Kelly McKernan

Kelly McKernan is an American artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, known for luminous watercolor and acrylic gouache paintings of ethereal female figures — work sold through galleries, private commissions, conventions, and their online store. A full-time independent artist, McKernan built a career the hard way: painting by painting, client by client.

Becoming a prompt

In 2022, McKernan discovered their name circulating as a style keyword in AI image generators — anyone typing “Kelly McKernan” into Stable Diffusion or Midjourney could conjure imitations of a style honed over decades. According to the class-action complaint, McKernan was astonished to find that the top internet search result for their own name had become an AI-generated image made with Midjourney, prompted with their name. No one had ever asked consent or offered compensation.

In January 2023, McKernan joined Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz in filing a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt — the first major artists’ suit against generative AI companies. After an early round of dismissals, Judge William Orrick revived the core copyright claims in August 2024, sending the case into discovery. McKernan has weathered a wave of online hostility for it, telling BuzzFeed News the insults from “AI bros” were “inane rants. I don’t read them. It’s a waste of my time.”

McKernan has become one of the movement’s most visible working-artist voices — not a celebrity with a fallback, but a mid-career independent whose livelihood sits exactly where image generators compete.