A U.S. federal judge, William Orrick, has ruled that a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of visual artists against AI companies, including Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI, can proceed. The artists allege that these companies used their copyrighted works without permission to train AI image generation systems. The court denied the defendants' motions to dismiss the claims, allowing the case to move forward to the discovery phase. This legal battle could have significant implications for the future of AI art and copyright law. The court will also allow artists to proceed with discovery on claims that AI image generators relying on Stable Diffusion violate both the Copyright Act and the Lanham Act.