On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court made a first-instance judgement on the first copyright case involving an AI-generated image. The court found that the defendant's behaviour constituted an infringement, so he must make a public apology and pay 500 yuan in compensation.

According to the judgment released by the Court, the plaintiff, Mr. Li, a Chinese social media Xiaohongshu account owner, used Stable Diffusion (an artificial intelligence) to generate an image and then posted the image on the Xiaohongshu platform. The defendant, Mr. Liu, used this image to accompany the article in Baijiahao, a blog-style platform.

The plaintiff filed an infringement lawsuit against the defendant in China’s Beijing Internet Court, demanding a public apology and 500 yuan compensation. The plaintiff claimed that the defendant violated rights of attribution and information network dissemination rights.
The Beijing Internet Court made a judgement in favor of the plaintiff. The Court reasoned that the plaintiff made the relevant setting of the AI model based on his needs and selected the figure in the image. The disputed image reflects the plaintiff’s personalized expression. Therefore, the plaintiff is the author of the image and owns its copyright.

The Court then determined that the disputed AI-generated image had “originality” and reflected a human’s original intellectual investment and should be identified as a work and protected by copyright law.