Artists sue Google for using their works in the training of an AI

Once again, Google finds itself in court. A group of American artists have joined forces to denounce that their work has been used by the company to train its AI-powered image generator.

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The affected artists are photographer Jingna Zhang and illustrators Sarah Andersen, Hope Larson, and Jessika Fink, who filed the lawsuit last Friday according to Reuters. The group denounced the improper use of billions of copyrighted images to train Google’s Imagen generator.

Google first announced the existence of Imagen through a research document. In this document, Google admits that Imagen had been trained with the LAION-400M public database of images, which in turn contains copyrighted material from these artists.

Zhang and Andersen are also involved in another similar case against Stability AI and Midjourney, among others. In addition, the lawsuit filed against Google also specifies that both Stability and Midjourney used the same databases to train their systems.

A Google spokesperson, José Castañeda, stated last Monday that “our AI models are primarily trained with publicly available information on the Internet […] US legislation has long supported the use of public information in new and beneficial ways, and we will refute these allegations in court“.

For the artists’ lawyers, Joseph Saveri and Mathew Butterick, this is “another example of a multi-billion dollar technology company deciding to train a commercial AI product with copyrighted works of others without consent, credit, or compensation“. The artists have requested the court for compensation for damages, as well as to force Google to destroy their works within the systems.

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