Central to this case is the question of what data is used to train AI models and whether it was obtained legally.
A US judge has allowed the continuation of a copyright lawsuit filed by a group of artists against companies that use text-to-image generators, including Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.
In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge William Orrick said the motions 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 denied in part.
Stability AI’s text-to-image generator, Stable Diffusion, can create new images based on a sentence entered by the user, 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 covers Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI, all of which allegedly use Stable Diffusion in their AI products.
“We have a long way to go”
McKernan, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, called the verdict “very exciting.”
“The judge lets our copyright claims go through and now we’re learning all the things these companies are trying to keep from us during discovery. This is a HUGE win for us. I’m SO proud of our incredible team of lawyers and co-plaintiffs!” she wrote on X.
“We still have a long way to go, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize the efforts we’ve made to reach this milestone in our litigation. It’s been an intense 18 months, let’s keep going!”
McKernan sued the companies in January 2023 along with Andersen and Ortiz, one of several high-profile 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 12 million photos – along with captions and metadata – from Getty Images’ collection without asking permission or paying compensation.
The move represents an escalation from the previous month, when Getty Images sued Stability AI in London on the same grounds, claiming the company had “unlawfully copied and processed” millions of copyrighted images for its own commercial gain and “to the detriment of content creators.”
In November, Ed Newton-Rex, former vice president of audio at Stability AI, resigned from his post after disagreeing with the company’s view that training generative AI models on copyrighted works was “fair use.” He said that while his colleagues had a “more nuanced” view on the issue than some competitors, he could not change the “prevailing opinion” on fair use at the company.
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