An American lawsuit against text to image generators

Sunday 15th January, 2023 - Bruce Sterling

*That seems newsworthy. I wonder if it will work.

*I won’t be surprised if the legal results of this action are entirely different from anything expected by the people involved.

https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/

Hello. This is Matthew Butterick. I’m a writer, designer, pro­gram­mer, and law­yer. In Novem­ber 2022, I teamed up with the amaz­ingly excel­lent class-action lit­i­ga­tors Joseph Saveri, Cadio Zir­poli, and Travis Man­fredi at the Joseph Saveri Law Firm to file a law­suit against GitHub Copi­lot for its “unprece­dented open-source soft­ware piracy”. (That law­suit is still in progress.)

Since then, we’ve heard from peo­ple all over the world—espe­cially writ­ers, artists, pro­gram­mers, and other cre­ators—who are con­cerned about AI sys­tems being trained on vast amounts of copy­righted work with no con­sent, no credit, and no com­pen­sa­tion.

Today, we’re tak­ing another step toward mak­ing AI fair & eth­i­cal for every­one. On behalf of three won­der­ful artist plain­tiffs—Sarah Ander­sen, Kelly McK­er­nan, and Karla Ortiz—we’ve filed a class-action law­suit against Sta­bil­ity AI, DeviantArt, and Mid­jour­ney for their use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion, a 21st-cen­tury col­lage tool that remixes the copy­righted works of mil­lions of artists whose work was used as train­ing data.

Join­ing as co-coun­sel are the ter­rific lit­i­ga­tors Brian Clark and Laura Mat­son of Lock­ridge Grindal Nauen P.L.L.P.

Today’s fil­ings:

Class-action com­plaint

Class-action com­plaint: Exhibits

As a law­yer who is also a long­time mem­ber of the visual-arts com­mu­nity, it’s an honor to stand up on behalf of fel­low artists and con­tinue this vital con­ver­sa­tion about how AI will coex­ist with human cul­ture and cre­ativ­ity.

The image-gen­er­a­tor com­pa­nies have made their views clear.
Now they can hear from artists….