A group of visual artists has filed a copyright lawsuit against Google in a federal court in California, Reuters reports. The plaintiffs, including photographer Jingna Zhang and cartoonists Sarah Andersen, Hope Larson, and Jessica Fink, assert in their class action suit that Google’s Imagen, an AI-driven image generator, was trained using their copyrighted works without authorization.
What’s happening?
The lawsuit, initiated on Friday, accuses Google of using “billions” of copyrighted images unlawfully to enable Imagen to generate images based on text prompts. This legal action joins a series of significant lawsuits that target major tech entities like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta, concerning the use of copyrighted content in training their AI technologies.
“Our AI models are trained primarily on publicly available information on the internet. American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways, and we will refute these claims in court,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda stated.
Attorneys Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick remarked that the case was “another instance of a multi-trillion-dollar tech company choosing to train a commercial AI product on the copyrighted works of others without consent, credit, or compensation.”
Zhang and Andersen are concurrently participating in a related lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and additional parties, accusing them of similar unauthorized use of their creative works for AI image generator training. The recent filing alleges that Google, like Stability and Midjourney, employed one of the same datasets for training its Imagen system.
The artists have requested the court to award them an unspecified sum in monetary damages and to issue an injunction requiring Google to eliminate any copies of their works it possesses.
Featured image credit: Alex Dudar/Unsplash
