Andersen v. Stability AI class-action complaint filed (13 January 2023)

On Friday 13 January 2023 the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, the typographer-turned-lawyer Matthew Butterick, and Lockridge Grindal Nauen P.L.L.P. filed a putative class-action complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of three visual artists — cartoonist Sarah Andersen, illustrator Kelly McKernan, and concept artist Karla Ortiz — and a proposed class of "thousands, possibly millions" of other artists whose copyrighted works the complaint alleged had been used to train generative text-to-image AI systems without consent, credit, or compensation. The case was docketed as 3:23-cv-00201 and drawn to US District Judge William H. Orrick III. It is the opening event of the first major US federal class action by visual artists against generative-AI training-data practices and, on the public record this corpus tracks, the field-defining US strategic-litigation moment for the creative-industry response to generative AI.

The complaint

The original defendants were Stability AI Ltd., Stability AI Inc., Midjourney Inc., and DeviantArt Inc. The complaint advanced six classes of claim. The first was direct and vicarious copyright infringement against Stability AI for training Stable Diffusion on five billion LAION-scraped images including the plaintiffs' works, and against Midjourney and DeviantArt for distributing systems the complaint alleged were either trained on, or built atop, that training corpus. The second was a Digital Millennium Copyright Act count for stripped or altered copyright-management information. The third and fourth were a right-of-publicity claim under California Civil Code § 3344 and at common law. The fifth was breach of DeviantArt's Terms of Service in connection with the company's DreamUp text-to-image launch on user-uploaded data. The sixth was California unfair-competition law. The pleading advanced an early version of what would later be called the "compressed copies" theory — the assertion that Stable Diffusion's model weights themselves retain compressed representations of training images.

Counsel and the artist-organising lead-up

Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick had been preparing the case in parallel with their software-side class action against GitHub Copilot, Microsoft, and OpenAI (filed November 2022) and worked together as the campaign's public-facing counsel from the date of filing onward. The artist side of the case had crystallised over October–December 2022 in three convergent threads. First, Spawning's "Have I Been Trained" tool had made the LAION-5B training set searchable by image and by URL, and Kelly McKernan had been among the first artists to make the discovery that their copyrighted work had been ingested into the Stable Diffusion training corpus go viral on social media. Second, Karla Ortiz, then on the board of the Concept Art Association, had been observing AI systems reproduce her distinctive style since early 2021 and through late 2022 had organised artist town halls and connected with machine-learning researchers in preparation for legal action. Third, Sarah Andersen's 31 December 2022 New York Times op-ed on the alt-right and AI use of her Sarah's Scribbles comic had given the case a mainstream-press framing for its underlying style-imitation problem. Ortiz reached out to McKernan and Andersen after seeing McKernan's viral tweet and Andersen's op-ed, and the three agreed to be named plaintiffs in the class action Saveri and Butterick were already drafting. The December 2022 ArtStation member revolt — which forced the Epic Games-owned portfolio platform to add a "NoAI" tag — supplied the public-mood backdrop the suit landed against.

Framing on the day of filing

Counsel and plaintiffs framed the case publicly from the date of filing as a campaign against unconsented generative-AI training-data practices generally, not only against the named defendants. Butterick told CBS News that Stable Diffusion was "a parasite that, if allowed to proliferate, will cause irreparable harm to artists, now and in the future" and, in the Saveri firm's accompanying press release, that "Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt are appropriating the work of thousands of artists with no consent, no credit, and no compensation." Saveri said the case was "a larger fight for preserving ownership rights for all artists and other creators" and that the plaintiffs objected to "Stable Diffusion settling on a business strategy of massive copyright infringement from the outset".

The three plaintiffs each gave the press their own framing of why they had joined the suit. McKernan told BuzzFeed that the technology "effectively destroys an entire career path made up of the most talented and passionate living artists today". Ortiz told CBS News that "why would someone hire someone when they can just get something that's 'good enough'?" — the job-displacement framing the suit would carry forward into her July 2023 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee testimony. Andersen, framing the case in terms of consent rather than economics, told BuzzFeed that "artists have a right to say what happens to their hard-earned works" and that "it's clear from the way AI generators rolled out that there was never any consideration given to artists, our wishes, or our rights." Contemporaneous press coverage compared the case to Napster and the Authors Guild's Google Books litigation, against which the artist-side hope was an outcome that, like Napster, forced the industry into a licensing regime that compensated rights-holders.

Significance

The 13 January 2023 filing is the opening event of the Andersen v. Stability AI campaign and, for the broader corpus, the moment at which the creative-industry response to generative AI moved from artist-community advocacy on ArtStation and social media into US federal court. Two structural features of the filing have continued to shape the case three years on. The first is the three-named-plaintiff frame — a cartoonist, an illustrator, and a concept artist — which let the suit speak credibly across the disciplinary breadth of the affected creative-industry workforce; the November 2023 amended complaint expanded that frame to twelve artists, but the artist-coalition character of the case was set on the day of filing. The second is the rhetorical core the suit gave the wider sectoral campaign — the "three Cs" of consent, credit, and compensation — a framing that has been carried forward unchanged into Ortiz's July 2023 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee testimony, into the FTC's October 2023 Creative Economy and Generative AI roundtable, into the WGA and SAG-AFTRA AI-bargaining provisions in the 2023 Hollywood strikes, and into the parallel publishing-side AI-authors suits the Saveri firm and others have filed in the years since. The filing was not the moment at which the artist-organising wave began — the December 2022 ArtStation revolt and the Concept Art Association's parallel federal-lobbying push had begun several weeks earlier — but it was the moment at which that organising wave acquired its primary US legal vehicle, and the moment from which subsequent generative-AI training-data litigation in the United States has measured its own field.