Via HollywoodReporter, artists win a partial victory against the AI megathieves.
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U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday advanced all copyright infringement and trademark claims in a pivotal win for artists. He found that Stable Diffusion, Stability’s AI tool that can create hyperrealistic images in response to a prompt of just a few words, may have been “built to a significant extent on copyrighted works” and created with the intent to “facilitate” infringement. The order could entangle in the litigation any AI company that incorporated the model into its products.
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This is only the first step in litigation, but at least the judge has opened the door to have a trial. The plaintiffs are in videogaming and related crafts, and the offenders are using AI for art and animation.
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The lawsuit, filed last year, revolves around the LAION data set, which was built using 5 billion images that were allegedly scraped from the internet and utilized by Stability and Runway to create Stable Diffusion. It implicated Midjourney, which trained its AI system using the model, as well as DeviantArt for using the model in DreamUp, an image generation tool.
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DeviantArt, one of the defendants, brazenly defends its “right” to steal from the ARTISTS WHO USE IT AS A STOREFRONT. This is commercially stupid as well as criminal. Why would you trust an agent who steals your work?
Midjourney has bragged about a straightforward direct copy of named images, not just the usual mashup:
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Midjourney chief executive David Holz posted the names of roughly 4,700 artists he said that its AI tool can replicate. This followed Stability chief executive Prem Akkaraju saying that the company downloaded from the internet troves of images and compressed them in a way that can “re-create” any of those images.
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In other words, we have copies of specific works and we will copy and distribute them.
Polistra's Mill 