Artists accuse Google of “massive copyright infringement” with Imagen AI

The controversy around AI image generators continues. Stability AI, OpenAI and Midjourney have all been sued for alleged copyright infringement over how they trained their models using images without artists' consent. Now Google can be added to the list. 

A group of artists has lodged a class action against Google in relation to its Imagen AI image generators, which the groups claims was trained on their works without permission.

The lawsuit filed in a California District Court argues that Imagen is an “infringing derivative work” though which Google has committed “massive copyright infringement” by reproducing their own original work multiple times because it was trained on the open-source  corpus LAION-400M. Also at issue is the use of their work to subsequently train Imagen 2 and the foundation model Gemini.

According to the lawsuit, "The intermediate copies of each copyrighted work that Google made during training of the Google LAION Models were substantially similar to that copyrighted work." The artists demand the destruction of all reproduced copies of their work and legal costs.

Several other lawsuits against AI image generators are still ongoing. Adobe continues to argue that it's Firefly AI model is commercially safe because its training data was taken from licensed Adobe Stock images.