A few days ago, three artists filed a lawsuit against Stability AI (the developer behind Stable Diffusion), accusing Stability AI of direct and indirect copyright infringement, violation of the DMCA, and unfair competition.

These three artists (Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz) believe that Stability AI has collected billions of images from the Internet for AI tool training “without the consent of the original artist”, infringing their including the rights of millions of artists.

The three artists filed the lawsuit through the law firm of Joseph Saveri, which specializes in antitrust and class actions, along with attorney Matthew Butterick. Among them, Butterick and Joseph Saveri are currently suing Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI. The case involves the AI ​​programming model CoPilot. The reason for the prosecution is similar to this case, except that one involves artwork generation and the other involves code generation.

Attorney Butterick described the case as “another step toward making artificial intelligence fair and ethical for everyone.” He believes that AI art tools like “Stable Diffusion” can flood the market with an infinite number of infringing images, which can cause permanent harm to art and artists.

If you look closely at their lawsuit, you will find that their description of AI technology is not accurate. The lawsuit claims that the AI ​​art model stores compressed copies of copyrighted training images and then recombines them. However, the AI ​​art model does not actually store images, but collects mathematical representations of patterns from these images, and the AI ​​​​generated images are not a patchwork of images in the data set, but from scratch based on these mathematical representations Create pictures.

As for whether Stable Diffusion is really infringing, it is up to the court to try, and this lawsuit may last for many years.