With AI tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT producing some amazing results and sparking all new types of business opportunities, many questions have also been raised concerning the legality of such processes, and how they source from the work of human creators for digital re-purposing. For example, different artists are displeased that DALL-E can use work that they charge for as source material for new images, for which those that use DALL-E have no legal rights. This is something that has led a collective of artists to push for legal action against the unregulated use of their work through AI generation tools.

Fight of The Century

As reported by The Verge:

“A trio of artists have launched a lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney, creators of AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and artist portfolio platform DeviantArt, which recently created its own AI art generator, DreamUp. The artists allege that these organizations have infringed the rights of ‘millions of artists’ by training their AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web ‘with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists’.”

This suit claims that several AI image generators have effectively been stealing original art, allowing their users to create similar-looking work by using specific prompts and guides. Such prompts can be totally overt, as explained by a guide from DreamStudio, a platform used to write AI scripts. In some cases, it appears as though it simply isn’t a coincidence, but that these tools are prompting users to replicate the styles of artists by guiding the tools in such a way.

It’s easy to see how this would be a significant concern for working artists, and is actually one of the key points that’s likely to be raised in the new case. It’s also not the first lawsuit relating to AI generators. Another group is suing Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI over an AI programming tool called ‘CoPilot’, which produces code based on samples sourced from the web. Various photographers are also exploring their legal rights to their images used in the ‘training’ of these AI models.

Concerns about the future of litigation relating to such tools are why Getty Images refuses to list AI-generated art for sale on its website. At the same time, Google has published a new blog post that outlines why it’s not planning on currently releasing its own AI-generation tools to the public. Google also noted that AI-generated content is in violation of its Search guidelines, and will not be indexed if detected.

There are a range of risks and challenges that could derail the rise of such tools. While they won’t likely go away entirely, even as a result of legal rulings, it seems just as possible that these tools will become more mainstream due to big companies now also taking an interest. 

The Wrap

The most that will happen seems to be that these AI companies will need to come to terms with certain usage restrictions (i.e., artists can register their names to stop others from using them in their prompts) or arrange a form of payment to their source providers. Other than that, AI generation tools will remain highly accessible, moving forward. But there are risks, and it’s worth maintaining awareness of such in your usage, especially as more and more people look to such tools to save time and money in various forms of content creation.

Sources

http://bit.ly/3iHNuYk