Since the rise of Midjourney and other image generators, artists have been looking at it and wondering whether AI is a great opportunity or an existential threat. Now that a list of 16,000 names has emerged of artists whose work Midjourney is said to have used to train its AI – including Bridget Riley, Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, David Hockney and Anish Kapoor – the art world has called to arms done against the technologists.
British artists have contacted US lawyers to discuss joining a class action against Midjourney and other AI companies, while others Observer that they may take their own legal action in Britain.
“What we need to do is come together,” said Tim Flach, president of the Association of Photographers and an internationally renowned photographer whose name is on the list.
“This public display of this list of names is a great catalyst for artists to come together and challenge it. Personally, I would.”
The 24-page list of names is Exhibit J in a class action filed by ten American artists in California against Midjourney, Stability AI, Runway AI and DeviantArt. Matthew Butterick, one of the lawyers representing the artists, said: “We have had interest from artists all over the world, including Britain.”
The technology companies have until February 8 to respond to the claim. Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment.
“Although [the] Defendants like to describe their AI image products in lofty terms, but the reality is dirtier and nastier: AI image products are prized primarily as tools for copyright laundering, promising customers the benefits of art without the costs of artists,” the complaint says .
The promise of AI is that it will generate the image in your imagination if you can describe it. Yet this promise is limited by whether someone else has already created part of the image you imagined. Artists have found that Midjourney will generate an image very similar to their original works, which they say amounts to copying. And Midjourney allows — and encourages, according to the lawsuit — its users to specify an artist’s style.
Flach is known for his stylized portraits of animals, from snow leopards to bats, which often look at the camera in a human-like manner in a studio environment. His projects cost “tens of thousands,” he said, but AI generators can spit out copies in seconds. Some images apparently generated by the software show snow leopards with exactly the same spots as those in his photos.
“The imitation of artists and their style is probably what will stick,” Flach said. “Because when you adopt an artist’s style, you are essentially robbing him of his livelihood.”
A survey last week by the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) of 1,000 artists and agents found that 89% wanted the government to safeguard their share of the UK’s £108 billion creative industry by regulating generative AI. Already 22% had discovered that their own work was being used to train AI.
‘If we had done our research now [after the list had come out] we probably would have had a stronger response,” said Reema Selhi, head of policy at DACS. “Many people didn’t know if their works had been used. There is a transparency that we didn’t have a few months ago.”
Ministers originally wanted to open up copyright laws to make it easier for companies to train AIs without consent, Selhi said, but stopped short after opposition from the creative sector. “We’ve had such a strong feeling from people that this is a complete copyright violation. No permission was requested. They didn’t give permission. They received no reward. They are not credited.”
DACS is pushing for some form of licensing, perhaps similar to the royalties Spotify pays musicians – an amount that is often criticized as ridiculous by independent artists. Selhi said a $1.5 billion AI deal signed by Vodafone and Microsoft last week showed there was far more money available than when Spotify launched in Britain in 2010.
Getty Images has already filed a challenge against Stability AI, claiming copyright infringement on its photos. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool that allows artists to add images to images they upload to the internet and is intended to poison the AI database.
Julia Fullerton-Batten is an award-winning fine art photographer who creates extravagant depictions of historical events. She said she was “shocked and appalled” when she discovered her name on the Midjourney list, and investigated whether it could be plagiarism of her work.
“An image emerged that was very similar to my ‘In Between’ series, a project that took me a long time to photograph,” she said. “I’m definitely going to do something about it. We shouldn’t just let this happen to us.”
But even for someone on the list, Midjourney retains a seductive quality. “Your emotions go from being really excited when you see your shooting style on screen,” Fullerton-Batten said, “but within seconds you realize, ‘oh shit, that’s really bad.’ This is not good for the future for anyone.”
Her experience underlines why opposition to AI is not universal among artists, with some trying to start an AI art movement. Before AI, artists used randomness and math to generate works, and the line between inspiration and plagiarism isn’t always clear.
Related: AI companies may pay a high price for the artistic capabilities of their software | John Naughton
Sci-fi artist Chris Foss is one of the most imitated artists by the AI generators, thanks to his long career illustrating and shaping the covers of more than 1,000 classic novels by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick and Arthur C Clarke to our imagination of space travel. He even worked with Stanley Kubrick AIthe film later completed by Steven Spielberg.
Yet the 77-year-old, who is also known for his illustrations, appears The joy of sexdoesn’t have a computer and wasn’t aware of any impersonations on Midjourney until last week.
“People who really know my work would immediately recognize that these are not mine,” he said, after seeing some of the “Chris Foss” style images online. “They have a certain flatness – a lack of depth.” He said he was confident customers would continue to buy his work and he has an exhibition in Guernsey later this year. Some AI images captured his imagination, he said.
“I have about 80 paintings to deliver,” Foss said. “I have to solve all kinds of problems with lighting, composition and the like. And I’m looking at this one [AI] things, thinking, you know what, I can download that, play with it, and I’ll have a damn good painting. They have already solved all the problems for me.”