purples. The style, in the artist’s words, is “surreal, ethereal … dealing with discomfort in the human journey.”
“People were tagging me on Twitter, and I would respond, ’Hey, this makes me uncomfortable. I didn’t give my consent for my name or work to be used this way,’” the artist said in a recent interview, their bright blue-green hair mirroring their artwork. “I even reached out to some of these companies to say ‘Hey, little artist here, I know you’re not thinking of me at all, but it would be really cool if you didn’t use my work like this.’ And, crickets, absolutely nothing.
The lawsuit may serve as an early bellwether of how hard it will be for all kinds of creators — Hollywood actors, novelists, musicians and computer programmers — to stop AI developers from profiting off what humans have made. Stability AI declined to comment. In a court filing, the company said it creates “entirely new and unique images” using simple word prompts, and that its images don’t or rarely resemble the images in the training data.Midjourney and DeviantArt didn’t return emailed requests for comment.
The idea that such a development is inevitable — that it is, essentially, the future — was at the heart of a U.S. Senate hearing in July in which Ben Brooks, head of public policy for Stability AI, acknowledged that artists are not paid for their images.