AI has been eating the world this year, with the launch of GPT-4, DALL·E 3, Bing Chat, Gemini, and dozens of other AI models and tools capable of generating text and images from a simple written prompt. To train these models, AI developers have relied on millions of texts and images created by real people—and some of them aren’t very happy that their work has been used without their permission. With the launches came the lawsuits. And next year, the first of them will likely go to trial.
Almost all the pending lawsuits involve copyright to some degree or another, so the tech companies behind each AI model are relying on fair use arguments for their defense, among others. In most cases, they can’t really argue that their AIs weren’t trained on the copyrighted works. Instead, many argue that scraping content from the internet to create generative content is transformative because the outputs are “new” works. While text-based plagiarism may be easier to pin down than image generators mimicking visual styles of specific artists, the sheer scope of generative AI tools has created massive legal messes that will be playing out in 2024 and beyond.
In January, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI (the makers of Stable Diffusion) seeking unspecified damages, alleging that the generative image model was unlawfully trained using millions of copyrighted images from stock photo giant’s catalog. Although Getty has also filed a similar suit in Delaware, this week, a judge ruled that the lawsuit can go to trial in the UK. A date has not been set. For what it’s worth, the examples Getty uses showing Stable Diffusion adding a weird, blurry, Getty-like watermark to some of its outputs are hilariously damning.)
A group of visual artists is currently suing Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI for copyright infringement by using their works to train their AI models. According to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco,…
Read the full article here