Midjourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt published a response on April 18 to a group of artists who have accused them of widespread copyright infringement. The artists allege that the companies used their work to generate artificial intelligence systems without proper authorization.
The companies filed a motion in San Francisco federal court to dismiss a proposed class action brought by the artists. They argue that the AI-generated images are not the same as the artist's work, and that the lawsuit lacks specific information about the alleged misuse of the photos. In January, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz filed a lawsuit against the companies, claiming their rights were violated. The artists claim that their work was used to train the system without permission, and that the resulting AI-generated images created in their style also constitute copyright infringement.
In a Tuesday filing, deep-learning, text-to-image model artificial intelligence company Stability AI argued that artists "failed to identify an allegedly infringing output image, let alone one that was substantially similar to any of their copyrighted works." images.” Midjourney, an artificial intelligence company that generates images from natural language descriptions, said the suit also did not “identify any single plaintiff’s work” that was “believed to be used as training data.”
DeviantArt, an online community of artists that provides a service that enables users to generate images using Stability AI's Stable Diffusion system, supports the same arguments as Stability AI. Furthermore, it claims that it is not responsible for any alleged wrongdoing by AI companies. AI programs have the potential to infringe copyright by generating output similar to existing works. Under U.S. case law, copyright owners can determine that the output produced by an AI program infringes their copyright if the AI program has access to their work and the output is deemed "substantially similar."
Recent innovations in AI have raised new questions about how copyright law principles such as authorship, infringement, and fair use apply to content created or used by AI. Generative AI computer programs, such as Stability AI's Stable Diffusion program and Midjourney's program of the same name, generate new images, text, and other content or output in response to textual prompts or input from users. These generative AI programs are trained to generate such works, in part by exposing them to a wealth of existing works, such as text, photographs, paintings and other artwork.
