Artists across writing, illustration and music are turning to the courts as generative AI systems reshape the business and meaning of creative work. Their cases do not all make the same legal claim, but they share a central concern: creative labor was used to build AI products without the consent artists believe should have been required.
The lawsuits have become one of the most important battlegrounds over AI training. Some cases focus on copyright. Others argue that companies stretched platform terms of service beyond what creators reasonably understood when they uploaded their work.
How artists found themselves inside AI training data
For author Kirk Wallace Johnson, the issue became personal when The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI. He searched for his name and found it. His books, including The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon, had been used in a way he says followed years of work.
Johnson described those nonfiction books as projects that took “five to six years researching, writing, and investigating.” His reaction combined anger, fear for the future of writers, and a desire to push back against large companies that had benefited from intellectual property like his.
He contacted Susman Godfrey, the law firm already leading a case against Anthropic on behalf of authors. Johnson saw that suit as a broader stand for people who make creative work, not only for the individual writers named in court filings.
He is not alone. The fight now includes authors, musicians, illustrators and other artists. Their lawsuits have mainly targeted AI companies on copyright grounds, though some have also relied on arguments about terms of service. The outcomes have been mixed so far, especially around how courts define fair use.
Visual artists moved early
Illustrator and cartoonist Sarah Andersen was among the first artists to directly challenge major AI companies. She has described her webcomic Sarah’s Scribbles as a deeply personal body of work shaped by education, childhood influences and many individual creative decisions.
Andersen, Karla Ortiz, Kelly McKernan and several other visual artists filed a class action suit against Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI. That case has been moving through the court system since January 2023.
The timing matters because the technology’s public role changed quickly. The case began only a few months after Stability’s image generator Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were first released. ChatGPT had only just made its debut the previous November. What first looked to many people like a curiosity has since become a much larger policy and industry issue.
Andersen has said she felt “violated” and described the experience as “reducing my life’s work to an algorithm.” That reaction captures a larger tension in the cases: artists are not only arguing about money or licensing terms. They are also objecting to a process they see as treating finished work as raw material for systems that may compete with the people who made it.
Authors and musicians are testing different legal paths
The lawsuits against AI companies do not all follow the same route. Author Andrea Bartz, known for books including We Were Never Here and The Spare Room, is the lead plaintiff in Susman Godfrey’s suit against Anthropic. She told The Verge, “I felt violated, shocked, alarmed,” after seeing work she had spent years creating included among books allegedly taken for training.
Other cases have targeted Meta, Google, Anthropic and the AI music generator Suno. In the Meta case, novelist Richard Kadrey, comedian Sarah Silverman, writer Christopher Golden and others sued over the alleged use of their books to train Llama AI without consent.
In music, Sam Kogon is the lead plaintiff in an ongoing suit against Google’s Lyria AI music engine. Kogon and other independent musicians accuse Google of violating its own terms of service, rather than making the case only around copyright infringement.
Their lawyers argue that Google improperly used its Content ID system and YouTube data to train Lyria and ProducerAI. Google has mostly declined to comment on the specific accusations, though it has filed a motion to dismiss. In that filing, Google says YouTube’s terms of service give it broad rights to “reproduce, distribute, [and] prepare derivative works.”
Kogon calls that “pure bait and switch.” He argues that YouTube’s changing terms and take-it-or-leave-it structure leave creators with little real bargaining power. His concern is that work uploaded before these AI tools existed is now being treated as available for training.
Terms of service have become a flashpoint
The Google case highlights a question that reaches beyond one platform: what did creators actually agree to when they accepted dense platform rules? Krystle Delgado, an entertainment and IP lawyer who runs the YouTube channel Top Music Attorney, said, “I don’t think that anyone uses YouTube thinking that you are giving the rights to remake your content.”
Delgado also noted that YouTube’s terms include an “irrevocable perpetual license, meaning you can’t ever take it back.” That distinction is central to why musicians and other creators are uneasy. A license written for one platform relationship can look very different when applied to AI training.
Google spokesperson Jack Malon told The Verge that “as we’ve said for several years, we use content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers across YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI applications.”
Artists interviewed by The Verge viewed that position as an abuse of Google’s power. Their concern is practical as much as legal: avoiding a platform as large as YouTube may not be realistic for working creators.
What is at stake for creative work
The artists bringing these cases are not uniformly confident about the future of AI, but many are optimistic about their own chances in court. Some also hope that litigation will help courts build clearer guardrails for how creative work can be used in AI systems.
The deepest worry is that independent artists and the creative working class will carry the biggest burden. Kogon says AI companies are devaluing work by giving AI-generated output to people, at least for now, for free. He warns that this could disenfranchise and disempower many musicians.
Johnson’s view is similarly uneasy. “This does not seem to be a bus driven by a bunch of sane sober thinking people, and we’re all stuck in it,” he says.
For creators, the cases are about control, consent and recognition. For AI companies, the disputes test how far training practices can go under copyright law and platform agreements. The courts now have to decide how old legal frameworks apply to a fast-moving technology built on human-made work.