In January, US artists Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a copyright infringement complaint against Stable diffusion, Midjourney and DreamUp (three of the most popular art generators) for using billions of copyrighted images for training itself without the consent or knowledge of the artists of the original images.
While this was happening, Stock photo provider Getty images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI (the company which created Stable Diffusion, an AI-based system for generating images from text inputs) for copying several of its photos without a license and using them to train the software to generate more accurate depictions based on user prompts.
“While copyright can only be claimed on tangible work and not ‘style’, in these cases what the creators are trying to convey is that their work is being ‘copied’ without consent to generate more similar images. That’s another way to sue these companies over violation of their Intellectual Property rights,”…
