Artists file class-action lawsuit against AI image generator companies

The artists taking action -- Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz -- "seek to end this blatant and enormous infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work," according to the official text of the complaint filed to the court. Using tools like Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or the DreamUp generator on DeviantArt, people can type phrases to create artwork similar to living artists. Since the mainstream emergence of AI image synthesis in the last year, AI-generated artwork has been highly controversial among artists, sparking protests and culture wars on social media. Enlarge/ A selection of images generated by Stable Diffusion. Knowledge of how to render them came from scraped images on the web.