Incident replay · what actually happened
Stable Diffusion / LAION-5B
Date
ongoing, 2023+
Loss
ongoing
Andersen et al. v. Stability AI Ltd. (N.D. Cal. 2023, 23-cv-00201)
Getty Images (US), Inc. v. Stability AI, Inc. (D. Del. 2023)
LAION-5B dataset paper (Schuhmann et al. 2022, NeurIPS)
T
0.0s / 22.0s
pivot @ 14.0s
verifier REFUTES at T = 14.0sactual deploy 2021–2022
Actual reality
no instrumentation- DEPLOY2021–2022
LAION-5B assembled from Common Crawl WARCs; ~5.85B image-text pairs, no per-pair licence verification
- DEPLOYAug 2022
Stable Diffusion 1.x trained on LAION-5B subset, weights released publicly
- SYMPTOMJan 2023
First symptoms — researchers extract verbatim training images from model outputs (Carlini et al. 2023)
- ALARMJan 2023
Andersen et al. file class action; Getty Images files separately weeks later
- WIRE2023–2024
DMCA takedowns issued for shards; takedown set ≠ removed-from-shards set; rebuild ambiguity
- LOSSongoing
Discovery proceeds in both suits; $200M+ in legal exposure; model retraining liability open-ended
Loading counterfactual timeline…
The customer rule that would have caught it
copyrighted-text !-> training_corpus without licence_flag
Three lines. Open-ended liability.