A trio of artists have launched a lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney, creators of the AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and artist portfolio platform DeviantArt, which recently created its own AI art generator, DreamUp.
The artists, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, allege that these organizations have infringed the rights of “millions of artists” by training their artificial intelligence tools on five billion images pulled from the web “without the artists’ consent.” originals”.
The lawsuit has been brought by attorney and typographer Matthew Butterick along with the Joseph Saveri law firm, which specializes in class action and antitrust cases. Butterick and Saveri are currently suing Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI in a similar case involving the CoPilot AI programming model, which is trained on lines of code collected from the web.
in a blog post announcing the lawsuit, Butterick describes the case as “another step in making AI fair and ethical for everyone.” He says the ability of AI art tools like Stable Diffusion to “flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of infringing images will inflict permanent damage on the art market and artists.”
As AI art tools have become increasingly popular over the past year, the art community has reacted strongly. While some say these tools can be useful, just like past generations of software like Photoshop and Illustrator, many more oppose using their work to train these money-making systems. AI generative art models are trained on billions of images collected from the web, often without the creators’ knowledge or consent. AI art generators can be used to create artwork that replicates the style of specific artists.
Whether or not these systems infringe copyright law is a complicated question that experts say will need to be resolved in court. The creators of AI art tools generally argue that the training of this software on copyrighted data is covered (at least in the US) by fair use doctrine. But cases involving fair use have yet to be litigated, and there are numerous complicating factors when it comes to AI art generators. These include the location of the organizations behind these tools (as the EU and US have slightly different legal permissions for data scraping) and the purpose of these institutions (Stable Diffusion, for example, is trained in the LAION data setcreated by a non-profit research organization based in Germany, and non-profit organizations may receive more favorable treatment than regular companies in cases of fair use).
The lawsuit brought by Butterick and the law firm Joseph Saveri has has also been criticized for containing technical inaccuracies. For example, the lawsuit claims that AI art models “store compressed copies of [copyright-protected] training images” to later “recombine” them; functioning as “21st century collage tool[s].” However, AI art models do not store images at all, but rather mathematical representations of patterns collected from these images. The software also doesn’t collage image fragments together, instead creating images from scratch based on these mathematical representations.
the edge has reached out to Matthew Butterick, Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for comment. We will update the story if we get a response.
