> The three artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — immediately ran into problems as two of them — McKernan and Ortiz — did not register their works with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Two of them got bounced, Anderson remains.
> Judge Orrick writes that it is “unclear” as to whether Stable Diffusion holds “compressed copies” of the images and points to the defense’s argument that the training dataset, which contains five billion images, can “not possibly be compressed into an active program.”
Once again, regulation that's needed is complicated by the fact that people in power do not understand how this shit works.
However:
> The judge has offered the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend and clarify their theory as to how Stable Diffusion operates its training data.
And:
> However, the judge allowed Andersen’s complaint that her 16 copyrighted works were used without her authorization to move forward.
So the case is still developing.
However, this is frustrating:
> The problem for the artists is that the training data for these programs is a black box. Outside of LAION, very little is known about what exactly went into training AI image generators but it is widely assumed that the companies did an almighty scrape of images on the internet which included taking copyrighted and copyrightable pictures.
I'm not sure if the publication stated "widely assumed" here because of legal reasons or because the author doesn't understand this either, but the entire crux of Anderson's case here is that if you include the proper prompts, you get comics out of these generators that strongly resemble hers, in both style and content, which are copywritten. That an generator can do that basically requires that a good amount, and I mean a LOT of her comics were pushed into the training data, and not only that, but were tagged explicitly as her work. Given how much of LAION is scraped from social media, this is not surprising.
In order for the generator to know what Sarah Anderson's style looks like, her comics must be in the data set. Period, paragraph.