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Stable Diffusion Allegedly Used Artists' Works without Permission for AI Training

12 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Stability Ai, Runway and 4 others and deployed by Stability Ai, Lensa Ai and 2 others allegedly harmed Digital Artists, Artists Publishing On Social Media and 1 other.

Risk domain
Privacy & Security Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information
Occurred
Coverage
12 reportsDec 2022 - Apr 2023

What happened

Text-to-image model Stable Diffusion was reportedly using artists' original works without permission for its AI training.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Privacy & Security (Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (9)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Lensa AI, the app making 'magic avatars,' raises red flags for artists
    techcrunch.com · Taylor Hatmaker
  2. Lensa, the AI portrait app, has soared in popularity. But many artists question the ethics of AI art.
    nbcnews.com · Morgan Sung
  3. Artists can now opt out of the next version of Stable Diffusion
    technologyreview.com · Melissa Heikkilä
  4. The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It.
    nytimes.com · Sarah Andersen
  5. Artists sue AI art generators over copyright infringement
    polygon.com · Nicole Clark
  6. AI tools can create new images, but who is the real artist?
    apnews.com · Matt O'Brien, Arijeta Lajka
  7. Artists Attack AI: Why The New Lawsuit Goes Too Far
    copyrightlately.com · Aaron Moss
  8. This Tool Could Protect Artists From A.I.-Generated Art That Steals Their Style
    nytimes.com · Kashmir Hill
  9. AI companies ask U.S. court to dismiss artists' copyright lawsuit
    reuters.com · Blake Brittain

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Digital Artists, Artists Publishing On Social Media, Artists

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.1.

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI models or systems can ‘leak’ information about individuals whose data was used in training. For future models trained on sensitive personal data like health or financial data, this may lead to partic...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal d...

    International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

  • Private Training Data

    "As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private d...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Association in LLMs

    "Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a pr...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Memorization in LLMs

    "Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy and regulation violations

    "Some of the broken systems discussed above are also very invasive of people’s privacy, controlling, for instance, the length of someone’s last romantic relationship [51]. More recently, ChatGPT was banned in Italy over...

    Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #421 on the AI Incident Database · all 12 reports