What rights do creators have in the age of A.I.—and who actually enforces them? How can an artist appropriate appropriately in the digital age? Katarina Feder, the vice president of the Artists Rights Society (ARS), is here to answer everything you wanted to know about artists’ rights but were afraid to ask. The inquiries below are inspired by real conundrums presented to ARS, which has worked to protect the intellectual property rights of thousands of visual artists and estates from around the world since 1987. To have your question answered for a future edition of this column, send an inquiry to knowyourrights@ars.com.
I saw that David Salle trained his own A.I. to “self-plagiarize” his older work in order to create the backgrounds for newer work. How is that legal? Could I do this myself?
You saw correctly: National treasure David Salle first debuted paintings that incorporate artificial intelligence in 2024. (CULTURED recently included a solo show featuring the series in its round-up of Venice shows to see.) Salle has long interrogated the idea of originality in his work by appropriating photographs, reproducing his own, and examining how an artist can be both a skilled painter and a product of his influences.
Then Salle went one step further and trained A.I. to appropriate himself. Working with the technologists Danika Laszuk and Grant Davis, he customized a model on his own “Pastorals” series, 1999–2000, printed the new configurations on linen, and painted over them to create his “New Pastorals,” first shown at Gladstone Gallery in New York in 2024.
Your legal question should really be split in two: Is the training legal, and is the output protectable? Both answers favor Salle, but for different reasons.
On the training side, the only copyrights at issue are his own. Salle owns the copyrights, no matter who owns the “Pastoral” paintings. Copyright infringement requires copying someone else’s protected work without a license or fair use defense. A closed-loop training set built from your own canvases sidesteps that entire battlefield. You may have heard that Salle’s gallery removed a painting from a recent show in Los Angeles following claims from a Minnesota-based social media influencer that his A.I. model had appropriated the work of another artist, but this claim was incorrect and the painting was only taken down to mitigate this confusion. In point of fact, that portion of the work was hand-painted, and the kind of painting-within-a-painting appropriation that dates back to Édouard Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola.
On the output side, the U.S. Copyright Office’s January 2025 report (part two of its ongoing A.I. series) is unusually clear about a scenario that matches Salle’s almost exactly. The office concluded that when a human puts their own copyrightable work into an A.I. system, they remain the author of whatever portion of the original expression is still perceptible in the output. The A.I.-generated result is effectively a derivative work of the human’s underlying art. The office further confirmed that A.I.-assisted works qualify for copyright protection in cases where a human contributes sufficient creative expression: editing, arranging, modifying, or—to take a hypothetical entirely at random—printing the output on linen and painting over it. Mere prompting doesn’t get you there. Salle’s overpainting almost certainly does.
What you must take care to avoid is the element of deception. Salle never hid his use of A.I., which he describes less as a co-author than as a smart brush. Don’t present old work as new and get paid for it, and don’t pretend that warmed-over ideas are a fresh creative breakthrough. Beyond the reputational cost, misrepresenting the date, authorship, or provenance of an artwork can constitute civil fraud, breach of warranty under the Uniform Commercial Code (which governs art sales), and, in egregious cases, criminal forgery.
One last related lesson: When Alec Baldwin coveted Ross Bleckner‘s Sea and Mirror, 1996, but the dealer Mary Boone was unable to pry it from the collector who owned it, she sold him a freshly painted version masquerading as the original and stamped the same inventory number, 7449, on the back. Baldwin paid $190,000 in 2010. He noticed the colors were off the moment the crate was opened, but was told the artist had merely cleaned the canvas. Six years later, he sued for fraud. Boone settled for a seven-figure sum in 2017. The problem was never Bleckner’s self-plagiarization, but obscuring the painting’s true history.
I’m developing an app that uses A.I. and augmented reality to allow users to “paint” murals on walls virtually, swiping through a variety of street artists’ styles. Could I get into legal trouble for this?
The short answer is yes, you certainly can get in trouble for this. Street art enjoys copyright protection, as well as other intellectual property considerations, and copyright issues could be triggered by both the creation and “training” of your A.I. model, as well as the results that are intended to mimic a street artist’s style.
Street art tends to be illegal, as in, it’s created without the requisite permission of the property owner. But when it comes to copyright, a work of art is a work of art, regardless of where it was created, and whether its creation was legal or not. A Keith Haring on the wall of a subway station enjoys the same copyright as any painting you might see at the artist’s show at the Brant Foundation.
H&M learned this principle the hard way in 2018, when the graffiti artist Revok demanded that the clothing giant cease using an image of his Brooklyn street art. In an act of Scandinavian overconfidence rarely seen outside the works of Karl Ove Knausgård, H&M counter-sued Revok, believing that his illegal artwork could not claim copyright. They withdrew the lawsuit after intense public backlash.
Here’s a caveat: While an art work is protected by copyright, an art style generally is not. Last year, the Internet was flooded with images in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved animated films that had been generated from photographs by GPT Image. But because GPT was recreating the Ghibli look, rather than reproducing specific Ghibli characters, OpenAI wasn’t held liable for infringing copyright.
Still, monetizing an artist’s style and reputation leaves you open to legal action. The artists could sue you for false endorsement or trade-dress infringement, claiming that your app deceptively implies their involvement. This happened last year when three U.K. street artists—Cole Smith, Reece Deardon, and Harry Matthews, known professionally as DISA, SNOK, and RENNEE—sued Vivienne Westwood for allegedly putting their street art and graffiti tags onto clothing without permission. The plaintiffs argued that the line had stolen their credibility and made them look like corporate sellouts in the process.
And all this could get even worse if you actually spoke to any of the graffiti artists whose style your app mimics. In 2026, AirAsia was sued by the Lithuanian-born, Malaysia-based artist Ernest Zacharevic because the airline had allegedly reproduced one of his better-known murals Kids on Bicycle, 2012, on one of their aircraft without his consent. What made this particularly egregious was the fact that AirAsia supposedly met with Zacharevic in 2017 about a potential paid collaboration, so the airline was fully aware of the artist and his rates.
As I said at the top, you should treat graffiti the way you would treat any other kind of art. When the image generator GANksy was unveiled in 2020, it was described as being trained on the “portfolio of a certain street artist.” One letter is not abundant protection, and despite Banksy’s anarchic style, he’s actually quite litigious. His Pest Control Office Limited goes after would-be imitators using trademark to protect his (perhaps now outed) identity. “The fact that he may have said on two occasions that ‘copyright is for losers’ should not impact on the validity of his trademark registration,” one expert told The Art Newspaper.
I’m a romance author whose novels contain a lot of dialogue that might be considered “spicy.” A friend of mine recently showed me screenshots from a dating app with “A.I.-generated” opening lines that are clearly lifted from my work, some of them verbatim. How did this even happen? What recourse do I have here?
It takes a lot for me to be shocked by anything I hear about the world of online dating but I must admit that this is a new one. Before, we used only to worry about STIs, lovebombing, and catfishing—now we must add to this list of dangers the concept of “chatfishing”: the idea that your date’s rizz levels may have been artificially inflated by ChatGPT.
And now these apps are ripping off lines from novels? Reader, I will bury them.
Your question isn’t clear as to whether or not the dating app generated these lines itself so I should first clarify that none of the major players currently supply A.I.-generated pickup lines. (Facebook Dating proposes ideas for dates; Hinge suggests ways to improve the answers to prompts in one’s profile.)
So chatfishing would seem to originate with the users, who are going out of their way to be lazy. External aides may include ChatGPT or dedicated wingman apps like Rizz, Winggg, and YourMove. These apps are used in parallel and, when fed screenshots of chats and profiles, suggest clever comebacks and disarming ways to slide into someone’s DMs. These apps are ostensibly context-sensitive, and there haven’t yet been formal accusations that bodices aren’t the only thing being ripped here.
I have to wonder if your romance novels aren’t being infringed through straightforward scraping by LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude in order to summarize them or produce similar texts. In a $1.5 billion landmark settlement last year, Anthropic effectively paid $3,000 per work on 500,000 books for illegally training its models on copyrighted works, both fiction and nonfiction. The New York Times recently profiled the South African romance novelist Coral Hart, who demonstrated how she uses A.I. to produce a novel in 45 minutes. This use case isn’t the biggest surprise, given that romance literature has always been an early adopter of new technological practices, from e-books to BookTok.
I should note, however, that use of a sentence or two, or use of a very small portion of a larger book (otherwise known as de minimis use), may not qualify as infringement. Dating apps are continuing to invest heavily in A.I., so it may not be long before they are generating original lines to auto-complete conversations. But even if they were merely training their models on your text, it could be the case that they owe you money, or at least some form of citation.
You should do some investigations to find out how these lines were generated, either in-app or with a third party. You deserve credit for your smut.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
At 101, the Chinese American Artist Ce Roser Is Finally Getting Her Big Break
Yes, Kane Parsons Directed ‘Backrooms.’ Here’s How It All Went Down.
The Gayest Places in New York, According to Queer Culturati
Director Boots Riley and George Clinton Disagree About the Future of A.I.
The 8 Must-See Movies at Tribeca This June, According to the Ultimate Insider
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
