Stable Diffusion copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for AI

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  • And smaller companies might be locked out of the industry altogether.The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit describe Stable Diffusion as a “complex collage tool” that contains “compressed copies” of its training images.
  • When I asked the software to draw “Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonald's sign,” for example, it generated the picture you see above.Stable Diffusion can do this because it was trained on hundreds of millions of example images harvested from across the web.
  • Just as you can identify a point on the Earth’s surface based on its latitude and longitude, Stable Diffusion characterizes images based on their “coordinates” in the “picture space.” It then converts this latent representation into an image.
  • There are some strong arguments that copyright’s fair use doctrine allows Stability AI to use the images.
  • There’s a real possibility that the courts could decide that Stability AI violated copyright law on a massive scale.That would be a legal earthquake for this still-nascent industry.
  • Many others were not—and the world’s artists and photographers aren’t happy about it.In January, three visual artists filed a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, the startup that created Stable Diffusion.
Image generated by Stable Diffusion with the prompt Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonalds sign.12 with The AI software Stable Diffusion has a remarkable ability to turn text into images. When I as [+2994 chars]