AI companies can’t generate defense against copyright claims

It’s the damnedest thing. Here, you have a groundbreaking new technology, Artificial Intelligence, the wave of the future. No more art because the computer can do it. That sort of thing. All it needs is a little push from artists—say 5 billion images scrapped from at least 4,700 artists—and it can make it so we won’t need to paint anymore. Unfortunately, for some reason, they refuse to allow their brilliant, infallible supercomputer to write an argument that can get around pesky copyright law.

Yesterday, a judge ruled that AI companies Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway AI, and, for some humiliating reason, DeviantArt could be required to follow copyright law. Per The Hollywood Reporter, U.S. District Judge William Orrick advanced the copyright infringement and trademark claims against the companies—yes, even ones that are mostly innocent hosts of Pregnant Luigi jpegs. The judge believes there’s good reason to think that Stable Diffusion, the AI tool at the center of all this, “creates copyright infringement” because it “was created to facilitate that infringement by design.” What’s next? Do we need a license to generate images of Pope Francis certifiably dripping in Balenciaga or a rat with a monster hog?

Created by Stability AI, Stable Diffusion is an image generation tool “built to a significant extent on copyrighted works.” According to the initial lawsuit, Stable Diffusion runs off the LAION dataset, which is comprised of billions of artworks made by artists for this project. Just kidding. They allegedly scrapped five billion images from the internet and compressed them to create its output. If a company offers the tool to users, as DeviantArt did through their DreamUp generator, that company could also be implicated. DeviantArt, which until now drove traffic through a hardworking, unpaid workforce of users willing to put their Shadow the Hedgehog fanart on the website for free, turned its back on the millions of loyal deviants who have kept the site alive since 2000. DeviantArt didn’t create the tools, but if they can get sued simply for offering AI to users, anyone can. Some people skip through the “You wouldn’t steal DVD” PSA on DVDs, and it shows.

It seems evident to the judge that Stable Diffusion works as designed. If only a machine could generate a defense that could tell these companies that using other copyrighted images without the artist’s permission is illegal. Alas, no such machine exists.