AI Is Built on Writers' Unpaid Labor

As copywriters, we have a lot of ethical questions when using AI. For one, is the work I’m doing built on texts copyrighted by authors illegally without their consent or compensation? Yep. Well, sort of. The jury is still out on if it’s legal or not. There are a lot of nuances to copyright law. Currently, a group of authors including George R. R. Martin and Sarah Silverman are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using their work illegally in the training of ChatGPT.

So far, however, many judges have ruled in favor of AI companies. Not because of a pro-tech agenda, but because of the fair use clause in copyright law. Fair use allows certain copyrighted material to be used if it is sufficiently transformed. Writing reviews, quoting text in a critique, news reporting, and parody are classic examples. By definition, ChatGPT is positioned as transformative. The name itself stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer.

There are some success stories. Such as in New York Times v. OpenAI the Times demonstrated that the model could reproduce its articles nearly word for word with relatively simple prompts. That helped establish a case for plagiarism rather than transformation. A judge agreed that OpenAI would need to log training materials going forward. It was a meaningful ruling, but it did little to address the damage already done.

In another high-profile case, a judge ruled in favor of Anthropic, also known as Claude, which is owned by Amazon, allowing the use of copyrighted material that the company had legally purchased for training. However, the ruling went against the use of so-called shadow libraries, a term that sounds abstract but refers to massive databases of pirated books. OpenAI is widely suspected of having used similar libraries, though it does not currently disclose its training data.

These cases are recent, but the importance of copyright law is not. It appears in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, drafted in 1787: “Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

That clause exists for a reason. If artists and inventors cannot protect their work, what incentive is there to create? Imagine if anyone could legally do whatever they wanted with a Disney character. Licensing would collapse. Merchandising would disappear. A beloved children’s franchise could suddenly be used to promote extreme political views. The result would not be innovation. It would be chaos.

Many artists are already feeling the consequences. Some have watched their work dry up as AI-generated images rank alongside or even above their own names. Being briefly associated with your heroes is flattering until you realize you are now competing with a free, automated version of yourself. Fair use is meant to ensure that transformation does not dilute an artist’s market or replace them. In practice, that line is already being crossed.

SOURCES:
Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said, Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-cut-pirated-millions-used-books-train-claude-copyright-2025-6?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Meta’s Massive AI Training Book Heist: What Authors Need to Know, The Authors Guild

https://authorsguild.org/news/meta-libgen-ai-training-book-heist-what-authors-need-to-know/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors, The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/26/meta-wins-ai-copyright-lawsuit-as-us-judge-rules-against-authors?utm_source=chatgpt.com