This article was originally published on https://www.smithsonianmag.com at this link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/are-ai-image-generators-stealing-from-artists-180981488/

of Picasso,” and artificial intelligence tools including DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can conjure an image for you in seconds. They do so by incorporating elements from the vast libraries of digitally available images and artwork from across the internet that they have been trained on.

But in doing so, are those A.I. tools infringing on the copyrights of the artists behind those images? That question is at the heart of two new lawsuits.

Last week, Seattle-based stock image giant Getty Images announced that it has initiated legal proceedings against Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion. Getty alleges that the company has copied millions of its images and “[chosen] to ignore viable licensing options and long-standing legal protections in pursuit of their stand-alone commercial interests.”

Stability AI was also named as a defendant in a class action lawsuit filed in a United States federal court in San Francisco by three visual artists on behalf of the visual arts community, per Reuters’ Blake Brittain. They say that A.I. image generators “violate the rights of millions of artists,” also naming Midjourney and DeviantArt, an online gallery that has launched its own A.I. tool, as defendants....

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AI software like Midjourney use advanced machine learning techniques, particularly deep neural networks, to generate images from textual descriptions.

These systems are trained on massive datasets of images and corresponding text captions. During training, the networks learn the relationships between words and the visual features they describe.

When generating images, the software takes in a textual prompt and decodes it through the neural network to create corresponding visual elements. The neural network's layers interpret and transform the input, generating image pixel by pixel.

Alternatives to Midjourney, such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Jasper Art, and others, utilize similar principles, employing neural networks to translate text inputs into visually coherent images.

This process demonstrates the fusion of natural language understanding and image synthesis through AI technologies