Authors and musicians are suing AI giants — and a thirst for 'revenge' is fueling the fight

When The Atlantic released a searchable dataset of pirated books used to train AI, author Kirk Wallace Johnson found his own work in there. The nonfiction books he’d spent half a decade researching were fed to a chatbot without his consent. His reaction wasn’t just anger. He told The Verge he felt a “healthy thirst for revenge on these massive corporations that have become galactically wealthy” off his intellectual property. Johnson didn’t just stew. He proactively contacted Susman Godfrey, the law firm already suing Anthropic on behalf of authors, calling their suit a “middle finger on behalf of everyone that has tried to create something.”

Johnson is far from alone. He’s one of dozens of creators now waging a multi-front legal war against the core business model of generative AI. Illustrator Sarah Andersen, a lead plaintiff in a class action against Stability AI, Midjourney, and others, has been fighting since January 2023. She described the experience as having her life’s work “reduced… to an algorithm.” Novelist Andrea Bartz felt “violated, shocked, alarmed” upon discovering her books were also swallowed by training datasets. These aren’t abstract fights over terms of service. For the artists, it’s a deeply personal breach.

The legal arguments are branching out. While many cases hinge on copyright infringement and the boundaries of fair use, musician Sam Kogon is taking a different tack against Google. As lead plaintiff in a suit targeting the Lyria AI music engine, Kogon’s lawyers argue Google violated its own terms of service by improperly leveraging YouTube’s Content ID system for training data. Kogon sees it as a fundamentally dehumanizing act. “Making fake music,” he said, “is the most anti-human thing you could do.”

A grim consensus is shared among the plaintiffs: the people steering this technology don’t get it. Johnson describes the situation bluntly, saying, “This does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we’re all stuck in it.” A few early wins in court haven’t erased that deep worry. The artists are optimistic about legal guardrails eventually snapping into place, but they’re under no illusion that the corporations driving the bus are going to hit the brakes on their own.