NEW YORK — Kelly McKernan’s acrylic and watercolor paintings are bold and vibrant, often featuring feminine figures rendered in bright greens, blues, pinks and purples. The style, in the artist’s words, is “surreal, ethereal … dealing with discomfort in the human journey.”
The word “human” has a special resonance for McKernan these days. Although it’s always been a challenge to eke out a living as a visual artist — and the pandemic made it worse — McKernan now sees an existential threat from a medium that’s decidedly not human: artificial intelligence.
It’s been about a year since McKernan, who uses the pronoun they, began noticing online images eerily similar to their own distinctive style that were apparently generated by entering their name into an AI engine.
The Nashville-based McKernan, 37, who creates both fine art and digital illustrations, soon learned that companies were feeding artwork into AI systems used to “train” image-generators — something that once sounded like a weird sci-fi movie but now threatens the livelihood of artists worldwide.
“People were tagging me on Twitter, and I would respond, ‘Hey, this makes me uncomfortable. I didn’t give my consent for my name or work to be used this way,’” the artist said in a recent interview, their bright blue-green hair mirroring their artwork. “I even reached out to some of these companies to say ‘Hey, little artist here, I know you’re not thinking of me at all, but it would be really cool if you didn’t use my work like this.’ And, crickets, absolutely nothing.”
McKernan is now one of three artists who are seeking to protect their copyrights and careers by suing makers of AI tools that can generate new imagery on command.
The case awaits a decision from a San Francisco federal judge, who has voiced some doubt about whether AI companies are infringing on copyrights when they analyze billions of images and spit out something different.
“We’re David against Goliath here,” McKernan says. “At the end of the day, someone’s profiting from my work. I had rent due yesterday, and I’m $200 short. That’s how desperate things are right now. And it just doesn’t feel right.”
The lawsuit may serve as an early bellwether of how hard it will be for all kinds of creators — Hollywood actors, novelists, musicians and computer programmers — to stop AI developers from profiting off what humans have made.
The case was filed in January by McKernan and fellow artists Karla Ortiz and Sarah Andersen, on behalf of others like them, against Stability AI, the London-based maker of text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion.
The complaint also named another popular image-generator, Midjourney, and the online gallery DeviantArt.
The suit alleges that the AI image-generators violate the rights of millions of artists by ingesting huge troves of digital images and then producing derivative works that compete against the originals.
The artists say they are not inherently opposed to AI, but they don’t want to be exploited by it.