Disney and the rest of Hollywood have been eerily quiet about the launch of Stable Diffusion, despite the fact that this open-source A.I. software will happily spit out high-quality images of iconic, copyrighted characters from comics, cartoons, and movies in response to text prompts.
But this doesn't mean they're sitting idly by and doing nothing. There's a legal battle taking shape, though it doesn't yet involve any of the larger players—at least not that we can see publicly. The first big lawsuit against Stability AI, the company that makes Stable Diffusion, is fronted by friendly "indie artist" faces who are put forth on a very slick website as fighters for a fair shake for independent creatives. Their suit takes direct legal aim at the core of how generative A.I. works.
