Thread: The Generation of Generative-AI Legal Battles Begins
First Posted: January 18th, 2023
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On Friday, the age of AI legal battles experienced an important milestone, with the 1st class-action copyright infringement lawsuit being filed against companies that are involved with OpenSource Generative AI art. Here's what you should know 🧵
- The class action lawsuit was filed against Stability AI (maker of stable diffusion), Midjourney, and DeviantArt (an online art community) for copyright infringement, violation of the DMCA, violation of statutory rights of publicity, Unfair Competition and declaratory relief.
- According to the complaint, Stability AI created Stable Diffusion by downloading or acquiring copyrighted images without permission and using them as training images.
- The lawsuit claims that when used to produce images, Stable Diffusion uses the training images to produce new images that are based entirely on the training images, and are thus derivative works of the particular images used.
- Based on this, the lawsuit claims that these resulting images compete in the marketplace with the original images, and harms the artists by not compensating them for their work.
- The lawsuit raises important questions surrounding the application intellectual property law and AI, most of which is uncharted territory (although there is some academic writing on the topic).
- Some key questions that may come up: Does AI-generated work constitute originality? how do we define this? Can we establish authorship if AI was involved? Is a trained AI's artwork considered transformative work or fair use? Can we apply the first sale doctrine? & more…
- As AI technology continues to advance, some experts are urging caution in its development and deployment. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said "we need to be careful" and cautioned to "not move fast and break things" when it comes to AI.
- In contrast to the past, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also seems to have adjusted his tune from urging "speed" to highlighting that "GPT-4 will launch only when they (OpenAI) can do it safely & responsibly"
- Regardless of what the final outcome is, I suspect this will be a landmark case and just the beginning of this new age.
🚨 Disclaimer: this isn't legal advice. Read the full class action complaint here: