Andersen v. Stability AI

Filed in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit alleged copyright infringement on a scale the existing legal framework was not designed to address. Users of Stable Diffusion could prompt the system to produce images in the style of Sarah Andersen, approximating her visual signature closely enough to compete with her for commissions. The three named plaintiffs represented a potential class of millions of artists whose work had been scraped from portfolio sites and social media platforms without consent, notification, or compensation. The lawsuit was not filed under cover of darkness by anonymous rioters; it was filed publicly, through the formal legal system. But its structural function was identical to the direct actions Thompson documented: the assertion of a claim — our labor has been taken without consent and used to enrich others — through the only mechanism available when the customary norms governing the use of that labor had been violated.