He might not look like it, but Matthew Butterick is the unlikely driving force behind the first wave of class-action lawsuits against big artificial-intelligence companies. He’s on a mission to make sure writers, artists, and other creative people have control over how their work is used by AI. The complaints all take slightly different legal approaches, but together, they represent a crusade to give creative people a say in how their work is used in AI training. “It’s pushback,” Butterick says. It’s a mission that AI companies vigorously oppose, because it frames the way they train their tools as fundamentally corrupt. Even many copyright and intellectual property scholars see it as a long shot.
