Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

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 intellectual property. He proactively reached out to Susman Godfrey, the law firm already leading the case against Anthropic on behalf of authors, because he saw their suit as a “middle finger on behalf of everyone that has tried to create something.” Johnson is just one of the dozens of authors, musicians, illustrators, and artists of all stripes…