AsianFin--Google has been hit with a new copyright lawsuit in California federal court by a group of visual artists who claimed the Google 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 said in the proposed class action filed Friday that Google is liable for misusing "billions" of copyrighted images, including theirs, to teach Imagen how to respond to human text prompts.

The case is one of many potential landmark lawsuits brought by copyright owners against tech companies including Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta over the data used to train their generative AI systems.