Filed by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, the class-action lawsuit also takes aim at Midjourney, one of the most powerful AI models on the internet. It mentions multiple quotes from Midjourney founder David Holz and his answers regarding copyright ramifications. “To my knowledge, every single large AI model is basically trained on stuff that’s on the internet. And that’s okay, right now,” the lawsuit cites him as saying.
In an exhaustive exhibit list, the legal complaint mentions instances where copyrighted material was lifted illicitly from work produced by plaintiffs including artists such as Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Kelly Ortiz. The latest lawsuit against Stability AI is just one in a series of legal battles awaiting AI labs, including market leader OpenAI.
About a week ago, The New York Times sued the ChatGPT-maker and Microsoft over copyright infringement claims. In September 2023, George R. R. Martin and John Grisham were among the 17 artists that filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using materials from their books without seeking their explicit permission.
A few months prior to that, comedienne Sarah Silverman and a couple of other authors filed a lawsuit against Meta as well as OpenAI over allegations of using illegally-acquired datasets to train their AI models. Aside from visual artists and writers, music labels including Universal Music have also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for scraping lyrics to train AI models. Musicians like Grimes, on the other hand, are more open to the generative AI creative debate.
