A class action lawsuit by artists against AI art is losing steam as a US court doesn’t seem sympathetic to the arguments.
On Wednesday, the lawsuit Anderson vs Stability Ltd. was heard at the US District Court in Northern California. The class-action lawsuit was brought by three artists – Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz. The lawsuit was against various AI platforms working on text-to-image generators, including Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney.
The primary argument of the plaintiffs was that AI text-to-image platforms train their models on copyrighted artworks of artists, without giving them credits or royalty. As such, this is a case of copyright infringement and the companies should be liable to pay to the creators whose work they used for their models.
However, copyright claims are usually made in cases where a copied work is either identical or bears a heavy resemblance to the original. A particular case of such claims involves derivate works, where the copied work takes small but cumulative properties from many works. The problem arises that the case of AI art involves neither. Remarking on the case, Judge William Orrick said: “I don’t think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment, because there’s no substantial similarity [between the images by the artists and images created by the AI image generators]”.
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The defendants pointed out that among the three named plaintiffs, only one – Sarah Anderson – has works registered at the US Copyright Office. Even among the 16 works registered under Anderson, the plaintiffs failed to show any AI-generated work that had noticeable similarities with her paintings. While the AI companies like OpenAI have admitted that their models can create works using the style of any artist, living or dead, “style” is not protected under current copyright laws. As such, it seems likely that the case would get dismissed in the coming days.
