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 artwork without consent to train AI algorithms. The lawsuit claims these tools act as unlawful collage tools that harm the market for original artists.
A group of artists files a class-action lawsuit against the companies behind three major AI art generators: Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI. The plaintiffs accuse these platforms of violating copyright and unfair competition laws by scraping and using their artwork without consent or compensation to build algorithmic training sets.
The legal complaint focuses heavily on the LAION-Aesthetics dataset, which Stability AI commissions to train its Stable Diffusion model. The artists point to research showing that nearly half of this dataset consists of images scraped from stock photo sites, shopping platforms, and user-generated content hubs like DeviantArt, where an estimated 3.3 million images originate.
The lawsuit characterizes these AI image platforms as 21st-century collage tools that produce derivative works without adding anything new. The illustrators argue that the widespread availability of these generated images substantially damages the market and earning potential for human artists whose original works fuel the AI systems.