A group of visual artists has filed a new copyright lawsuit against Google in California federal court, alleging that Alphabet’s new tab unit used their work without permission to train Imagen, its artificial-intelligence powered image generator.
Photographer Jingna Zhang and cartoonists Sarah Andersen, Hope Larson, and Jessica Fink asserted in the proposed class-action filed on Friday that Google used “billions” of copyrighted images, including theirs, to teach Imagen how to respond to human text prompts.
This case adds to the growing number of landmark lawsuits brought by copyright owners against tech giants like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta over the data used to train their generative AI systems.
Google and the artists’ representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new lawsuit on Monday.
Zhang and Andersen are also part of an ongoing lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and others over the alleged misuse of their work to train AI image generators.
The lawsuit filed on Friday stated that Google utilized one of the same datasets to train Imagen that Stability and Midjourney used for their systems.
The artists are seeking unspecified monetary damages and requesting an order for Google to destroy its copies of their work.
The case is titled Zhang v. Google LLC, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 5:24-cv-02531.
