Artists file lawsuits against AI companies over training data and output

Illustrators, authors, and musicians have filed lawsuits against AI companies alleging that their copyrighted works were used without permission to train models and that AI outputs infringe their rights. Plaintiffs include Sarah Andersen, Karla Ortiz, Kelly McKernan, Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and musician Sam Kogon. The cases primarily target Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, Runway AI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and AI music generator Suno.

Sarah Andersen, Karla Ortiz, Kelly McKernan, and others filed a class action in January 2023 against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI, alleging that Stable Diffusion and Midjourney incorporated their works into training data without consent. Author Andrea Bartz is the lead plaintiff in a suit against Anthropic filed by Susman Godfrey, arguing that her books were among those ingested to train AI systems. Kirk Wallace Johnson, author of The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon, proactively contacted the law firm after discovering his books in a searchable dataset published by The Atlantic that was linked to AI training.

Musician Sam Kogon leads a suit against Google’s Lyria AI music engine, accusing the company of violating its own terms of service by using YouTube data and Content ID to train Lyria and ProducerAI. Kogon argues that AI-generated music devalues human creativity and dehumanizes art, while Google has filed a motion to dismiss, asserting that YouTube’s terms grant broad rights to reproduce and prepare derivative works.

Artists describe feelings of violation and alarm upon discovering their works were used to train AI systems. Andersen characterized the experience as reducing her life’s work to an algorithm, and Bartz said she felt violated and shocked to see her novels treated as part of a dataset for training algorithms. Johnson expressed anger at the scale of corporate enrichment from using artists’ intellectual property without consent.