Put in a cue like “a chocolate bar riding a bicycle in the style of Picasso,” and artificial intelligence technologies including DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can generate a visual for you in seconds. They do this by combining components from the enormous digital collections of photos and artwork that are accessible from all over the internet and on which they have received training.
Are the A.I. tools violating the creators’ copyrights in the process, though? Two new cases centre around that issue.
The creator of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, was sued last week, according to a statement made by Seattle-based Getty Images. According to Getty, the has “[decided] to ignore potential licencing choices and long-standing legal protections in pursuit of their stand-alone commercial goals” and has allegedly duplicated millions of its photographs.
According to Blake Brittain of Reuters, Stability AI was also listed as a defendant in a class action lawsuit brought by three visual artists on behalf of the visual arts community in a US federal court in San Francisco. Ai picture generators “abuse the rights of millions of artists,” they claim, naming Midjourney and DeviantArt as defendants. DeviantArt is an online gallery that recently debuted its own AI tool.
In both claims, it is claimed that A.I. image generators unjustly plunder artists by utilising their creations without giving them credit or compensation by scanning the web for photos.
The class action lawsuit claims that “the injury to artists is not hypothetical” because “pieces generated by A.I. Image Products ‘in the manner’ of a certain artist are currently sold on the internet, syphoning commissions from the artists themselves. Before their professions are eliminated by a computer programme wholly run by human labour, the plaintiffs “want to end this blatant and huge infringement of their rights.”
The majority of image-generation services, such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Steady Diffusion, charge a price.
A spokeswoman for Stability AI responded to the artists’ lawsuit by stating that the firm takes “these things seriously” and that “anyone who believes that this isn’t fair usage does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law,” according to Reuters. Before the complaints were brought, Midjourney CEO David Holz discussed the method behind his image-generating service with the Associated Press in December. He compared it to human creativity, which frequently involves taking inspiration from other artists.
“Can someone look at someone else’s photo and take inspiration from it to create a picture that looks similar?” stated Holz. “Clearly, it’s acceptable for people, and if it weren’t, the entire professional the non-professional sector of the arts business. It’s kind of the same thing, and if the images turn out differently, it seems like it’s okay, to the extent that artificial intelligences are learning similarly to people.
But other people share the plaintiffs’ worries. A.I. photo app Lensa gained popularity in December for its new Magic Avatars feature, which used user-uploaded selfies to create a variety of artistic renditions. The artistic community expressed concern and criticism about the feature, particularly because some Lensa photos showed distorted copies of what might have once been artists’ signatures.
Matthew Butterick, an attorney representing the class action plaintiffs, filed a second lawsuit against GitHub Pilot last year for engaging in “unprecedented open-source software piracy.”
In a blog post, he notes that “since then, we’ve heard from people all over the world—especially writers, artists, programmers, and other creators—who are concerned about A.I. systems being trained on massive volumes of copyrighted content without consent, no credit, and no compensation.”
