Artists, Writer Suing Google Agree to Merge AI Copyright Cases

Artists accusing Google LLC of copyright infringement by using their work to train a text-to-image AI model agreed with the tech giant that a judge should merge the case with another proposed class action in California federal court.

Photographer Jingna Zhang and cartoonists Hope Larson, Jessica Fink, and Sarah Andersen joined with Google and investigative journalist Jill Leovy—who filed her own copyright suit against Google—to propose combining the two cases, in an Oct. 25 joint filing in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The proposed order followed Google’s Oct. 9 motion to consolidate ...