Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd (3:23-cv-00201) District Court, N.D. California
tl;dr Artists sue #DeviantArt, #StabilityAI, and #Midjourney over purported #copyright violations inflicted by #StableDiffusion #AI and related tools.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@hewittlaw@mastodon.social/109789753621184612
The original complaint (¶¶ 80-81) has a nice cartoon of stable diffusion as a kind of interpolation, but since the cartoon uses a 2-D "space of all images" with but two images, basing your lawsuit on such a cartoon seems a bit naive and misleading.
The cartoon came from the left part of Figure 8 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11239 . It is not very large. Blink and you would miss it. But it lacks the context of what the computer knows, which is the discovered relations between images.
¶ 76 links to that paper but puts the date as Dec 2020 when there are actually two similar preprints of the paper by Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, and Pieter Abbeel [v2] dated 2020-12-16 and [v1] dated 2020-06-19. The published version is in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2020. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2020/hash/4c5bcfec8584af0d967f1ab10179ca4b-Abstract.html
The plaintiffs' lawyers have arranged for a late January media blitz of misinformation about the technology with a companion website that boosts the plaintiffs' story: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/
But there is what reads to me as a more mathematically-informed view suggesting that plaintiffs are using only reasoning by analogy with little foundation in what the computer is doing: http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/
There is no database of images. The rare toy example of overfitting ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188 ) does not mean an example of near-duplication proves that StableDiffusion is some form of lossy image compression.