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The question of what data is used to train AI models and whether it is legally obtained is central to this case.
A copyright lawsuit filed by a group of artists against companies using text-to-image generators, including Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt, has been allowed to proceed by a US judge.
In a ruling this week, US district judge William Orrick said that motions brought forward by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, Hawke Southworth, Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye and Adam Ellis were granted in part and dismissed in part.
Stability AI’s text-to-image generator, Stable Diffusion, can create new images based on a sentence a user inputs, combining different concepts, attributes and styles.
The class action lawsuit alleges that Stable Diffusion used the artists’ works as “training images” to produce AI-generated images “in the style” of the original images. The lawsuit also extends to Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI, all of whom allegedly use Stable Diffusion in their AI products.
‘Long road ahead’
McKernan, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee, hailed the ruling as “very exciting”.
“The judge is allowing our copyright claims through and now we get to find out all the things these companies don’t want us to know in discovery. This is a HUGE win for us. I’m SO proud of our incredible team of lawyers and fellow plaintiffs!” she wrote on X.
“We have a long road ahead still but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge all the effort it took to get to this milestone in our lawsuit. It’s been an intense 18 months, let’s keep going!”
McKernan initially sued the companies in January 2023 along with Andersen and Ortiz, one of several prominent copyright lawsuits against AI companies. While Orrick dismissed many of their allegations in October, he allowed them to be refiled.
Last February, Getty Images sued Stability AI in a US court, accusing the start-up of “brazen infringement” of its intellectual property “on a staggering scale”. It allegedly copied more than 12m photos – along with captions and metadata – from Getty Images’ collection without obtaining permission or compensating them.
The move marked an escalation over the previous month, when Getty Images sued Stability AI in London for the same reasons, claiming it “unlawfully copied and processed” millions of copyright-protected images for its own commercial benefit and “to the detriment of content creators”.
In November, former vice-president of audio at Stability AI Ed Newton-Rex resigned from his post after disagreeing with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is “fair use”. He said that despite his colleagues having a more “nuanced” view on this issue than some competitors, he wasn’t able to change the “prevailing opinion” on fair use at the company.
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