As OpenAI's ChatGPT and its imitators exploded onto the world stage over the past few years, they kicked off a series of legal showdowns that are still working their way through the courts.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI. Disney is suing Midjourney. And in a class action case representing potentially millions of writers, book authors are suing Anthropic.

All these cases are orbiting around a central question: what do the creators of modern AI systems — which are trained by ingesting vast amounts of information to find patterns in it — owe the people and organizations that created all that information? It's an especially fraught question as both AI companies and certain economists warn that AI tech could be poised to replace many of the workers who currently do intellectual labor.

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