Opinion: Creative Professionals Are Losing the Copyright War Against AI Models

Thousands of artists from different disciplines—including well-known figures like Paul McCartney, Julianne Moore, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Billie Eilish—have publicly spoken out against AI companies, but it seems they are losing the copyright battle

The hard work of creative professionals is being overshadowed, not only by artificial intelligence that mimics their style and technique, but also by U.S. courts that are siding with tech giants over the use of copyrighted content.

Last month, several authors lost legal battles against Silicon Valley startups. A federal judge ruled in favor of Anthropic after three writers claimed that Claude, the company’s chatbot, had reproduced paraphrased versions of their work and style.

Even though it was later confirmed that the AI had been trained on their books—including pirated copies—and that the authors weren’t compensated in any way, the judge argued that the chatbot had behaved “like any reader aspiring to be a writer” trying to replicate the style of their favorite authors.

Also this month, another judge sided with Meta, despite a lawsuit brought by 13 writers—including well-known names such as Sarah Silverman and Junot Diaz—who insisted they were never asked for permission to use their work in training Meta’s AI models.

While thousands of authors, musicians, designers, and creative artists around the world feel robbed of their intellectual property and stripped of their creative products, tech companies continue to push ahead in the race to stay at the forefront with the most advanced products. Is this a fair fight?

Tech Giants Ask Neither Forgiveness Nor Permission

As if scraping the internet and copying everything they could get their hands on wasn’t enough, these AI companies took it a step further: they downloaded millions of pirated books to feed their insatiable tech beasts. Anthropic alone—self-branded as one of the “most ethical” AI companies out there—has reportedly downloaded around 7 million pirated books.

Operating under what feels like a near-Machiavellian playbook, Big Tech seems focused on moving forward at all costs, skipping over even the “forgiveness” part of the old  expression, “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Which makes sense, as Zuckerberg—and Silicon Valley’s— mantra is just “move fast and break things.”

“Move fast and break things” sounds good until you realize you’re moving the wrong direction and everything’s broken.

— Danny Trinh (@dtrinh) January 4, 2021

Although, in Anthropic’s case, the judge did say that a separate trial is needed to specifically address the issue of the pirated books, U.S. courts overall seem to favor technological progress over the work of millions of artists.

More trials are set to come, but it all points out that tech giants won’t get hurt as much as creative professionals are right now.

A Situation That Affects Multiple Disciplines

Musicians, writers, journalists, designers, photographers, comedians, and artists of all kinds… Creative professionals across multiple disciplines have been stripped of their own creations.

They’ve watched, with a sense of dread, as AI companies develop models and systems that can mimic their style, tone, and technique.

There are countless advanced tools now capable of generating artistic content—from video tools like Veo, to image generators like Midjourney, to simple text-based platforms like Claude. All of them can mimic an artist’s style and produce free content for millions of people around the world.

Thousands of artists have spoken out against this for years. Painters, designers, and photographers joined the app Cara, and left popular social media platforms such as Instagram after Meta updated its policies, saying that they would use the content from people’s accounts to train their AI models. Cara was created in 2022 by Jingna Zhang as a platform commitment to prioritizing human-created content over AI content, but they have not shared updates on their progress in recent months

Over 13,500 artists and content creators—including prominent figures such as Julianne Moore, Thom Yorke, and Kazuo Ishiguro—signed a petition last year to stop tech companies from scraping content to train AI.

This year, over 1,000 musicians—Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Annie Lennox, and Kate Bush among them—released a silent album called Is This What We Want? to protest against the use of copyrighted material in the United Kingdom.

Artists have not remained silent—well, only for the album—, yet all of their efforts seem to be vanishing.

Technology Development Over Creative Value

The AI race has gained priority over protecting artists’ rights. Tech giants argue that in order to continue developing advanced AI models, the only viable path is to “move on” and allow unrestricted access to the data they need.

Since March, OpenAI has been lobbying the U.S. government to allow tech companies to train their AI models on copyrighted material, and it’s working.

“America has so many AI startups, attracts so much investment, and has made so many research breakthroughs largely because the fair use doctrine promotes AI development,” wrote OpenAI in its proposal for the new AI Action Plan. Recent developments suggest that U.S. courts have been listening.

Some publishers and studios have managed to strike deals with AI companies. Universal Music Group, for instance, partnered with the AI music company KLAY Vision to develop ethical AI solutions for artists. Publishers like News Corp have also reached agreements with companies like OpenAI for the use of their content. However, it remains unclear how these partnerships will evolve.

Meanwhile, many experts in the creative industry asking for compensation remain concerned and feel powerless. “If we allow the erosion of copyright, which is really how value is created in the music sector, then we’re going to be in a position where there won’t be artists in the future,” said composer Max Richter in an interview.

A Cloudy Future For Creative Professionals

Although there are still battles to be fought and some artists remain hopeful about the possibility of reaching agreements that benefit creative professionals, all signs suggest that artists will need to reinvent themselves and find new ways to create and monetize their work in the AI era.

There are many strategies they can adopt to stay afloat amid this storm of technological change—from building or joining new platforms and tools such as Glaze that protect their creations through digital safes, to accepting defeat and “joining the enemy” to create new AI-powered art.

Those who make a decision and take action to understand the current landscape and protect their intellectual output are the ones with the best chance of prevailing in the long run.