Sarah Andersen
Cartoonist
Creator of the beloved webcomic Sarah’s Scribbles, and lead plaintiff in Andersen v. Stability AI — the landmark class action accusing AI image generators of mass copyright infringement.
In her words
I felt violated. The way I draw is the complex culmination of my education, the comics I devoured as a child and the many small choices that make up the sum of my life.
It’s clear from the way AI generators rolled out that there was never any consideration given to artists, our wishes, or our rights, and this is our only option to be heard.
Biography
Sarah Andersen (born 1992) is an American cartoonist and illustrator whose semi-autobiographical webcomic Sarah’s Scribbles — wide-eyed, anxious, and instantly shareable — made her one of the most recognizable cartoonists of the internet era. She is also the author of the graphic novel Fangs and multiple best-selling Scribbles collections.
From meme theft to machine theft
Andersen’s path into the AI fight began with an older violation: alt-right trolls had long defaced her comics with hateful rewrites. In a December 2022 New York Times guest essay, she described discovering that AI image generators could now produce work in her style on demand — a new, automated form of the same appropriation. The essay, “The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It.,” became one of the earliest and most-cited artist statements against generative AI.
Weeks later, in January 2023, she put her name at the top of the case that now defines the battle. Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt in the Northern District of California, challenging the use of billions of scraped images — including theirs — in the LAION dataset used to train Stable Diffusion. In August 2024, Judge William Orrick allowed the core copyright and trademark claims to proceed into discovery, a major win for the artists, with trial set for September 2026.
Andersen has framed the suit not as a technophobic crusade but as a matter of consent, telling BuzzFeed News that “artists have a right to say what happens to their hard-earned works.” Her case is widely regarded as the bellwether for whether training on copyrighted art without permission is infringement.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/sarah-andersen