On August 6, 2024, Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois issued an order dismissing Brantley v. Prisma Labs, Inc., a proposed class action suit against the creator of the “Magic Avatar” AI app for lack of standing and lack of personal jurisdiction over the representative plaintiff Tyrone Brantley.
The “Magic Avatar” app, or Lensa, transforms selfie images into AI drawings by pulling from a database of images called LAION-5B. Brantley brought suit against creator Prisma Labs under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act for allegedly scraping his biometric data from that repository without his consent in order to develop and train Prisma Labs’ AI system. While Brantley acknowledged that he had never uploaded his own images to LAION-5B, he argued that based on his usage of social media and other websites that it was “virtually certain” the database contained images of himself and the other Illinois residents comprising the proposed class.
The court rejected this argument, determining that Brantley failed to allege a concrete and particularized injury that could give rise to standing because he could not plausibly allege that Prisma Labs had actually scraped his biometric data from the LAION-5B database. While Brantley did allege that LAION-5B contained images from almost every website, he did not allege that most photos (or even his own) from those websites were actually uploaded to the database during that period. The court explained that “[a]t most, [plaintiff’s] allegations are ‘consistent with’ the possibility that [his photos were scraped and contained in the LAION-5B dataset], but, again, where a complaint pleads facts that are ‘merely consistent with’ a defendant’s liability, it ‘stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of entitlement to relief.” Additionally, Judge Alonso determined that the court lacked personal jurisdiction over Prisma Labs because the company’s activities were not sufficiently targeted at the state of Illinois so as to establish the necessary level of minimum contacts.
For further information on Illinois Biometric Privacy Act and an amendment to the statute’s violation accrual, please see our recent blog post.