Three artists have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against AI image generating companies Stability AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney, alleging that they have infringed on copyright laws. According to the lawsuit, software contains unauthorized copies of millions of copyrighted images, which were created without the knowledge or consent of the artists.

The artists, who are being represented by lawyer Matthew Butterick, claim the tools compete with their original works in the marketplace, regardless of whether the final images resemble the training images. Butterick argues the AI companies’ ability to flood the market with an unlimited number of infringing images will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists.

Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that DeviantArt, a web-based artist community, has released a paid app built using Stable Diffusion called DreamUp, which crowds out the work of human artists with a flood of AI-generated art. Midjourney, another defendant, offers a text-to-image generator trained on scraped images.

The complaint includes allegations of both vicarious and direct copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violations of the rights of publicity, violations of California’s unfair competition law, and breach of contract for DeviantArt’s Terms of Service. The three plaintiffs in the case include artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz, who are seeking compensation and injunctions on behalf of all artists affected by Stable Diffusion.

The artists argue that AI has erased the humanity from art by reducing their life’s work to an algorithm, claiming that art is deeply personal, and AI reduces art to an algorithm. This lawsuit highlights the ongoing debate about the legal and ethical implications of AI-generated art and the potential for AI to infringe on the rights of human artists.