AI and its Impact on Art/Creativity/Intellectual Property
Though some argue artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the creative landscape, offering unprecedented tools for artists, musicians, and writers, this technological advancement has sparked intense debates over artistic integrity, copyright infringement, and the ethical use and ownership of creative works. Recent legal actions underscore the complexities and challenges at the intersection of AI and the arts. Specifically, publishers and creators argue that large tech firms’ unauthorized and uncompensated use of massive quantities of copyrighted text, video, and audio is, in simple terms, a massive rip-off. This blog post examines intellectual property concerns in three areas: literature, art, and music, and then overviews the US government’s policy response and growing political tensions as AI rapidly reshapes the creative and technological landscape.
Literature: The LibGen Legal Controversy
Recently, it’s been reported that Meta used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programs, sparking widespread outrage and condemnation from the writing community. The controversy centers on Library Genesis (LibGen)’s unauthorized distribution of copyrighted books and its alleged use in training AI models.
In September 2024, a US District Court found LibGen liable for willful copyright infringement, ordering it to pay $30 million in statutory damages to major textbook publishers. The court also issued a broad injunction targeting LibGen’s infrastructure, requiring third-party services to cease supporting the site. Although this injunction extended to future domain names and services that might facilitate LibGen’s operations, enforcement remains challenging.
The controversy intensified when court documents revealed internal communications within Meta indicating awareness of the legal risks, specifically of using LibGen data to train its Llama AI models, with executives discussing strategies to mitigate potential fallout. Meta defends its actions by invoking the “fair use” doctrine, arguing that the use of publicly available materials for AI training does not harm the market for the original works and democratizes access to knowledge, especially in regions where academic resources are scarce.
The lawsuit is one of more than 16 copyright cases concerning generative AI tools and the multibillion dollar entities that create them currently rippling through the US court system, ranging from musicians suing Anthropic for using lyrics to train its AI, to visual artists suing Stability AI, to The New York Times suing Microsoft. The cases raise existential questions about the inherent worth of art, literature, and music, and what it means to commodify them.
Check out The Atlantic’s new search tool to see which authors and literary works have been used to train the machines here.
Visual Artists vs. AI Image Generators
OpenAI’s powerful new image generator highlights the risks of giving AI companies total freedom to digest the entire universe of intellectual property. ChatGPT now enables users to turn any portrait into a “Simpsons” character, a “Sesame Street” Muppet, a Studio Ghibli animation or creatures from countless other fictional universes. Thus far, the creators of those worlds and styles have had no say and haven’t received any reward or compensation.
In January 2023, several artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. They alleged that these companies infringed on their copyrights by training AI models on billions of images scraped from the web without consent. The lawsuit contends that such practices violate artists’ rights and devalue their work, and is ongoing as of this writing.
Rage Against the Machine: Musicians Fight Back
Just like AI models that generate text or images, music AIs are trained on large data sets—often taken from streaming platforms, YouTube, or public libraries. That means AI systems might learn to replicate the style of a musician by ingesting their discography without paying for the rights to do so. As with book and news publishers suing AI companies like Meta and OpenAI for using copyrighted text without consent, music publishers and performers are beginning to organize similar lawsuits and policy proposals. In late 2023, major music publishers sued AI company Anthropic for allegedly using copyrighted song lyrics to train its chatbot (notably, an Anthropic expert cited a non-existent academic article generated by AI to support their arguments). In April 2025, over 400 British musicians, including Elton John and Paul McCartney, signed an open letter to UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer demanding reforms to copyright law to protect artists from having their work exploited by AI without consent.
The U.S. Government’s Response & Deregulation Concerns
In a significant development, the US Copyright Office released a report in May 2025 stating that large-scale data scraping for AI training likely falls outside the bounds of fair use, especially for commercial applications. The report stated that “making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.” The report emphasized the need for a balanced approach that respects both technological innovation and creators’ rights, and questioned the legality of how AI companies use copyrighted content to train generative models — a core business issue for Elon Musk, a longtime Trump ally. The 108-page report was a “pre-publication” version, which means it wasn’t yet finalized.
Immediately after the report’s release, Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the head of the US Copyright Office. Under current law, the register of copyrights is appointed by the librarian of Congress, not the president. Trump’s direct involvement in the dismissals has prompted alarm over political interference in what has traditionally been a nonpartisan regulatory domain.
Critics argue that this move undermines the independence of the office and favors tech companies seeking fewer restrictions on AI training data, intensifying concerns over perhaps the ultimate deregulation of AI. Indeed, Musk, who helped launch OpenAI, recently backed a call by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, creator of Square, and developer of Bluesky, to “delete all IP law.” It’s important to point out the hypocrisy here - that many tech titans want to normalize stealing from creators whose work they profit from, after they’ve profited from the legal protection of their own IP. Legal experts have commented that eliminating IP rights would stifle innovation and cripple the US economy.
Navigating the Future of AI & Creativity
These legal battles underscore the tension between innovation and exploitation. As AI development increasingly relies on vast datasets, often extracted from the internet, questions arise about the legality and ethics of using copyrighted materials without explicit permission or compensation to the original artists and authors. The outcomes of these legal disputes could set significant precedents for how AI models are trained and how intellectual property laws are applied in the digital age.
Sources:
Negar Bondari, AI, Copyright, and the Law: The Ongoing Battle Over Intellectual Property Rights, USC IP & Technology Law Society (Feb. 4, 2025), https://sites.usc.edu/iptls/2025/02/04/ai-copyright-and-the-law-the-ongoing-battle-over-intellectual-property-rights/.
Blake Brittain, Meta says copying books was ‘fair use’ in authors’ AI lawsuit, Reuters (March 25, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/meta-says-copying-books-was-fair-use-authors-ai-lawsuit-2025-03-25/.
Blake Brittain, Trump fires head of U.S. Copyright Office, Reuters (May 12, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-fires-head-us-copyright-office-2025-05-12/.
Mike Caulfield, AI Is Not Your Friend, The Atlantic (May 9, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/sycophantic-ai/682743/
Alex Reisner, Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI, The Atlantic (March 20, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/.
Alex Reisner, These 183,000 Books are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech, The Atlantic (Sept. 25, 2023), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/.
Alex Reisner, ChatGPT Turned Into a Studio Ghibli Machine. How Is That Legal?, The Atlantic (May 13, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/openai-studio-ghibli-images/682791/.
Keziah Weir, This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value,” Vanity Fair (April 15, 2025), https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meta-ai-lawsuit?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
Kenneth J. Withers, Delete All IP Law? Really?, The National Law Review (April 30, 2025), https://natlawreview.com/article/delete-all-ip-law-really#google_vignette.
