Artists File Class-Action Copyright Lawsuit Against Major AI Art Generators
A group of illustrators is suing Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI for allegedly scraping their copyrighted artwork to train AI algorithms without consent.
A group of artists files a class-action lawsuit against Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI, claiming the companies violate copyright and unfair competition laws. The plaintiffs argue that these text-to-image platforms act as 21st-century collage tools that unlawfully use millions of artworks to train their algorithms without permission or compensation.
The complaint focuses heavily on the LAION-Aesthetics dataset, which Stability AI commissions to train its Stable Diffusion model. The artists point to a study showing that nearly half of this dataset consists of images scraped from stock photo sites, shopping platforms, and user-generated content sites like DeviantArt, which reportedly contributes millions of images to the pool.
The lawsuit asserts that the AI generators produce images derived exclusively from the original training artworks without adding anything new. Plaintiffs warn that this unauthorized use substantially harms the market for human artists, as the AI tools flood the market with competing digital images built directly from their stolen labor.