Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning
For practitioners using AI tools in creative work, this outlines the legal risks, changing copyright landscape, and potential need to reconsider data sources and ethical practices.
AI Summary
Artists, authors, and musicians are increasingly filing lawsuits against AI companies, alleging copyright infringement and unauthorized use of their work to train models, with some achieving notable legal victories. The article highlights creators like author Kirk Wallace Johnson and visual artists Sarah Andersen in their efforts to challenge the AI industry's data practices. It examines the impact of court decisions on the definition of fair use and the broader implications for the creative industries.
Excerpt
Artists whose work has been co-opted by AI are taking to court. | Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge 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 t