Artists sue Stability AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney for copyright infringement

Three artists have filed a class action lawsuit against Stability AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney, which use the artificial intelligence text tool Stable Diffusion to create images. By doing so, these companies are violating copyright laws, the lawsuit says.

The artists report that Stable Diffusion contains millions or billions of copies of copyrighted images. They say the images were created without the creators' knowledge or consent to train artificial intelligence.

On behalf of three wonderful artist plaintiffs, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz, they have filed a class action lawsuit against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney for using Stable Diffusion, a 21st-century collage tool that aggregates copyrighted work by millions of artists used as training data, said attorney Matthew Butte.

On behalf of all the artists affected by the Stable Diffusion algorithm, the plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief and damages. The amount of compensation is not known. The lawsuit also estimates that if a nominal $1 compensation is required for each photo, the amount of compensation would be at least $5 billion.

“People put their humanity into art because art is deeply personal. Artificial intelligence just took the humanity out of it, turning my life's work into an algorithm,” complained one of the plaintiffs, Sarah Andersen, of the webcomic Sarah's Scribbles.

Stable Diffusion Reaction

In 2022 Stable Diffusion's management responded by saying that the creators' rights are not unlimited, and everything has to keep up with the times and new technologies. The company also accused plaintiffs' lawyer Matthew Butterick of hypocrisy, saying he used images from their research without compensation or consent, though he did provide a link to the source.

Earlier, Stability AI announced that it would allow artists to remove their work from the data used to train Stable Diffusion 3.0.

Adobe announced that it would sell images created by neural networks along with all other images, adding that these images would be specially labeled.

In 2022 Summer, Midjourney's image won an award at the Colorado Fine Arts Competition, winning in the digital art category. Artists and enthusiasts blamed the image maker for hastening the demise of the creative professions.