Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, the artificial intelligences capable of generating images, will find themselves in court.
The two entities behind these AIs, Stability AI and Midjourney, are indeed the subject of a class action brought by a trio of artists. The latter accuse them of violating copyrights by using billions of images to train their systems.
AI on trial
For several weeks now, tech news has been full of these “artistic” achievements of artificial intelligence that have provoked the ire of human artists. And if they initially asked for a boycott of the images, today a new step has just been taken. The mode of operation of the AI is indeed finally attacked in justice.
Three artists, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, have just filed a complaint against Stability AI and Midjourney. The portfolio platform DeviantArt, which has developed its own AI tool DreamUp, is also under attack. In this case, the creators are supported by the firm Joseph Saveri and the lawyer Matthew Butterick, already on trial against Microsoft, OpenAI and GitHub in the case of the IA CoPilot.
The trio accuses the entities involved of violating the copyrights of ” several million artists on nearly 5 billion images used to feed artificial intelligence.
The legal framework needs to be clarified
It must be said that the legal framework is still vague around this technology. Artificial intelligences capable of generating images do not actually use artists’ illustrations in their productions, but extract mathematical representations of images presented to them. These are reused later to create “original” figures on request.
Except that it is then possible to trade in these productions, as shown by the upcoming release of a manga published thanks to Midjourney. For lawyer Matthew Butterick, the ability of these AIs to ” flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of violating images [les droits] will inflict permanent damage to art and artists in the marketplace “.
The fact remains that the contested parties also have arguments. In the United States, the creators of these artificial intelligences claim that the use of copyrighted material would be covered by the doctrine of “fair use” which can make it possible to reduce copyrights from time to time for the public interest. Will the courts provide a satisfactory answer?
Source : The Verge
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