How artists Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, and Sarah Andersen found each other due to their AI concerns and sued Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt
Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News :
Context & Ripple Effects
This BuzzFeed News feature traces the human origin of what became the defining copyright fight over AI image generation. The groundwork was laid in October 2022, when artists discovered their work was in the dataset Stability AI used to train Stable Diffusion without notice, consent, or payment — anger that circulated until McKernan, Ortiz, and Andersen found each other through those shared concerns and filed suit alongside the same firm behind the Copilot case against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI.
First-order effects
- McKernan, Ortiz, and Andersen move from individual grievance to named plaintiffs, putting Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt on legal defense footing within weeks of the lawsuit's filing.
Second-order effects
- The case survives attrition unevenly: a judge later dismisses the claims against Midjourney and DeviantArt while letting the claim against Stability AI proceed (October 2023 ruling), then allows some infringement claims against all defendants to move forward in August 2024 — forcing each company to litigate separately rather than as one bloc.
Third-order effects
- Once individual artists proved a template for suing generative-image companies at scale, deep-pocketed rights holders followed: Disney and NBCUniversal sued Midjourney in June 2025 after failed talks (the studios' filing), shifting the fight from artist-led test cases to commercial-scale enforcement.
The trend: AI image-generation companies are moving from facing scattered artist lawsuits to confronting coordinated, well-resourced studio litigation that tests whether training on copyrighted work is defensible at all.