A group of artists has sued three companies dedicated to digital art, such as Stability AI, DeviantArt y Midjourneywhich use the Stable Difussion tool, which they accuse of infringing copyright in the development of works of art created by artificial intelligence (AI).
Stability AI is responsible for the development of open-source AI-powered music and image generation systems, among whose achievements is Stable Difussion, which is used to generate high-quality digital images from a text description.
MidJourney, For its part, it is an AI program that also generates artistic images from a text, just as Dall-E and IMAGE work. For his part, DeviantArt It is presented as a platform for the exhibition and exhibition of works of art.
A group of artists from California (United States) has filed a lawsuit collective in which they denounce that these three brands have committed infringement of copyright in their artistic creations, as collected by CBR.
The applicants point out that these three marks use Stable Difussiona text-to-image machine learning model developed by Stability AI and based on the image bank LAION5-B –belonging to LAION–, which houses billions of royalty-free works of art.
In this sense, the plaintiffs allege that this database also integrates creations with copyright, so that these images would be used without their consent. In addition, these artists point out infringements of their publicity rights, counterfeiting and the violation of the Digital Age Copyright Act o Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
With this lawsuit, the artists are not only seeking compensation for the indiscriminate use of his worksbut also to establish a norm that regulates this type of image banks to avoid future problems while creating a system that limits the free use of these artistic resources.
“Unethical practices by AI companies now receive the scrutiny they deserve from the public, the media, legislators and, soon, the courts,” he commented in Twitter one of the signatories of this class action lawsuit, Karla Ortiz. Also included in this complaint are illustrators Sarah Andersen and Kelly McKernan.