Pop art is going AI—or is it just more pop art, after all? That’s the question raised by a class-action lawsuit filed nearly a year ago by a group of artists against the virtual face of AI-driven artwork: Midjourney, the research lab that uses the Stable Diffusion image-generation engine, and Stability AI, which created that engine. Andy Warhol is just one of the iconic artists whose names are being dragged into the case, but what would Andy himself say?
Warhol was famous for many things: mentoring the legendary 1960s rock band the Velvet Underground as well as ‘80s art legend Jean-Michel Basquiat, playing a pivotal part in the Downtown scene via his “Factory,” and of course, all those soup cans. But he was also endlessly quotable and eerily prophetic on the 21st century. He anticipated Twitter and TikTok by predicting that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” but he also foreshadowed this lawsuit when he said “Art is anything you can get away with.”
