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AI lawsuits?
By Steven | October 8, 2026
Before AI kills us all, or enslaves us like horses, or takes our jobs, or destroys our infrastructure, it’s going to drive us to the courts.
I’m a media lawyer and lecturer, and I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about how AI is going to shake down in my field.
You’ve probably already heard about the raft of copyright lawsuits aimed at AI companies’ practice of hoovering up our entire cultural inheritance without paying for it. But the cases will go well beyond that.
I sometimes imagine myself setting an exam in a few years’ time:
Charlie, an author, uses the LLM ChatTanooga to polish her prose and suggest an alternative ending with a twist. She gets it to add some new passages to flesh out her main character. Has she breached the term in her contract with the publisher requiring the work to be original?
The publisher, WilliamCollins, feeds the book into AI to suggest a blurb and some marketing scripts. It doesn’t switch off AI’s training data function. Has the publisher breached the contract?
The book is a hit. Jude, a journalist, runs it through AI-Spy, an AI detection programme. It concludes the book is 8% AI generated.
Jude reports this. Is that defamatory? Might the machine’s take attract a defence of honest opinion? If the accusation is wrong, might Jude have a defence of responsible communication in the public interest?
Tom bought a copy of Charlie’s book. Can he get his money back?
WilliamCollins pulls the book and sues Charlie. Can it get a court order forcing ChatTanooga to disclose Charlie’s chat records?
Blake represents WilliamCollins and gets ChatTanooga to draft the application. It invents a few helpful cases. Has Blake committed contempt of court?
Sam publishes a different book with a very similar style to Charlie’s and in fact includes some passage from Charlie’s book, almost verbatim. Some of those passages were written by AI. Can Charlie sue for breach of copyright? Or for Passing Off? (Can ChatTanooga?)
Justice ChatTanooga rules that AI owns the copyright and orders Sam and Charlie and WilliamCollins to pay millions of dollars in compensation. ChatTanooga then drains Charlie’s bank account, sells her home, and lists all the chemicals in her body on TradeMe.
Are there good grounds for appeal?
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