Extract from Maria Dinzeo’s article “Judge Whittles Down Artists’ Landmark AI Copyright Suit but Keeps Core Infringement Claims Alive”
A federal judge late Monday trimmed claims against AI-powered image creators accused of ripping off artists’ work but said the artists’ direct copyright infringement theories should be put to the test on summary judgment.
His ruling is the latest turn in a high-profile class action brought by a slew of cartoonists, painters and illustrators who say AI startups Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway AI and DeviantArt used their art to train machine learning models Stable Diffusion and AI image generators Dream Up and AI Magic Tools without paying the artists or getting their consent.
The 19-month-old lawsuit says the images were taken from the Large Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, a giant, open-source index of five billion images that Stability and Runway scraped to train versions of Stable Diffusion. Plaintiffs say Midjourney also trained its platform on Stable Diffusion.
