SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — For now, at least, a federal judge will allow copyright claims from a group of artists to proceed against a tech company that used their artwork to train an artificial intelligence model.
In their class action, the artists accused AI company Stability AI, software company Midjourney and online art platform DeviantArt of using their art to train Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image AI tool created by Stability AI. The companies did so without consent or compensation, the artists said — stressing that Stable Diffusion was now competing against human artists in the marketplace.
The artists first sued the companies last year. U.S. Senior District Judge William Orrick, a Barack Obama appointee, tossed most of the claims in October, allowing only a single direct copyright claim to survive.
The plaintiffs then amended their complaint, and the defendants again asked for dismissal. But in a 33-page ruling on Monday afternoon, Orrick found that the amended copyright claims should at least proceed to discovery, where a court can decide if Stable Diffusion's generated images do in fact violate copyrights.
“Plaintiffs allege that Stable Diffusion is built to a significant extent on copyrighted works and that the way the product operates necessarily invokes copies or protected elements of those works," Orrick wrote in his order. Siding with the artists on this issue, he said it was at least plausible that Stable Diffusion not only "creates copyright infringement" but was "created to facilitate that infringement by design."
Stability argued that without evidence of intent to promote infringement, copyright claims against the company and its AI tool should fail. But the artists cited a statement by Stability's CEO, in which he boasted that the company took 100,000 gigabytes of images and compressed them into a two-gigabyte file that can “recreate” the images.
Stability argued that isolated use of the word "create" by its CEO didn't show it intended to foster infringement.
Orrick wasn't so convinced.
“In addition to the comment of Stability’s CEO, plaintiffs reference articles by academics and others that training images can sometimes be reproduced as outputs from the AI products," Orrick wrote. "Whether true and whether the result of a glitch (as Stability contends) or by design (plaintiffs’ contention) will be tested at a later date. The allegations of induced infringement are sufficient."
Orrick did, however, dismiss claims against Stability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, finding the company's generic license did not suggest any association with the plaintiffs' works as required by the DMCA. He said readers of the license agreement would understand that Stability was not "claiming rights to or conveying any false information" about artworks in its dataset.
He also threw out unjust enrichment claims by the artists, finding they were preempted by the Copyright Act.
“If plaintiffs have a good faith theory of unjust enrichment that falls outside the scope of the protections provided by the Copyright Act, they are given leave to make one last attempt to state an unjust enrichment claim,” Orrick wrote.
Lawyers for Stability AI and the artists did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
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