Artists sue AI art generators over copyright infringement

A group of artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McK­er­nan, and Karla Ortiz — have filed a class-action lawsuit against Midjourney and Stability AI, companies behind AI art tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and DeviantArt, which recently launched its own artificial intelligence art generator, DreamUp.

The suit alleges that these companies “violated the rights of millions of artists” by using billions of internet images to use train its AI art tool without the “consent of artists and without compensating any of those artists.” These companies “benefit commercially and profit richly from the use of copyrighted images,” the suit alleges. “The harm to artists is not hypothetical,” the suit says, noting that works created by generative AI art are “already sold on the internet, siphoning commissions from the artists themselves.”

These three artists are the plaintiffs. Their work was used in training these AI tools. Andersen is known for creating the popular webcomic. Sarah’s Scribbles. McK­er­nan is a full-time artist whose works have been featured in galleries and who makes illustrations for comics, books, and games. Ortiz, a concept artist/illustrator, has worked for clients such as Marvel Film Studios or Wizards of the Coast.

Matthew Butterick, an attorney, filed the suit with Joseph Saveri, a California-based law firm that specializes in class-action and antitrust law. The Stable Diffusion litigation blog describes Stable Diffusion, and generative AI like it, as “a parasite that, if allowed to proliferate, will cause irreparable harm to artists, now and in the future.”

This group seeks a jury trial as well as unspecified damages.

AI-generated artwork has gained prominence in the last year, when tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion became widely available. AI-generated artwork has been more popular, and artists are pushing back. AI art tools are trained with billions of images from the internet, and artists often don’t have a way of opting in or out. Stable Diffusion was, in fact, trained with LAION-5B. This database contains 5.85 billion text/image pairs from sources such as Flickr, DeviantArt and Wikimedia. Stable Diffusion, an AI art tool that can be used to create images is as simple as entering a few words. An image can be created in the exact style of an artist’s work.

Since then, artists have begun to share tools and resources that can help determine if their work has been scraped in order to use the dataset for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

It can be hard to tell if AI tools are violating copyright laws. Images within these massive databases, that these AI tools “learn” from, may be protected by fair use doctrine. As The Verge reported, it’s a complicated matter of evaluating both the “inputs” (the images scraped from these databases) and the “outputs” (the images that the AI art generators create), for copyright law violations.

In response to the suit, a Stability AI spokesperson told Polygon, “Please note that we take these matters seriously. Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.”

Polygon has reached Out to Matthew Butterick, DeviantArt, Midjourneyney and DeviantArt. They will be updating this Story when they reply.