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

<figure> <img alt="a middle finger being at an AI sparkle" data-caption="Artists whose work has been co-opted by AI are taking to court. | Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge" data-portal-copyright="Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/07/268669_The_artists_suing_AI_companies_AParkin.jpg?quality=90&#038;strip=all&#038;crop=0,0,100,100" /> <figcaption> Artists whose work has been co-opted by AI are taking to court. | Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge </figcaption> </figure> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">When <em>The Atlantic </em>published a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/category/ai-watchdog/">searchable dataset</a> 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 <em>The Feather Thief </em>and <em>The Fishermen and the Dragon - </em>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 …</p> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/971059/ai-artists-lawsuit-google-meta-anthropic">Read the full story at The Verge.</a></p>