Judge Dismisses Artists' Copyright Claims Against AI Art Generators, Allows One Lawsuit to Proceed

Judge Orrick dismissed all claims against Midjourney and DeviantArt in pioneering lawsuit on AI infringement, but permits accusations against Stability AI to continue over alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted images.

• Judge William Orrick has dismissed multiple claims made by artists against AI art generators Midjourney and DeviantArt, citing that the accusations are defective in various ways, but allowed a lawsuit against Stability AI to continue.
• The lawsuit against Stability AI pertains to the alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted images to train their AI system, particularly for creating Stable Diffusion. However, Stability AI contends that their model training does not involve copying but developing parameters from the works, a point which remains contested.
• In his ruling, Orrick emphasized that plaintiffs had not provided proof that Midjourney and DeviantArt had a direct role in the alleged infringement and that clarifications were required regarding how Stable Diffusion operates with the training images.
• Artists may also need to demonstrate that the AI tools have produced works identical to their copyrighted material. However, it is admitted that none of the output images from Stable Diffusion in response to a text prompt are likely to closely match a specific image in the training data.
• Two of the three artists who initiated the lawsuit dropped their infringement claims due to not having their work registered with the copyright office before suing. The case now revolves around the artist Sarah Anderson’s works, using a search result from the 'haveibeentrained' website as proof of infringement by Stable Diffusion.

3 Articles

The Hollywood Reporter Reuters VentureBeat