Three artists have accused fast-fashion online retailer Shein of deploying an algorithm to recreate their designs on merchandise, bolstering concerns around artificial intelligence infringing on intellectual property.
In a lawsuit against Shein filed in California federal court on Tuesday, Krista Perry, Larissa Martinez, and Jay Baron argue that the company is using AI to identify trending art online and then creating nearly identical copies on a plethora of cheap merchandise without any acknowledgment or profits to the original artists.
“The brand has made billions by creating a secretive algorithm that astonishingly determines nascent fashion trends—and by coupling it with a corporate structure, including production and fulfillment schemes, that are perfectly executed to grease the wheels of the algorithm, including its unsavory and illegal aspects,” the complaint reads.
Shein has not responded to a request for comment.
The plaintiffs continue that the new algorithm was sanctioned by Chris Xu, the billionaire founder of Shein, who “made Shein the world’s top clothing company through high technology, not high design,” according to the complaint. Shein’s unparalleled ability to swiftly identify and recreate fashion and art trends is due to this technology, the artists—all of whom claim to be victims of Shein’s aesthetic cannibalization—say.
The artists acknowledge their slim chance of piercing Shein’s formidable legal protections. The plaintiffs argue in the complaint that the company escapes accountability for alleged copyright infringement and intellectual property theft by using a “byzantine shell game of corporate structure” that makes it difficult to find the proper party to sue.
The lawsuit comes amid a mounting copyright crisis over emergent AI image generators. The wildly popular text-to-image generators Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were built by scraping billions of images from the internet, including millions of works by digital artists who never gave their consent.
In mid-March, the United States Copyright Office ruled that AI-generated artworks are not eligible for copyright.
“These technologies, often described as ‘generative AI,’ raise questions about whether the material they produce is protected by copyright, whether works consisting of both human-authored and AI-generated material may be registered, and what information should be provided to the Office by applicants seeking to register them,” the statement of policy read.