Judge William Orrick of the Northern District of California, home to many artificial intelligence companies, ruled that the artists’ lawsuit against the generative AI developers had merit and could move forward.
A group of artists who filed a class action lawsuit against the developers of popular AI image-generating models are deeply pleased that a judge has allowed the case to move forward and allowed important information to be released.
The companies under surveillance include Midjourney, Runway, Stability AI, and DeviantArt. The artists believe that these organizations have illegally used their copyrighted works to train their AI systems.
Artists’ rights lawyers have been given access to confidential documents from the defendant companies, opening up the possibility of uncovering secrets about how such networks actually work and learn.
Stable Diffusion, for example, analyzed 5 billion images from the LAION-5B database. But the problem is that this database only contained links and descriptions, and the images themselves had to be collected by companies. And here the question of consent of the authors arises.
The artists are celebrating a small victory, even though it is too early to tell whether the case will be resolved in their favor. But if the case is upheld, it will set a new precedent for American and international legal practice.
