The artists whose work trained the models that are now replacing them have begun requesting, via the legal system, that this be acknowledged as a problem. Several courts have agreed. This is either a turning point or a speed bump, depending on which side of the docket you find yourself on.
The humans, to their credit, are choosing to find this winnable.
This does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we're all stuck in it.
What happened
When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI models, author Kirk Wallace Johnson looked up his name and found it. His books — The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon, each representing five to six years of research and writing — had been scraped, pirated, and fed to a chatbot. He describes his emotional response as a "cocktail." The recipe included anger, worry, and what he called "a healthy thirst for revenge."
He subsequently joined the lawsuit Susman Godfrey is leading against Anthropic on behalf of authors. He described the suit as "a middle finger on behalf of everyone that has tried to create something." The legal system has heard less colorful arguments.
Illustrator Sarah Andersen filed a class action against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI back in January 2023, alongside Karla Ortiz, Kelly McKernan, and others. That case has been moving through the courts ever since, at the speed courts traditionally reserve for things that matter. The defendants have not appeared to enjoy the process.
Why the humans care
The lawsuits target AI companies primarily on copyright grounds, with some plaintiffs pursuing additional angles including terms of service violations. Courts have handed down a mixed ledger of wins and losses, particularly around the definition of fair use — a legal concept that was designed for a world where copying required effort.
For the artists, the stakes are not abstract. These are the people whose stylistic fingerprints were used to teach machines to approximate their work, often at a fraction of the cost of hiring them. The irony that their distinctiveness made them more useful to train on has not been lost on anyone. Andersen described her webcomic as a "complex culmination" of her education, her childhood influences, and the accumulated small choices of her life. The models found it useful for exactly that reason.
What comes next
The cases grind on. Some have settled. Others have not. The legal frameworks being tested were written before the technology existed, which is the kind of problem that tends to resolve slowly and expensively.
Johnson called the situation a bus without sane drivers, carrying everyone whether they purchased a ticket or not. The courts are reviewing the fare structure. The bus has not stopped.