Now artists sue AI image generation tools Stable Diffusion, Midjourney over copyright

The lawsuit alleges that these companies through the use of their products, “benefit commercially and profit richly from the use of copyrighted images.” The plaintiffs 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.”

The suit has been filed by Matthew Butterick who earlier also helped file a lawsuit against GitHub Copi­lot for its “unprece­dented open-source soft­ware piracy.” The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial and damage recovery, although the amount hasn’t been specified.

A blog has been put up, describing the litigation. The blog calls Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion “a par­a­site that, if allowed to pro­lif­er­ate, will cause irrepara­ble harm to artists, now and in the future.” It also tries to describe how diffusion – the process used by AI image tools to generate new images – works similarly to compression formats MP3 and JPEG, which rely on lossy compression.

“Dif­fu­sion is a way for an AI pro­gram to fig­ure out how to recon­struct a copy of the train­ing data through denois­ing. Because this is so, in copy­right terms it’s no dif­fer­ent than an MP3 or JPEG—a way of stor­ing a com­pressed copy of cer­tain dig­i­tal data,” the blog reads.

While the lawsuit doesn’t specify any amount in damages, the blog suggests that since Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion con­tains unau­tho­rized copies of mil­lions of images, the value of the misappropriation could be around $5 billion. The figure was arrived at by assuming nominal damages of $1 per image.

While proving that AI image generators are copyright infringement can be tricky, the wider ethical concerns around the technology are harder still to substantiate. It’s a hotly debated topic. On one hand, the technology has the potential to replace the professions of many artists, while on the other, it can be used by artists themselves to better express their ideas and story.

Stable Diffusion is currently facing another lawsuit filed by visual media company Getty Images, which has accused the AI tool of copyright violations. The suit alleges that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed” millions of images that were protected by copyright.