On the other hand, at least one suit was making headway as of 2024-08-14, about 2 months ago [0]. It seems like there must be some merit to GPs claim if this is moving forward. But again, I'm still trying to figure out where to stand.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/artists-claim-bi...
The remaining claim may not be a good claim, but it isn't completely laughable.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Ander... Order-on-Motions-to-Dismiss-8-12-2024.pdf
In October 2023, I largely granted the motions to dismiss brought by defendants Stability, Midjourney and DeviantArt. The only claim that survived was the direct infringement claim asserted against Stability, based on Stability’s alleged “creation and use of ‘Training Images’ scraped from the internet into the LAION datasets and then used to train Stable Diffusion.”
I think you could have grounds for saying that construction of LAION violates copyright which would be covered by this. It doesn't necessarily mean training on LAION is copyright violation.
None of this has been decided. It might be wrong.
The rest of the case was "Not even wrong"
The learning process is similar, and it isn't identical.
Humans and AI both have the intellectual capacity to violate copyright, but also human artists generally know what copyright is while image generators don't (even the LLMs which do understand copyright are easily fooled, and many of the users complain about them being "lobotomised" if they follow corporate policy rather than user instructions).
And while there's people like me who really did mean "public domain" or "MIT license" well before even GANs, it's also true that most people couldn't have given informed consent prior to knowing what these models could do.