In order to generate Facebook images that trick your Nan into praising a fake kid who made a giant Jesus out of eggs, AI systems first need to be trained on eye-watering amounts of data. The more content that’s poured into these models, the more detailed, accurate and diverse the end results can be. So companies like OpenAI and Anthropic just scrape the entirety of human creative output – in other words, the internet.

But a little thing called copyright keeps cropping up as a thorn in their sides. Nintendo wasn’t too pleased that Meta AI allowed users to generate emoji stickers depicting Mario characters brandishing rifles, for instance. But while the big content owners have the resources to either sue AI companies or strike up lucrative licensing deals, small creators often get shafted.