Artists Battle AI Slop in Court, Scoring Early Wins

A sense of cautious optimism pervades the creative community—illustrators, authors, and musicians alike—regarding their prospects in ongoing legal battles, even as fundamental doubts about the future of artificial intelligence persist.

Upon the publication of a searchable dataset by The Atlantic, detailing works used to train AI models, author Kirk Wallace Johnson, like many of his peers, searched for his name out of curiosity and indeed found it. His nonfiction books, including The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon—works that he dedicated “five to six years researching, writing, and investigating”—had been illicitly copied and assimilated into a chatbot. Johnson described 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” through the unauthorized use of his intellectual property.

Prompted by this discovery, he proactively contacted Susman Godfrey, the legal firm already representing authors in a case against Anthropic, viewing their lawsuit as a potent “middle finger on behalf of everyone that has tried to create something.”

Johnson’s case is representative of dozens of authors, musicians, illustrators, and artists across various disciplines who are challenging AI companies in court. These lawsuits predominantly cite copyright infringement, though some explore other avenues, such as violations of terms of service. While some cases have spanned years and others have reached relatively swift settlements, artists have experienced a mix of victories and defeats, particularly concerning the interpretation 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.”

Illustrator and cartoonist Sarah Andersen emerged as one of the earliest and most vocal critics directly confronting AI giants. She characterizes her webcomic, Sarah’s Scribbles, as profoundly personal, describing it in a 2022 New York Times editorial as 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.” Andersen, alongside visual artists Karla Ortiz, Kelly McKernan, and others, initiated a class-action lawsuit against Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI. This legal action has been navigating the court system since January 2023, just months after the initial release of Stability’s Stable Diffusion and Midjourney image generators. At that time, generative AI was largely a novelty, with ChatGPT having debuted only the preceding November; it has since evolved into a matter of national security.

In the intervening period, a growing number of artists, potentially inspired by Andersen’s pioneering efforts, have launched their own legal challenges against prominent AI entities, including Meta, Google, Anthropic, and the AI music generator Suno. While artists generally express optimism about the outcomes of their individual cases and believe their actions will help establish necessary legal frameworks, they also harbor profound apprehensions regarding the fundamental approach of AI companies. Johnson articulates this concern, stating, “This does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we’re all stuck in it.”

A shared sentiment among many is that the leadership of Big Tech and the developers of AI models fundamentally lack understanding or respect for artistic creation. Andersen articulated feeling “violated,” describing the experience as “reducing my life’s work to an algorithm.” Author Andrea Bartz, known for novels such as We Were Never Here and The Spare Room, and the lead plaintiff in Susman Godfrey’s lawsuit against Anthropic, echoed this reaction. She conveyed to The Verge, “I felt violated, shocked, alarmed. 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.”

“I felt violated, shocked, alarmed.”

Sam Kogon, whose preference is to be recognized for his Americana-infused pop rock, has recently garnered headlines as the lead plaintiff in the ongoing lawsuit against Google’s Lyria AI music engine. He asserts that AI companies “are devaluing our work. They’re giving it away to people, for now, for free. And that’s going to disenfranchise and disempower a ton of musicians.” Beyond the economic impact, Kogon views AI-generated “art” as inherently dehumanizing, describing the creation of artificial music as “the most anti-human thing you could do.”

Kogon, along with several independent musicians, is suing Google for allegedly breaching its own terms of service—a distinct legal strategy compared to the predominant focus on copyright infringement in many other cases. Kogon’s legal team argues that Google improperly utilized its Content ID system and YouTube data to train Lyria and ProducerAI. Google has largely refrained from commenting on the specific allegations but has filed a motion to dismiss the case, contending in its filing that YouTube’s terms of service grant it extensive rights to “reproduce, distribute, [and] prepare derivative works.”

Kogon dismisses Google’s argument as “pure bait and switch,” highlighting YouTube’s frequent alterations to its terms of service. He characterizes the dense, mandatory TOS as a non-negotiable “take-it-or-leave-it situation.” Google appears to assert that any content uploaded at any point rightfully belongs to the company for training purposes. Kogon strongly counters this, arguing that such an interpretation would deem “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 intellectual property lawyer who manages the YouTube channel Top Music Attorney, expresses significant reservations about Google’s claims. She states, “I don’t think that anyone uses YouTube thinking that you are giving the rights to remake your content.” However, upon detailed examination of the TOS, Delgado discovered that uploaders grant YouTube an “irrevocable perpetual license, meaning you can’t ever take it back.”

In response to inquiries from The Verge, Google spokesperson Jack Malon stated, “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 interviewed viewed this stance as an exploitation of Google’s dominant market position, emphasizing that opting out of a platform as pervasive as YouTube is simply not a viable choice.

The most significant impact of AI is anticipated to fall upon independent artists and the creative working class. This concern was central to the lawsuit filed against Meta by novelist Richard Kadrey, comedian Sarah Silverman, writer Christopher Golden, and others, who alleged unauthorized use of their books to train Meta’s Llama AI. Their complaint articulated that while “AI-generated books probably wouldn’t have much of an effect on the market for the works of Agatha Christie,” they possess the potential to “very well prevent the next Agatha Christie from getting noticed or selling enough books to keep writing.”

Johnson stresses that focusing solely on “world-famous authors and screenwriters” misses the core issue. He contends that the primary threat is not the displacement of all great art, acknowledging, “AI could never write The Godfather…” Instead, he argues, “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.”

In the Kadrey v. Meta case, the judge dismissed many of the authors’ initial claims due to insufficient evidence of market harm. Nevertheless, a narrower set of claims, specifically focusing on copyright infringement and the utilization of pirated materials, continues to proceed through the courts.

In Bartz v. Anthropic, the company was found to have violated copyright laws by using pirated e-books obtained from the internet to train its Claude model. This resulted in the largest settlement ever in a copyright case—$1.5 billion—and an agreement by Anthropic to destroy its collection of pirated e-books. However, complexity arises concerning the millions of secondhand books the company legally acquired and scanned under the initiative named Project Panama to train its models. Judge William Alsup ruled that the use of these legitimately obtained books for LLM training qualified as fair use, deeming it “quintessentially transformative.”

“The courts and the judges seem to be starting to lean our way, and the court of public opinion too.”

Bartz expressed strong disagreement with this specific aspect of the ruling, stating, “I strongly disagree with the judge on that part of the ruling … I very much hope that future courts will see the light.” She further illustrated her point: “Even a library can’t buy a physical copy of a book, scan it, and start lending it out as an ebook.”

Despite this partial setback, Bartz remains focused on the landmark achievement of her case against Anthropic: it marks the first instance of a major AI company being held accountable and facing substantial repercussions for using artists’ work without consent. She characterized the significant 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 spearheading the lawsuit against Suno and Udio on behalf of independent musicians, shares a similar sense of optimism. Despite minor setbacks in the cases against Anthropic and Meta, she believes the tide is turning in artists’ favor. She observes, “Right now with these companies, they’re really nervous. 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.” Public opinion polls consistently indicate a demand for at least transparency regarding AI practices.

However, even with potential legal victories, all creators and legal professionals interviewed expressed profound concerns about the ability of artists to sustain their livelihoods in the face of an ever-advancing wave of AI.

Bartz concluded by reflecting on the pervasive narrative: “There’s been so much money spent on marketing to us this idea that AI is inevitable, 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.”