Artists Are Lawyering Up Against AI Slop, and Some Are Even Winning
Artists are winning early AI training-data lawsuits, signaling real legal risk for model developers.
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 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 … Read the full story at The Verge.
- 01Artists whose work has been co-opted by AI are taking to court.
- 02| 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.
- 03And, like a lot of artists, he found it.
- 04Essentially, 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.