Artists sue Stability AI and Midjourney over training their image-generation algorithms on their images

Three artists have filed a class-action lawsuit against the developers of image-generating AIs over alleged copyright violations. This is reported by The Register.

The case concerns Stability AI, Deviant Art and Midjourney. The plaintiffs allege that the developers used protected images to train their algorithms.

“Stable Diffusion contains unauthorized copies of millions — and possibly billions — of images protected by copyright. They were made without the knowledge or consent of the artists,” said attorney Matthew Butterick.

In August 2022, Stability AI released the text-to-image tool Stable Diffusion. It was trained on a pair of “image-caption” pairs sourced from the internet. The tool stores compressed copies of training data and uses them to recombine into a new “collage” based on existing images created by people.

According to Butterick, the resemblance between the final images and the training data does not matter, because they compete with the originals in the market.

“At a minimum, Stable Diffusion’s ability to flood the market with an almost unlimited number of drawings infringing copyright will inflict irreparable damage on the art market and on artists,” he said.

The paid app DreamUp, developed by DeviantArt, was also built using Stable Diffusion. Midjourney, in turn, offers a text-to-image generator trained on pictures downloaded from the internet.

The three plaintiffs include artists Sara Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Carla Ortiz. They seek damages and injunctions on behalf of all artists harmed by Stable Diffusion.

“People cannot help bringing their humanity to art. Art is deeply personal, and AI has just stripped humanity from it, reducing a lifetime of work to an algorithm,” Andersen said.

McKernan said that her name had been used at least 12,000 times to generate images in Midjourney. According to the artist, she has earned nothing from it.

A reminder that my name has been used and profited from at a MINIMUM of 12k times. These are just the publicly available results. Many have private servers they pay to keep. What if I had been paid for every instance? That’s life changing money for a single mom. This isn’t right. pic.twitter.com/6wvnnE4NRO

— Kelly McKernan (@Kelly_McKernan) January 15, 2023

“For ‘AI artists’ profiting from my name, share a portion of this wealth. I need to pay the bills and rent, buy groceries and support my child […]. I am a real human artist barely making ends meet, and your actions have real consequences,” McKernan said.

Despite growing criticism of AI generators from artists, many people advocate for minimal regulation of the algorithms.

A website opposing the suit appeared online. Anonymous authors calling themselves “tech enthusiasts” posted a response to Butterick’s filing. It states that “creators’ rights are not unlimited”, and that art must keep pace with time and new technologies.

Other users warned that major artists could limit access to the tool for less-established artists.

This is not Butterick’s first case in his career related to copyright and AI. Earlier he joined a team that filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot for alleged “unprecedented piracy of open-source software”.

In December 2022, the author of a book created with the help of AI faced a wave of criticism and death threats.

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