![\"Legal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/openai-copyright-cartoon-output.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: James Vigil\/MLB Photos via Getty; Andrew Harnik \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
The war between copyright holders and AI companies has been raging for years at this point. AI\u2019s seemingly magical ability to synthesize human-like text and lifelike videos Stephen Hawking<\/a> demands a huge appetite for data from books, films, music, and even your social media posts.<\/p>\n AI\u2019s appetite for raw data has been a huge legal sticking point, to put it mildly. Yet as Politico notes<\/a> in a recent article, legal experts are now growing incensed not just about what\u2019s going into the chatbots \u2014 but what\u2019s coming out.<\/p>\n \u201cCourts might accept copying for transformative learning, but they may be less forgiving when AI models generate recognizable\u2026 images where infringement risk is likely higher,\u201d copyright law scholar Abdi Aidid told the outlet.<\/p>\n That \u201ctransformative learning\u201d has been key to the AI industry\u2019s legal defense so far. And it works \u2014 tech companies like Meta<\/a> and Anthropic<\/a> have managed to skate by with minor slaps on the wrist by arguing that their wholesale commercial utilization of copyrighted books and other media followed the tenants of fair use<\/a>, which allows for certain remixes of intellectual property.<\/p>\n Now that OpenAI\u2019s spewing out perfect recreations of America\u2019s most beloved cartoon characters<\/a>, the landscape has changed. <\/p>\n When it comes to intellectual property law, Politico notes, judges are often much more protective over visual content than text-based media. For one thing, images and video<\/a> are viewed as being much more expressive than text, a limiting factor when it comes to fair use. For another, these aren\u2019t puny little novelists we\u2019re talking about \u2014 cartoons are big business. SpongeBob, a character who\u2019s featured heavy in AI-generated meth lab scenes<\/a> lately, has generated $16 billion in retail sales<\/a> since his franchise\u2019s launch 26 years ago.<\/p>\n That\u2019s some serious commerce we\u2019re talking about \u2014 something a judge isn\u2019t likely to overlook.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you use works to train a model, you\u2019re basically using them not for the expression\u2026 but you\u2019re using them as data,\u201d Pamela Samuelson, a copyright professor at UC Berkeley, told Politico. \u201cThere\u2019s something much more immediately expressive about graphical works, particularly characters.\u201d<\/p>\n How this ultimately shakes out will depend on someone taking OpenAI to task, something which is sure to test both current and historic copyright law. As Samuelson points out, users of this software might also be on the hook, depending on some old Betamax litigation<\/a> dating back to 1984. <\/p>\n For now, the legal scholar says that \u201cwhether the generative AI system developer is liable for infringement [is] a kind of untested question at this point.\u201d Still, all it takes is one angry publisher to pull the trigger.<\/p>\n