Lawsuits for AI Generated Imagery Have Begun
And the outcome will be fascinating!
Three disgruntled artists are waging war on AI copyright infringement by taking Stability AI to court over their use of copyrighted work in the training process. Stability AI are the creators of Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — popular AI image generators that are growing in popularity. However the method of training these programs has come under scrutiny from human creators worried that their work is being ripped off.
The lawsuit claims that artists’ work has been scraped from the internet and is being used by the AI image creation tools to create AI imagery without the consent of the original human creators. No one is disputing that this is how the software has been trained, but it’s a question of whether that’s lawful or infringing the rights of human artists.
The artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — allege that these organizations have infringed the rights of “millions of artists” by training their AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web “without the consent of the original artists.”
Some AI image creators claim ‘fair use’ doctrine covers their use of the artwork for training purposes. However, ‘fair use’ can be complicated and murky. The laws differ in different countries, they’re open to different interpretations, and ‘fair use’ is only considered a defence in court. It doesn’t provide anyone with an automatic right to reproduce a creative work. Essentially, it’s a legal defence that may not be upheld by a judge.
According to The Verge, the artists argue that the AI software stores copyrighted images and ‘recombines’ them to creates collages. But the developers argue that their software does not store images, but instead, stores ‘mathematical representations of patterns’ collected from these images, which are used to create new images from scratch.
This will be a fascinating case as it unfolds, as AI tools are growing in popularity and the risk of copyright infringement is a massive issue. But from the perspective of users, it might be somewhat reassuring to see that it’s the developers being sued here, not the users. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible that users will be sued at some stage, but it means they’re going after the big guys first… the people responsible for creating the tools.
A report on the case by Arts Technica points out that DALL-E was not included in the complaint, perhaps because their source material is unknown and some of it is licenced.
Arts Technica say: “Unlike Stability AI, OpenAI has not publicly disclosed the exact contents of its training dataset and has commercially licensed some of its training data from companies such as Shutterstock.”
Getty Images have filed a lawsuit too
You might think three artists is enough to give Stability AI a headache, but now Getty Images are getting in on the action. They too, have filed a lawsuit over copyright infringement by Stability AI.
Check out the AI generated imagery on the Verge article below, where it looks a lot like a mashup of a Getty image, complete with the Getty property mark still in position. It looks hard for anyone to claim that this image did not originally come from Getty Images.
Getty say they want to build models that respect intellectual property, not end the emerging industry of AI generated content. So, it may eventually become a more collaborative effort of mutual respect. They want to see the benefits of AI generated content split with all contributory parties, rather than their content being used without permission or compensation.
I will watch this all unfold with fascination.
© Susie Kearley 2023. All Rights Reserved.
Read the full stories about the artists’ lawsuits here…
Read another of my articles on image copyright here…
