We are used to thinking that copyright only applies to creations of the human mind. But images created with the use of AI aren’t wholly exempt from its protection. So what exactly does the law say?

Art created by artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded into the mainstream, thanks to a range of different platforms and apps such as OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, and Prisma’s Lensa AI. 

Through a combination of machine learning, written prompts, and user-uploaded images, anyone can now quickly generate countless pictures and imitate particular artistic styles, from photorealism to illustrations and cartoons.

The question of how this flurry of AI-enabled digital art impacts image owners has not gone unanswered, with both individual creators and companies taking the matter to the courts. 

One group of artists and illustrators has already filed a class-action complaint against Midjourney, Deviantart, and Stability AI. Media giant Getty Images, meanwhile, has sued the latter for copyright violations and unfair competition. 

How does artificial intelligence generate artwork?

Most generative AI art models scrape existing images and text-to-image pairs off the internet, using machine learning to build associations between its data and the prompt to create new content.

For example, OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 was trained on “hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet” while Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion was trained on 2.3 billion images.