‘ChatGPT said I did not exist’: how artists and writers are fighting back against AI

From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automation

No need for more scare stories about the looming automation of the future. Artists, designers, photographers, authors, actors and musicians see little humour left in jokes about AI programs that will one day do their job for less money. That dark dawn is here, they say.

Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest.