Artists File Class-Action Lawsuit Against Major AI Art Generators
A group of illustrators sues Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI, claiming the platforms illegally scrape artwork to train their algorithms.
A group of artists files a class-action lawsuit against the companies behind three major AI art generators: Midjourney, DeviantArt's DreamUp, and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. The plaintiffs argue that these platforms violate copyright and unfair competition laws by acting as 21st-century collage tools that exploit the rights of millions of artists.
The complaint centers on how these AI systems build their training datasets without obtaining consent or providing compensation to the original creators. The lawsuit highlights that the AI models rely heavily on the LAION-Aesthetics dataset, which reportedly contains millions of images scraped directly from user-generated content sites like DeviantArt, as well as stock photo and shopping platforms.
The artists assert that the AI tools use exact copies of their training images to generate new digital artwork that adds nothing fundamentally new to the original pieces. Furthermore, the lawsuit warns that this unlicensed mass production of AI-generated images substantially harms the market and earning potential for human illustrators.