AI companies Stability AI, Deviant Art and Midjourney in the United States have called for the dismissal of pleas filed by a group of artists alleging that the companies have infringed upon copyrighted works through their generative AI tools on April 19. Stability AI has sought an order in the Californian Court to dismiss all the claims made by the artists against the company. We summarise the most significant arguments including the failure of the artists to prove or produce at least one work where copyright infringement can be substantially proved among others. About the case: In January 2023, three artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a class action lawsuit— a lawsuit filed by a group of members with a representative from the group—against Stability AI, Deviant Art and Midjourney alleging that their AI tools have infringed upon works of thousands of artists. The three AI companies provide AI tools for generating images based on text prompts. The lawsuit claimed that “the Stable Diffusion tool used by Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney was trained on billions of copyrighted images scraped from the internet and contained within the LAION-5B dataset, which were downloaded and used by the companies without compensation or consent from the artists.” Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image generative AI model released in 2022 by Stability AI. Why it matters: This case majorly highlights how AI companies can take refuge in existing gaps in the country-specific copyright laws to shape their arguments in AI-specific cases. Copyright…
