// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning
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Illustrators, authors, and musicians are optimistic about their chances in court, if not about the future of AI.
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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.
“This does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we’re all stuck in it.”