AI companies ask U.S. court to dismiss artists' copyright lawsuit

By Blake Brittain

(Reuters) - Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt fired back Tuesday at a group of artists who accused them of committing mass copyright infringement by using the artists' work in generative AI systems.

The companies asked a San Francisco federal court to dismiss the artists' proposed class action lawsuit, arguing that the AI-created images are not similar to the artists' work and that the lawsuit did not note specific images that were allegedly misused.

An attorney for Midjourney declined to comment. Representatives for Stability, DeviantArt and the artists did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz sued the companies in January. The artists alleged that the unauthorized copying of their works to train the systems and the creation of AI-generated images in their styles violated their rights.

Stability's Tuesday filing said the artists "fail to identify a single allegedly infringing output image, let alone one that is substantially similar to any of their copyrighted works." Midjourney's motion said that the lawsuit also does not "identify a single work by any plaintiff" that it "supposedly used as training data."

DeviantArt, an online artist community with a service that allows users to create images through Stability's Stable Diffusion system, echoed those arguments and also said it was not liable for the AI companies' alleged misconduct.

"Even taking Plaintiffs' claims at face value, DeviantArt did none of the things that supposedly give rise to the liability asserted," it said.

The case is Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-00201.

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington)