{"id":718510,"date":"2026-07-30T05:05:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T05:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/718510\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T05:05:29","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T05:05:29","slug":"artists-are-lawyering-up-against-ai-slop-and-some-are-even-winning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/718510\/","title":{"rendered":"Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning"},"content":{"rendered":"

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset<\/a> 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 \u2014 nonfiction tomes that he spent \u201cfive to six years researching, writing, and investigating\u201d \u2014 had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a \u201ccocktail\u201d of emotions: \u201canger 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\u201d using his intellectual property.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmiddle finger on behalf of everyone that has tried to create something.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we\u2019re all stuck in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Kirk Wallace Johnson<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Scribbles as deeply personal. It\u2019s a \u201ccomplex culmination of my education, the comics I devoured as a child, and the many small choices that make up the sum of my life,\u201d she wrote in a 2022 New York Times<\/a> 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<\/a> since January 2023. That was just a few short months after Stability\u2019s 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\u2019s a matter of national security<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, other artists, perhaps emboldened by Andersen\u2019s efforts, have launched their own legal assaults on the biggest players in AI, including Meta, Google, Anthropic, and AI music generator Suno<\/a>. 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. \u201cThis does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we\u2019re all stuck in it,\u201d Johnson says.<\/p>\n

The problem, many seem to agree, is that the Big Tech CEOs and the people building AI models fundamentally don\u2019t understand or respect art. Andersen says she felt \u201cviolated<\/a>\u201d and described it as \u201creducing my life\u2019s work to an algorithm.\u201d Author Andrea Bartz, a novelist known for books like We Were Never Here and The Spare Room and the lead plaintiff in Susman Godfrey\u2019s suit against Anthropic, has a similar reaction. \u201cI felt violated, shocked, alarmed,\u201d she told The Verge. \u201cI had a big emotional response to seeing that something I\u2019d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt violated, shocked, alarmed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Andrea Bartz<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Lyria<\/a> AI music engine. \u201cThey\u2019re devaluing our work,\u201d he says, \u201cThey\u2019re giving it away to people, for now, for free. And that\u2019s going to disenfranchise and disempower a ton of musicians.\u201d But, just as importantly, he views AI \u201cart\u201d as dehumanizing. Making fake music, he says, is \u201cthe most anti-human thing you could do.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a>. In the filing, Google claims that the YouTube terms of service give it broad rights to \u201creproduce, distribute, [and] prepare derivative works.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pure bait and switch,\u201d Kogon says, noting that YouTube regularly changes its terms of service. The dense, compulsory TOS is not a contract that can be negotiated, it\u2019s a \u201ctake-it-or-leave-it situation.\u201d Google seems to be arguing that anything uploaded at any point rightfully belongs to the company for training purposes. Kogon counters that that makes \u201ctechnology that wasn\u2019t even invented, and wasn\u2019t even a glimmer in anyone\u2019s eye at the time of putting your things on YouTube, is now fair game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Krystle Delgado, an entertainment and IP lawyer who runs the YouTube channel Top Music Attorney<\/a>, takes serious issue with Google\u2019s claims. She says, \u201cI don\u2019t think that anyone uses YouTube thinking that you are giving the rights to remake your content,\u201d but when digging into the TOS, she discovered the uploader grants YouTube an \u201cirrevocable perpetual license, meaning you can\u2019t ever take it back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google spokesperson Jack Malon responded by telling The Verge that \u201cas we\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artists I spoke to viewed this as an abuse of Google\u2019s position. Opting out of a platform as big as YouTube simply isn\u2019t an option.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWhile AI-generated books probably wouldn\u2019t have much of an effect on the market for the works of Agatha Christie,\u201d the complaint<\/a> read, \u201cthey could very well prevent the next Agatha Christie from getting noticed or selling enough books to keep writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson says that \u201canyone that\u2019s focusing on these world-famous authors and screenwriters, they\u2019re missing the point.\u201d The threat isn\u2019t that AI is going to displace all great art. He says, \u201cAI could never write The Godfather \u2026 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\u2019s no judgment to them. They\u2019re servicing a marketplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The judge in Kadrey v. Meta dismissed many of the authors\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 $1.5 billion \u2014 the company also agreed to destroy its trove of pirated ebooks. But where things get complicated is with the trove of secondhand books \u2014 millions of them \u2014 the company bought and scanned to train its models under the name Project Panama<\/a>. Judge William Alsup ruled that using those legally acquired books to train an LLM qualified as fair use because it was \u201cquintessentially transformative.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe courts and the judges seem to be starting to lean our way, and the court of public opinion too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Krystle Delgado<\/p>\n

\u201cI strongly disagree with the judge on that part of the ruling \u2026 I very much hope that future courts will see the light,\u201d Bartz says. \u201cEven a library can\u2019t buy a physical copy of a book, scan it, and start lending it out as an ebook,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Still, she doesn\u2019t 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\u2019 work without consent. She described the sizable settlement as the \u201cfirst major win for creatives against an AI company \u2026 Hopefully that will guide us toward guardrails that are much needed in the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 favor. \u201cRight now with these companies, they\u2019re really nervous,\u201d she says. \u201cNot 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.\u201d Polls have shown that people, at the very least<\/a>, want transparency<\/a> when it comes to AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even if they win the legal battles, though, all the creators and lawyers I spoke to are concerned about the artists\u2019 ability to continue making a living in the face of an ever-growing tide of AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s been so much money spent on marketing to us this idea that AI is inevitable,\u201d Bartz says, \u201cand it\u2019s very convincing and it\u2019s very loud and it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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See All Tech<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[554,1119,457,84,96,59,844,1215,128,874,305,227,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-718510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-books","tag-business","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-google","tag-law","tag-music","tag-openai","tag-policy","tag-tech","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}