The lawsuit claims that Stable Diffusion trained on billions of images pulled from the internet without consent, including images owned by this trio of artists. Whether products and services powered by generative AI products can operate, a Savari press release He says“The foreseeable result is that they will replace the very artists whose stolen works feed these AI products with which they compete.”
Ortiz, a conceptual illustrator who has worked on videogames such as world of warcraft and Hollywood blockbusters like jurassic world Y strange doctor, told BuzzFeed News that making art was “her happy place.” She added that she is obsessed with technology.
In early 2021, Ortiz stumbled upon DiscoDiffusion, an older text-to-image AI generator, and discovered that the tool was capable of generating images in his style and in the styles of other artists he knew. “He felt invasive in a way he had never experienced,” he said.
Concerned, she began organizing town hall meetings on the subject with the Conceptual Artists Association, an organization for artists in the entertainment industry for which she sits on the board of directors. She also connected with machine learning experts to better understand the technology and reached out to other artists. In November she saw News of the co-pilot suit and contacted Saveri to present his own. The firm agreed.
In December, Ortiz saw McKernan’s viral tweet about generative AI and an opinion piece that Andersen wrote in the New York Times about how members of the alt-right on 4chan had used generative artificial intelligence tools to generate pro-Nazi comics in their style. She reached out to both of them immediately and they both agreed to be part of the lawsuit with her.
“Artists have a right to say what happens to their hard-earned works,” Andersen told BuzzFeed News via email. “It is clear from the way the AI generators were implemented that artists, our wishes or our rights were never considered, and this is our only option to be heard.”
The Association of Conceptual Artists is currently fundraising hire a lobbyist to protect creators against the march of generative AI.
“It’s disgusting to me,” Ortiz said of AI-powered apps and services that instantly spit out art based on a text message. “They trained these models with our work. They took away our right to decide if we wanted to be a part of this or not.”
