Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning
What's happening
AI firms have bought and destructively scanned physical books, cutting bindings, scanning pages with industrial equipment, and discarding the originals at scale, including rare and out-of-print copies. That practice has been described as widespread and protected by the first-sale doctrine and fair use, and a court has ruled that such destructive scanning was fair use. Separately, when The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, author Kirk Wallace Johnson found his books, including The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon, among the works used, and artists are responding by hiring lawyers and winning some cases against AI use of their work.
Why it's trending
Because datasets and court rulings exposing which books were scanned, plus visible author discoveries, have pushed creators to take legal action now.
SignalHolding at its usual pace, confirmed across 3 independent source types.
Story volume
Stories per dayAngles you could write
If AI companies can legally buy, shred and scan rare books, maybe the real failure is cultural, not legal: we let our cultural heritage be treated as training data rather than protected labor and craft.
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Original sources6
- 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 […]
The Verge AIJul 29 - AI firms bought and destructively scanned millions of physical books to train models — and a court ruled it was fair use
This resurfaced this week (some are calling it “AI book burning”), and I think the legal angle is more interesting than the outrage framing, so here's a neutral breakdown. What's documented: To build a training corpus, Anthropic bought millions of physical print books and “destructively scanned” them — cutting off the bindings, scanning the pages, and discarding the physical copies. It even hired
r/artificialJul 29 - AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical booksHackerNewsJul 31
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