The artists live (survived a motion to dismiss their claim) to see another day (continue pursuing their case against a group of image generation AI companies).

"The lawsuit, filed last year, revolves around the LAION data set, which was built using 5 billion images that were allegedly scraped from the internet and utilized by Stability and Runway to create Stable Diffusion," The Hollywood Reporter explains. The suit "implicated Midjourney, which trained its AI system using the model, as well as DeviantArt for using the model in DreamUp, an image generation tool."

Recently, the defendant companies have motioned to dismiss various key claims of the case, including a motion to dismiss DMCA claims, a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs' unjust enrichment and Copyright Act claims, Midjourney’s motion to dismiss Lanham Act claims, and DeviantArt’s motions to dismiss the breach of contract and breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing claims.

According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge William Orrick ruled this week that the 10 artists acting as plaintiffs in the case "plausibly argued that the companies violate their rights by illegally storing their works on their systems. Orrick also refused to dismiss related trademark-law claims, though he threw out others accusing the companies of unjust enrichment, breach of contract and breaking a separate U.S. copyright law."

Judge Orrick hinted as his decision earlier this year when, in a tentative ruling, he stated that the plaintiffs had plausibly argued that the defendants had "copied and stored their work on company servers and could be liable for using it without permission."

Authorial Claim

In a similar copyright-infringement case, a group of authors suing OpenAI for allegedly using their works to train its datasets without permission will be allowed access to the firm's training data for inspection, writes The Hollywood Reporter. They add that "under the agreement, the training datasets will be made available at OpenAI’s San Francisco office on a secured computer without internet or network access. Any person who’ll review the information will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, sign a visitor’s log and provide identification."

Verdict

The ruling by Judge Orrick continues the David versus Goliath narrative of the StabilityAI case, but the damage has already been done to artists. The question is, should the plantiffs win, what penalty will the Judge impose on these companies to protect future artists from further harm. Meanwhile, the concession by OpenAI to show the plantiffs their training data seems like a win on the surface, it remains a major question mark who among the legal team will be able to understand the complex code.