The Midjourney and Stable Diffusion lawsuit that could change the future of AI  

For copyright infringement

Three artists, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, are suing the creators of AI tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement. Specifically, they claim that these organizations violated the rights of millions of artists by training their AI models with five billion images taken from the internet without the consent of their creators.

The lawyer for the three artists describes the case as “ a step in the right direction to make AI fair and ethical for everyone ”, stressing that the capabilities of AI tools like Stable Diffusion “ flood the market with an unlimited number of stolen images that cause permanent damage to the art market and to artists ”.

The popularity of AI art tools has skyrocketed and the artist community has reacted strongly. These tools are trained on billions of images collected from the internet, without the knowledge or consent of their creators, and then the tools can produce art that mimics the style of specific artists.

Whether these systems actually infringe copyright is a complicated question that will likely be answered in the courts.