Artists Take Legal Action Against AI Companies for Unauthorized Use of Their Art

Kelly McKernan creates bold and vibrant acrylic and watercolor paintings that frequently showcase feminine figures depicted in vivid shades of green, blue, pink, and purple. According to the artist, her style can be described as “surreal and ethereal,” exploring the challenges encountered throughout the human experience.

The word “human” has a special resonance for McKernan these days. While making a living as a visual artist has always been a challenge—and the pandemic made it worse—McKernan now sees an existential threat in a medium that is clearly not human: artificial intelligence.

It’s been about a year since McKernan, who goes by the pronoun they, started noticing online photos eerily reminiscent of their own distinctive style, apparently created by feeding their names into an AI engine.

Nashville-based McKernan, 37, who creates both fine art and digital illustrations, soon learned that companies were feeding art into AI systems used to “train” image generators — something that used to sound like a weird sci-fi movie, but is now a threat. livelihood of artists worldwide.

“People tagged me on Twitter and I was like, ‘Hey, this makes me uncomfortable. I did not give my permission for my name or my work to be used in this way,” the artist said in a recent interview, their bright teal hair reflecting their artwork. “I even reached out to some of these companies to say, ‘Hey, little artist over here, I know you’re not thinking about me at all, but it would be really cool if you didn’t use my work like that.’ And crickets, nothing.”

McKernan is now one of three artists seeking to protect their copyrights and careers by suing the makers of artificial intelligence tools that can create new images on command.

The case awaits a decision from a federal judge in San Francisco, who has expressed doubts about whether AI companies are violating copyrights by analyzing billions of images and spitting out something else.

“We’re David against Goliath here,” McKernan says. “At the end of the day, someone is going to benefit from my work. I had rent due yesterday and I’m $200 short. That’s how desperate things are right now. And it just doesn’t feel right.”

The lawsuit may serve as an early indication of how difficult it will be for all kinds of creators – Hollywood actors. authors. musicians and computer programmers—to prevent AI developers from profiting from what humans do.

McKernan and fellow artists Karla Ortiz and Sarah Andersen filed a lawsuit in January on behalf of others like them against Stability AI, the London-based maker of the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. Another popular image generator, Midjourney, and online gallery DeviantArt were also mentioned in the complaint.

The lawsuit alleges that AI image generators infringe on the rights of millions of artists by ingesting vast amounts of digital images and then producing derivative works that compete with the originals.

Artists say they’re not inherently against AI, but they don’t want to be exploited by it. They are seeking class-action damages and an injunction to stop the companies from exploiting the artwork without permission.

Stability AI declined to comment. In the court filing, the company said it creates “completely new and unique images” using simple word prompts, and that its images do not or rarely resemble images found in training data.

“Stability AI enables creation; it is not infringing copyright,” it said.

Midjourney and DeviantArt did not return emailed requests for comment.

Much of the sudden proliferation of image generators can be traced to a single, huge research database known as the Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, or LAION, run by a professor in Hamburg, Germany.

Teacher Christoph Schuhmann said he has no regrets about the nonprofit project, which is not a defendant in the lawsuit and has largely avoided copyright challenges by creating a directory of links to publicly available images without storing them. But the teacher said she understands why artists are concerned.

“In a few years, everyone can create anything – video, images, text. Whatever you can describe, you can create it in such a way that no human can tell the difference between content created by artificial intelligence and content created by a professional human,” Schuhmann said in an interview.

The idea that such development is inevitable — that it’s essentially the future — was central to a US Senate hearing in July, where Ben Brooks, director of public policy at Stability AI, acknowledged that artists aren’t being paid for their work. pictures.

“There is no arrangement,” Brooks said, when Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, asked Ortiz if he had ever been compensated by AI makers.

“I’ve never been asked. I’ve never been reimbursed. I’ve never been compensated a penny, and that’s pretty much all my work, personal and commercial, Senator,” he replied.

You could hear the rage in the voice of San Francisco’s 37-year-old Ortiz, a concept artist and illustrator for the entertainment industry. His work has been used in films such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” “Loki,” “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” “Jurassic World” and “Doctor Strange,” the latter of which he was responsible for designing Doctor Strange’s costume.

“We’re kind of blue-collar workers in the art world,” Ortiz said in an interview. “We offer visual material for movies or games. We’re the first people to take a stab at what does the visual look like? And it provides a blueprint for the rest of the production.”

But it’s easy to see how AI-generated images can compete, Ortiz says. And it’s not just a hypothetical possibility. He said that he had personally participated in several productions where artificial intelligence images were used.

“It’s almost a billion dollar industry overnight. They just took our work, and suddenly we see our names being used thousands, even hundreds of thousands of times.”

In an at least temporary victory for human artists, another federal judge in August upheld the US Copyright Office’s decision to block someone’s attempt to protect art produced by artificial intelligence.

But Ortiz fears that artists will soon be considered too expensive. Why, he asks, would employers pay artists’ wages if they can buy “a monthly subscription for $30″ and produce nothing?

And if the technology is this good now, he adds, what will it be like in a few years?

“I’m afraid that our industry will decline to the point where very few of us will be able to make a living,” says Ortiz, predicting that artists will only end up editing AI-generated images instead of creating them. “The fun parts of my job, the things that make artists live and breathe—all of that has been outsourced to the machine.”

McKernan is also afraid of what lies ahead: “Will I have a job in a year?”

For now, both artists are throwing themselves into a legal battle — a battle focused on preserving what makes people human, says McKernan, whose Instagram profile reads: “Advocating for human artists.”

“I mean, it makes me want to be alive,” the artist says, referring to the process of artistic creation. The fight is worth fighting, “because that’s what humanity is to me.”