Stable distribution of AI art tools and target Midjourney with copyright lawsuits

A trio of artists at Stability AI and Midjourney, creators of AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and artist portfolio platform DeviantArt recently filed a lawsuit against DreamUp, its own AI art generator.

The artists – Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan and Carla Ortiz – said the organizations had violated the rights of “millions of artists” by training their AI tools on five billion images “without the consent of the original artists”.

The lawsuit was filed by attorney and typographer Matthew Buterick with the Joseph Savery Law Firm on antitrust and class action matters. Butterick and Saveri are currently suing Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI in a similar lawsuit involving Copilot, an AI programming model trained on lines of code collected from the web.

as if A blog post announcing the lawsuit, Butterick described it as “another step toward making AI fair and ethical for everyone.” AI art tools like Stable Diffusion “have the potential to flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of infringing images, causing permanent damage to the market for art and artists,” he said.

As AI art tools have exploded in popularity over the past year, the art community has responded strongly. While some say these tools can be helpful, like previous generations of software like Photoshop and Illustrator, many are opposed to putting too much extra work into training these money-making systems. Generative AI art models are trained on billions of images collected from the web, generally without the knowledge and consent of users. AI art generators can be used to create works of art It repeats the style of certain artists.

Whether or not these systems violate copyright law is a complex question that experts say needs to be settled in court. The makers of AI Art Tools generally argue that training on this software’s copyrighted material is covered (at least in the US) by Fair use doctrine. But issues involving fair use still need to be argued and there are many complexities when it comes to AI generators. The location of the organizations behind these tools (such as the EU and the US as they have secretly different legal allowances for data scraping) and the purpose of these institutions (Stable Diffusion e.g. LAION datasetGerman-based non-profit research shows that non-profit organizations can be treated more liberally than regular companies in terms of fair use.

The lawsuit, launched by the law firm of Butterick and Joseph Savery, has also been criticized. Contains technical errors. For example, the lawsuit claims AI art models “store compressed copies [copyright-protected] train images and then “recombine”; As a “21st century collage tool[s]He said. However, AI art models do not store images at all, but represent mathematical models collected from these images. The software does not stitch images together in the form of a collage, but creates images from scratch based on these mathematical expressions.

Verge He reached out to Matthew Butterick, Serenity AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for feedback. We’ll update the story if we hear back.