Artists File Landmark Lawsuit Against AI Image Generators
A group of artists is taking Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to court, accusing the AI companies of using copyrighted artwork to train systems that threaten their livelihoods. The class-action suit joins a separate copyright battle launched by Getty Images.
A group of artists files a class-action lawsuit against the creators of AI image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, arguing that these companies use their copyrighted work to train algorithms that threaten their jobs. The plaintiffs claim that these tools make it trivially easy for users to knock off a specific artist's signature style, allowing anyone to generate countless imitations without compensating the original creators.
The legal action asserts that the machine learning systems infringe on the rights of millions of artists and seeks to establish a new legal precedent in the rapidly growing AI industry. Artist Karla Ortiz, one of the lead plaintiffs, states that the current lack of legal framework leaves creators vulnerable to deeply exploitative practices, prompting the group to take a stand to make AI fair and ethical.
This lawsuit is not the only legal challenge facing AI developers, as stock media giant Getty Images simultaneously sues Stability AI for unlawfully copying and processing millions of copyrighted images. Stability AI trains its algorithms on the massive LAION-5B dataset, which scrapes images from the internet, and investigators find that this dataset contains thousands of works from specific artists like Erin Hanson.