringement. This case is among a growing number brought by artists against generative AI platforms, with ongoing legal action including a class action lawsuit against Google for similar infringement claims related to its Imagen models being trained on LAION datasets containing the artists' works.