AI art generators receive copyright lawsuit

Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DeviantArt's DreamUp, three of the most popular AI art generators right now, have recently received a copyright lawsuit. With the help of a US-based law firm called Joseph Saveri, three artists named Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz have filed a lawsuit against the creators of these AI art generators.

According to the lawsuit, these art generators use the collage tool called Stable Diffusion, which remixes existing images for training data. As such, the database these AI generators use contains "unauthorised copies of millions - and possibly billions - of copyrighted images". As per the claims by the three artists, the copies of these copyrighted images were made without the consent or knowledge of the artists of the original images. 

The lawsuit was filed by Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, known for litigation and antitrust cases. As per The Verge, Butterick and Joseph Saveri are also currently pursuing a copyright claim against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI for using CoPilot - an AI-based programming tool that trains itself by collecting billions of lines of codes from the internet. 

In the filing, Butterick claims that the lawsuit challenge is being made because "AI needs to be fair and ethical for everyone". Among the artists who are suing the AI art generators, Sarah Anderson, known for her popular comic series Sarah's Scribbles, has previously written about AI manipulating art on The New York Times. 

As per the lawsuit, if a minimal damage of $1 is counted per image, the total value of this unwarranted copyright strike would cost around $5 billion. While the lawsuit does suggest that the AI-generated images may or may not "outwardly resemble" the training images, it cannot be denied that the original images the AI uses to train are taken from existing artists. As such, such practices are harming the livelihood of artists and permanently damaging the art market by flooding it with infringed images - claims the lawsuit.

Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt, creators of these AI art generators, has not yet responded to such copyright claims. It is currently unknown when this lawsuit will be taken up in court.