Kelly McKernan (born 1986) is an American artist based in

Nashville, Tennessee Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the List of muni ...

Early life and education

McKernan joined

DeviantArt DeviantArt (historically stylized as deviantART) is an American online art community that features artwork, videography and photography, launched on August 7, 2000 by Angelo Sotira, Scott Jarkoff, and Matthew Stephens among others. DeviantArt, ...

as a high school student in 2002. In 2009, they earned a

Bachelor of Fine Arts A Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) is a standard undergraduate degree for students for pursuing a professional education in the visual, fine or performing arts. It is also called Bachelor of Visual Arts (BVA) in some cases. Background The Bachelor ...

from

Kennesaw State University Kennesaw State University (KSU) is a public research university located in the state of Georgia with two different campuses in the Atlanta metropolitan area, one in Kennesaw and the other in Marietta on a combined of land. The school was fou ...

Career and activism

McKernan teaches at the Nossi College of Art & Design in Nashville. On January 13, 2023, McKernan,

Sarah Andersen Sarah Andersen is an American cartoonist and illustrator, and the author of the webcomic '' Sarah's Scribbles''. Biography Andersen graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2014. While attending MICA, she started drawing t ...

, and Karla Ortiz filed a

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

lawsuit against

Stability AI Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generat ...

Midjourney Midjourney is an independent research lab that produces an artificial intelligence program under the same name that creates images from textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It is speculated that the underlying t ...

, and DeviantArt, claiming that the

generative artificial intelligence Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images or other data using generative models, often in response to prompts. Generative AI models learn the patterns and s ...

tools used by the companies have infringed the rights of millions of artists by training on five billion images scraped from the web, without the consent of the original artists. On July 19, Judge

William Orrick III William Horsley Orrick III (born May 15, 1953) is an American lawyer and judge. A native of San Francisco, Orrick has been a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California since 2013. He ...

stated he would dismiss most of the case, requesting they elaborate on issues and "provide more facts".

Honors and recognition

In 2023, ''Time'' Magazine named McKernan to its list of Most Influential People in AI.

Personal life

McKernan is

nonbinary Non-binary and genderqueer are umbrella terms for gender identities that are not solely male or femaleidentities that are outside the gender binary. Non-binary identities fall under the transgender umbrella, since non-binary people typically ...

, and goes by ''they/them'' pronouns. They are a single mother.

References

1986 births American non-binary artists Living people Artists from Nashville, Tennessee LGBT people from Tennessee Kennesaw State University alumni {{US-artist-stub