TECH NEWS – The Alphabet subsidiary is being taken to court because artists did not allow Google to train its artificial intelligence, Imagen, with their artwork.

There is not much regulation on training artificial intelligence with artists’ work, which is perhaps why Google thought it could safely train its model Imagen without restrictions. The company was wrong, as some artists are banding together to file a lawsuit against Google, but it is still early days and both sides will have to speak in court before a verdict is reached, and since the tech company is not short of money, it can probably afford better lawyers, so there is a chance they will get away with it.

Who was behind the lawsuit? A number of cartoonists (Sarah Andersen, Hope Larson, Jessica Fink) and a photographer (Jingna Thang) filed the lawsuit on Friday, Reuters reports. According to them, Google used billions of copyrighted images to train Imagen, some of which were created by these four people. It is not yet known how much compensation they are seeking, but they expect Google to destroy all copies of their images, but what are the chances of that?

There are a number of imaging companies and MidJourney, for example, that are being investigated, but we have no information on them. In all cases, the goal is usually to prevent the use of the creator’s images, but it is difficult to be clear about copyright. Google claims that the images are free to use, which is true, but it is not clear whether the image-generating programs have access to all the images or only a small part of them. It is understandable, however, that artists are banding together, because they have not been practicing for years to get companies to jump off their backs with their own AI models.

For this reason, it is legitimate to file such lawsuits, but it is questionable how much of the outcome will be in favor of the artists.

Source: WCCFTech, Reuters