§ THE STUDIO · 3 MIN READ
The Artists Who Took the Machines to Court
In January 2023, a group of illustrators sued the companies behind three image generators for training on their work without asking. Nearly four years later the case is still moving. Here is where it stands, what the courts have said, and what any artist can do now.
By Culture
THE SHORT VERSION
Andersen v. Stability AI, filed January 12, 2023 in federal court in California, is a class action by artists against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt alleging their image generators were trained on copyrighted art without permission. In October 2023 Judge William Orrick allowed the direct infringement claim over training to proceed while dismissing the claim that all outputs are infringing; summary judgment arguments are scheduled for February 2027.
Image generators can paint in the style of a living illustrator in about ten seconds. Most of them learned how by looking at billions of pictures pulled from the internet, including the work of people who were never asked and never paid. In January 2023, a group of those people went to court.
Andersen v. Stability AI was filed on January 12, 2023, in federal court in San Francisco. The lead plaintiff is the illustrator and cartoonist Sarah Andersen, joined by other artists. The defendants are Stability AI, which makes Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, which launched its own generator.
The artists' argument is direct: the companies copied their copyrighted images to train the models, without permission, and that copying is infringement.
In October 2023, Judge William Orrick became the first federal judge to rule on these claims at the early stage of a case. He did two things that matter.
He let the core claim go forward: that training a model on copyrighted images can be direct copyright infringement. That was a significant win for the artists, because it meant the case would be decided on evidence, not thrown out on theory.
He dismissed a broader claim: that because the training data included copyrighted work, every image the model produces is automatically an infringing copy. To win on outputs, artists will have to show specific outputs that are substantially similar to specific works.
Since then the case has been in discovery, the stage where each side gets to see the other's evidence. The judge has moved the schedule more than once. Arguments on summary judgment, where either side can ask the court to decide without a trial, are now set for February 2027.
“The question is not whether a machine can make a picture. It is whether it was allowed to study yours.”
A separate line of decisions has settled a different question. In March 2025, the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. ruled in Thaler v. Perlmutter that a work generated entirely by AI, with no human author, cannot be copyrighted. The U.S. Copyright Office said the same in its January 2025 report on copyrightability: human authorship is required, and prompts alone generally are not enough, though a person's creative choices in arranging, editing or adding to AI material can be protected.
For working artists, that cuts in their favour. The thing a human makes is protected. The thing a machine makes alone belongs to no one.
None of this waits on a verdict.
Knect uses AI-generated images in some places, including the demo artwork in this wing, and labels them as generated where they appear. Real artists on the platform own their work, and their uploads are theirs. That is the line the courts are drawing too.
- What is Andersen v. Stability AI?
- A class-action copyright lawsuit filed in January 2023 by artists including illustrator Sarah Andersen against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt over training image generators on their work.
- Has the court ruled?
- Partly. In October 2023 the judge let the claim that training on copyrighted images can infringe go forward and dismissed the theory that every output is automatically infringing. Summary judgment arguments are set for February 2027.
- Can AI-generated art be copyrighted?
- Not on its own in the United States. Courts and the Copyright Office require human authorship; human contributions to a work that uses AI can still be protected.
