A group of artists sued Google for a class action case, claiming copyright infringement caused by the image generators of the Imagen AI. The court filing in California District Court claims that Google’s Imagen process was trained on their works without permission, thus describing it as a massive copyright infringement.
The debate about AI image generators continues to rage on, Stability AI, OpenAI, and Midjourney have been in the past sued for copyright infringement due to how they trained their models; by using images without the permission of artists.
Allegations of copyright infringement
Google is accused of significant infringement of copyright laws by making countless intermediate copies throughout the training process, which, they claim, are very similar to the artists’ work. As stated in the complaint, “the intermediate copies of every copyrighted work that Google made during the training of its Google LAION Models were substantially similar to the copyrighted work itself.” The artists call for the destruction of all copies of their works, as well as they need to be reimbursed for legal costs.
According to the artists’ complaint, they demand to issue an order prohibiting the use of all copies of their work by Google and payment for their legal expenses. This example provides another layer to the AI image generators law discussion and the significance of legal consequences for businesses operating in this field.
Google released Imagen in May 2022 when text-to-image models were in their initial phase of maturation. Monthly 2 would hit the stands the next December. The image generation model was successfully integrated into Google Cloud’s platform like Vertex, allowing businesses to create images to meet their requirements.
Ongoing legal battles in the AI area
In addition, many other lawsuits in the AI industry are not yet settled as companies such as Adobe continue to defend their AI models. Adobe claims that, unlike Google’s Imagen AI, which uses the creative open-source pool, its own proprietary commercial Firefly AI model, which is trained on Adobe Stock images, is safe.
The aftermath of these court cases is most likely to heavily influence the advancement and implementation of AI in the future where fair dealing and moral rights act as the means of copyright protection in the creative field.
This news comes as a judge in a United States District Court recently ordered Google Inc. to face a class suit filed against it by advertisers claiming that Google has essentially a monopoly on this market for small-to-mid-size advertisers.
However, the court denied the class action suit which tried to prove that Google monopolized the market for ad-buying tools for big advertisers, but considered this antitrust claim referring to small advertisers plausible.
The class-action litigation arises against the backdrop of Google’s ongoing fight in the courts with the Justice Department over whether the company is abusing its dominance in the search market on the internet.