Artists File Class-Action Lawsuit Against AI Art Generators Over Copyright
A group of illustrators is suing Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI for allegedly scraping their artwork to train AI algorithms without consent or compensation. The lawsuit claims these tools act as unlawful collage tools that harm the market for original art.
A group of artists files a class-action lawsuit against Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI, accusing the companies of copyright infringement and unfair competition. The plaintiffs claim these AI art generators act as 21st-century collage tools that illegally use millions of artworks to train their algorithms without asking for permission or offering payment.
The legal complaint focuses heavily on the LAION-Aesthetics dataset, which Stability AI commissions to train its Stable Diffusion model. The artists point out that this massive dataset contains millions of images scraped directly from artist platforms like DeviantArt, as well as from stock photo and shopping sites, with an estimated 3.3 million images sourced directly from DeviantArt alone.
The plaintiffs argue that the AI platforms use exact copies of their training images to generate new digital art that adds nothing truly original to the market. They warn that this unauthorized use substantially harms the livelihoods of human artists by flooding the market with competing derivative works.