Judge Says Artists Can Sue AI Companies for Using Their Work

A California federal judge ruled that a group of 10 visual artists can proceed with copyright claims against Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway over text-to-image generative AI. Judge William Orrick dismissed the artists' unjust enrichment and breach of contract claims but found the copyright infringement complaints plausible, including claims that their artwork was used to train the companies' AI. The class-action suit, filed in November in the U.S. District Court in Northern California, centers on the alleged use of the LAION dataset of five billion images to develop Stable Diffusion.