Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon — nonfiction tomes that he spent “five to six years researching, writing, and investigating” — had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a “cocktail” of emotions: “anger over the brazenness of the theft, worry over what this means for writers, and a healthy thirst for revenge on these massive corporations that have become galactically wealthy” using his intellectual property.

He proactively reached out to Susman Godfrey, the law firm already leading the case against Anthropic on behalf of authors, because he saw their suit as a “middle finger on behalf of everyone that has tried to create something.”

Johnson is just one of the dozens of authors, musicians, illustrators, and artists of all stripes taking the fight against AI to the courts. The lawsuits they’ve filed have primarily targeted the companies on copyright grounds, though some have sought other avenues, like terms of service violations. Some have dragged on for years, others settled comparatively quickly. Along the way artists have been dealt their fair share of wins and losses, especially around the definition of fair use.

Illustrator and cartoonist Sarah Andersen was one of the first and most outspoken to directly take on the AI giants. She describes her webcomic Sarah’s Scribbles as deeply personal. It’s a “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,” she wrote in a 2022 New York Times editorial. She, along with Karla Ortiz, Kelly McKernan, and several other visual artists, filed a class action suit against Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI. The case has been crawling its way through the court system since January 2023. That was just a few short months after Stability’s image generator Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were first released. At the time, generative AI was primarily a curiosity; ChatGPT had only just made its debut the previous November. Now it’s a matter of national security.

In the meantime, other artists, perhaps emboldened by Andersen’s efforts, have launched their own legal assaults on the biggest players in AI, including Meta, Google, Anthropic, and AI music generator Suno. By and large artists are optimistic about how their individual cases will pan out, and some believe that their efforts will help guide the courts toward legal guardrails. But they also harbor deep concerns about the approach taken by AI companies. “This does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we’re all stuck in it,” Johnson says.

The problem, many seem to agree, is that the Big Tech CEOs and the people building AI models fundamentally don’t understand or respect art. Andersen says she felt “violated” and described it as “reducing my life’s work to an algorithm.” Author Andrea Bartz, a novelist known for books like We Were Never Here and The Spare Room and the lead plaintiff in Susman Godfrey’s suit against Anthropic, has a similar reaction. “I felt violated, shocked, alarmed,” she told The Verge. “I had a big emotional response to seeing that something I’d worked on for so many years and poured my heart and soul into was just one of hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of books that these Big Tech companies had just stolen for training their algorithm.”

Sam Kogon would prefer to be best known for his Americana-tinged pop rock, but his name has been in the headlines recently as the lead plaintiff in the ongoing suit against Google’s Lyria AI music engine. “They’re devaluing our work,” he says, “They’re giving it away to people, for now, for free. And that’s going to disenfranchise and disempower a ton of musicians.” But, just as importantly, he views AI “art” as dehumanizing. Making fake music, he says, is “the most anti-human thing you could do.”

Kogon, along with a number of independent musicians, is accusing Google of violating its own terms of service. This makes their case slightly different from many of the other cases, which focus primarily on copyright infringement. Instead, Kogon’s lawyers argue that Google improperly used its Content ID system and YouTube data to train Lyria and ProducerAI. The company has mostly refused to comment on the specifics of the accusations, though it has filed a motion to dismiss. In the filing, Google claims that the YouTube terms of service give it broad rights to “reproduce, distribute, [and] prepare derivative works.”

“It’s pure bait and switch,” Kogon says, noting that YouTube regularly changes its terms of service. The dense, compulsory TOS is not a contract that can be negotiated, it’s a “take-it-or-leave-it situation.” Google seems to be arguing that anything uploaded at any point rightfully belongs to the company for training purposes. Kogon counters that that makes “technology that wasn’t even invented, and wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eye at the time of putting your things on YouTube, is now fair game.”

Krystle Delgado, an entertainment and IP lawyer who runs the YouTube channel Top Music Attorney, takes serious issue with Google’s claims. She says, “I don’t think that anyone uses YouTube thinking that you are giving the rights to remake your content,” but when digging into the TOS, she discovered the uploader grants YouTube an “irrevocable perpetual license, meaning you can’t ever take it back.”

Google spokesperson Jack Malon responded by telling The Verge that “as we’ve said for several years, we use content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers across YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI applications.”

Artists I spoke to viewed this as an abuse of Google’s position. Opting out of a platform as big as YouTube simply isn’t an option.

Those who stand to lose the most are independent artists and the creative working class. When novelist Richard Kadrey, comedian Sarah Silverman, writer Christopher Golden and several others sued Meta for using their books to train its Llama AI without consent, their filing argued exactly that. “While AI-generated books probably wouldn’t have much of an effect on the market for the works of Agatha Christie,” the complaint read, “they could very well prevent the next Agatha Christie from getting noticed or selling enough books to keep writing.”

Johnson says that “anyone that’s focusing on these world-famous authors and screenwriters, they’re missing the point.” The threat isn’t that AI is going to displace all great art. He says, “AI could never write The Godfather … But AI could write a mediocre film. AI could write a mediocre book. And there are tons of authors and screenwriters that live in that space. And it’s no judgment to them. They’re servicing a marketplace.”

The judge in Kadrey v. Meta dismissed many of the authors’ initial claims for failing to show evidence of market harm, but a narrower set of claims focusing on copyright infringement and the use of pirated materials is still working its way through the courts.

In Bartz v. Anthropic, the company was found to have violated copyright laws by using pirated ebooks downloaded from the internet to train Claude. In addition to paying out the largest settlement ever in a copyright case — $1.5 billion — the company also agreed to destroy its trove of pirated ebooks. But where things get complicated is with the trove of secondhand books — millions of them — the company bought and scanned to train its models under the name Project Panama. Judge William Alsup ruled that using those legally acquired books to train an LLM qualified as fair use because it was “quintessentially transformative.”

“I strongly disagree with the judge on that part of the ruling … I very much hope that future courts will see the light,” Bartz says. “Even a library can’t buy a physical copy of a book, scan it, and start lending it out as an ebook,” she says.

Still, she doesn’t want to take away from the fact that her case against Anthropic is the first time a large AI company has been held accountable and faced consequences for using artists’ work without consent. She described the sizable settlement as the “first major win for creatives against an AI company … Hopefully that will guide us toward guardrails that are much needed in the industry.”

Delgado, who is leading the case against Suno and Udio on behalf of independent musicians, is equally optimistic. Despite the narrow setbacks in the case against Anthropic and Meta, she believes the pendulum is swinging in artists’ favor. “Right now with these companies, they’re really nervous,” she says. “Not only were they sued, but the courts and the judges seem to be starting to lean our way, and the court of public opinion too.” Polls have shown that people, at the very least, want transparency when it comes to AI.

Even if they win the legal battles, though, all the creators and lawyers I spoke to are concerned about the artists’ ability to continue making a living in the face of an ever-growing tide of AI.

“There’s been so much money spent on marketing to us this idea that AI is inevitable,” Bartz says, “and it’s very convincing and it’s very loud and it’s very pervasive. But I would just encourage people to think about the damage that these companies are doing to the arts, to our critical thinking, to our environment, to the world economy, as they continue to amass power and money.”