African creators have struggled with a painful problem of their work being consumed and enjoyed worldwide, yet the money and recognition flow elsewhere due to piracy, weak copyright enforcement, and a lack of infrastructure. The digital age promised to change all of this. Online platforms gave creators the ability to publish their work instantly and reach global audiences. Streaming services, e-commerce sites, and social media created new ways to monetise creativity.
But just as this promise was beginning to materialise, a new and far more sophisticated threat emerged. It did not come with the crude tactics of a pirate copying cassettes. It came with the polished language of innovation, efficiency, and progress. It came in the form of artificial intelligence.
The AI Revolution and the Theft of Creative Labour
Generative artificial intelligence, or Gen AI as it is often called, is a technology that can create new content—images, text, music, video—by learning from vast amounts of existing data. Companies like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Stability AI, the creator of Stable Diffusion, built their systems by scraping the internet. They fed billions of images, books, articles, and songs into powerful computers, teaching the AI to recognise patterns, styles, and techniques.
The results have been remarkable. Today, anyone can type a few words into a prompt and generate a professional-looking illustration in seconds. Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write an article, a poem, or even a novel. Anyone can use AI to compose a song that sounds like it was recorded in a top studio. These tools have democratised creativity in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
But there is a dark side to this revolution. The data that these AI systems learned from was not freely given. It was taken. Millions of copyrighted works—books, paintings, photographs, songs—were scraped from the internet without the permission of their creators and without any payment. The AI companies built their billion-dollar businesses on the backs of artists, writers, and musicians who never consented to their work being used in this way.
For African creators, this is not an abstract concern. Many AI companies are Western entities that have been accused of exploiting the copyrighted works of African creatives in training their AI models. This brings up the important issue of African creative data sovereignty—the right of African people to control how their cultural expressions are used. A photographer in Ghana who uploads her images to a stock photo site may find that those images have been scraped into an AI training dataset without her knowledge. A musician in Mali whose traditional rhythms are sampled into an AI system may never receive a cent for the use of his cultural heritage. A writer in South Africa whose novel is available online may see an AI system generate a derivative work that competes directly with her own book.
The stakes could not be higher. As the continent’s creative industries continue to mature, disputes surrounding originality, attribution, ownership, and control of creative works are becoming more frequent and legally sophisticated, particularly in an era driven by digital platforms, global distribution, AI-assisted creation, and viral social media dissemination. The creator economy in Africa is not just an economic opportunity; it is a matter of cultural survival.
The Legal Battles: Artists and Writers Fight Back
In response to this unprecedented appropriation of their work, creators around the world have turned to the courts. The resulting legal battles are among the most important of our time, with the potential to reshape the entire creative economy for generations to come.
The Artists Versus Stability AI
One of the most significant cases began in January 2023, when a group of visual artists filed a class action lawsuit in the United States against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. The lead plaintiffs—Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz—were soon joined by other artists, including Jingna Zhang, Gerald Brom, and Greg Rutkowski. They alleged that these companies had used their copyrighted works to train AI image-generation models without permission.
The case, known as Andersen v. Stability AI, has been a rollercoaster ride through the American legal system. An initial round of motions to dismiss was largely successful, with only one direct infringement claim surviving. The plaintiffs had alleged that Stable Diffusion contained “compressed copies” of training images, but the court ruled that they needed to define this term more clearly and provide greater clarity on how their copyrights were violated.
In August 2024, however, U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued a significant ruling allowing the artists to pursue claims that the AI image generators infringe upon their copyrights. The judge found that the artists had reasonably argued that the companies violate their rights by illegally storing their work and that Stable Diffusion “may have been built ‘to a significant extent on copyrighted works’ and was ‘created to facilitate that infringement by design'”. This was a major victory for the artists and a warning sign for the AI industry.
The lawsuit targets the LAION-Aesthetics dataset, which was commissioned by Stability AI. Studies found that 47 per cent of the dataset consists of images from stock photo sites like Shutterstock and Getty, shopping sites including Pinterest, and user-generated content platforms like Flickr. In other words, nearly half of the images used to train Stable Diffusion were taken from sources that are supposed to require licensing and payment. The artists argue that this is not incidental; it is the very foundation of the AI’s ability to generate images in the styles of real, living artists.
Getty Images Joins the Fray
In 2023, Getty Images, one of the world’s largest stock photography companies, launched proceedings in the High Court in London against Stability AI, originally alleging infringement of copyright in millions of images used to train Stable Diffusion, as well as infringement of database rights and trade marks. The case pushed into uncharted territory on the use of copyright materials in the training of AI models.
As the proceedings progressed, Getty narrowed the scope of its claims. Prior to judgment in November 2024, Getty decided not to pursue its claim of primary infringement, the central challenge being that training had taken place entirely outside the UK and thus principally outside the reach of UK copyright law. Instead, Getty rested its copyright claim on whether the offering of access to Stable Diffusion in the UK constituted the importation of an infringing article. The High Court judgment held that whilst an “infringing article” may consist of intangible property, the model weights underpinning Stable Diffusion did not reproduce Getty’s images, and so did not constitute an infringing article.
Getty Images was granted permission to appeal. In granting permission, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE acknowledged that the Court of Appeal may arrive at a different conclusion and that Getty’s proposed appeal “does have a real prospect of success. It concerns a pure question of law, namely a matter of statutory construction on which the minds of reasonable lawyers may differ”. The judge also recognised the broader importance of the answer to the questions at the heart of the dispute: “there are other compelling reasons for the appeal. The point of law is both novel and important because it concerns how the provisions of the CDPA should be construed (and specifically the phrase ‘infringing copy’) in the context of an AI model”.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Getty Images achieved a partial victory in its separate lawsuit against Stability AI. A U.S. District Court in California found that Getty Images sufficiently alleged claims for trademark infringement and unfair competition against Stability AI over the use of Getty’s copyrighted images to train AI image-generation models. Getty’s distorted watermarks, which appeared on images generated by Stability’s AI tool, could mislead consumers into thinking that Getty was affiliated with or endorsed those images. The court denied Stability AI’s motion to dismiss these claims, allowing the case to proceed.
The Authors Versus OpenAI
While visual artists were fighting their battles, writers were preparing their own legal offensive. In September 2023, the Authors Guild and more than a dozen authors—including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, and Sylvia Day—filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT . They alleged that OpenAI had used their books to train its AI models without permission.
The case was consolidated with other pending class actions and centralised in a multi-district litigation along with The New York Times’ and other news companies’ suits on April 3, 2025. The plaintiffs argue that “OpenAI’s GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books.” They describe how, since the release of ChatGPT, “a torrent of AI-generated books of all types” has started flooding the market, threatening to “substitute” for the creations of authors. Not only did OpenAI feed plaintiffs’ books to its models so that the models can regurgitate and create derivatives of the works with simple prompts by anyone in the world, but it also initially downloaded the books from pirate websites and quite literally “built the foundations of its business on mass piracy”.
The plaintiffs’ brief describes the harm caused by this piracy and training as the “single most important element” in the fair use analysis. It lays out how unchecked and uncompensated use of copyrighted books by defendants will decimate the market for books and eviscerate the incentives to write new books afforded authors by the U.S. Constitution. “OpenAI’s models are capable of displacing human authors precisely because it exploited their works,” the brief states.
The plaintiffs also point to public statements by OpenAI’s Head of Model Writing Quality, Tarun Gogineni, who said his “research mission” was to have GPT models write the “last two books” of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Gogineni had described himself as having “an undue amount of power over the English language” and “recognised that the models’ writing capabilities depended entirely on their training data”. He knew authors were upset about having their works stolen and losing work due to AI, but stated that he was not “all that sympathetic,” viewing the displacement of authors as acceptable.
The New York Times and the News Industry
In late 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train ChatGPT. The Times argued that the company was threatening its journalists’ livelihoods by effectively stealing billions of dollars’ worth of their work, in some cases spitting out The Times’ material verbatim to people seeking answers from generative artificial intelligence.
The Times has since been joined by other news organisations, including MediaNews Group-owned newspapers the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, digital media publisher Ziff Davis, and the nonprofit Centre for Investigative Reporting. In the United States, the Department of Justice has weighed in on the side of OpenAI. The department argued in a court filing that OpenAI legally used articles by The New York Times to develop AI, adding that national security depended on American tech dominance. The Justice Department argued that developing AI was critical to national security, and that training AI systems sufficiently transformed the written works into new material allowed under copyright law. It said the benefits of AI “far outweigh any competitive harm”.
The New York Times criticised the government’s position, saying the administration “is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.” Graham James, a spokesperson for the paper, said: “Both AI and creators can thrive—AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires”.
The stakes in these cases could not be higher. The pending cases will likely turn on whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create transformative new content. The first two judges to consider the issue issued diverging rulings, and the legal landscape remains deeply uncertain. A ruling in favour of the AI companies could effectively legalise the mass appropriation of creative work without compensation. A ruling in favour of the creators could force AI companies to pay for the data they use, fundamentally changing their business models.
The African Dimension: A Continent at a Crossroads
For African creators, these legal battles in American and British courts may seem distant. But their outcomes will have profound implications for the continent’s creative economy. Africa’s music markets are seen as particularly vulnerable to the threat of AI-generated music plagiarising the work of real-life artists, due to comparatively weak legal frameworks around intellectual property protection.
In Uganda, a quiet AI music boom is already raising difficult questions. In the recording studios of Kampala, artificial intelligence is no longer a general, futuristic idea; it is already helping Ugandan artists write lyrics, craft melodies, and polish tracks at a speed once unimaginable. For many musicians, AI has slashed costs and opened up professional production to everyone. Benon Mugumbya, a musician, songwriter, producer, and filmmaker, says: “I can use a simple melody to prompt AI to create something based on it, and within a minute or two, I get to have a full song”.
But even as he praises AI’s speed and power, Mugumbya insists on the need for a human feel in music. “I can quickly detect AI-generated music. There is something that you hear that is so fine and so crystal clear—perfect vocals. So, I feel that at the moment it’s still missing that soul. That’s why I think it should just help you build on what you have, but not produce 100% of the song, so we don’t lose that human touch”.
Beyond the creative debate lies a more urgent legal one. As AI systems grow sophisticated enough to mimic voices and entire musical styles, artists worldwide, and now in Uganda, are sounding the alarm over the unauthorised use of their work. Hamza Ssekamate, a lawyer, says creators already have tools to push back: “If AI is misused and you feel your content is being misused, you have moral rights. If you feel your content is being sold for money, you have the economic right. So, you have the right to go to court, and we have seen it in countries like the US, and it is also coming to Uganda”. However, Ssekamate acknowledges that the law is struggling to keep pace. “We cannot say that we are going to do away with AI, as it is here to stay. We just need to enact laws that are going to address the grey areas and help authors sell their songs”.
In Madagascar, the music industry is confronting similar challenges. Copyright authorities warn that AI-generated songs, cloned voices, and altered recordings are being used without the authorisation of original creators, without licensing agreements or fair compensation. In Botswana, piracy and unregulated artificial intelligence could threaten the country’s cultural identity and economic future if stronger protections for the creative industry are not put in place. Mr Motlogelwa warned that piracy continued to weaken the industry and that art and cultural material also risked being used by global AI systems without permission or compensation.
Lesotho faces an even starker reality. As artificial intelligence reshapes photography, design, and publishing, Basotho creatives are losing work while the country’s copyright regime remains stuck in 1989. Designers are redesigning AI-generated artwork for free because they cannot compete with tools that can produce images instantly and at no cost.
The Law Struggles to Keep Up
The legal frameworks governing copyright in many African countries were designed for a pre-digital era. They were not built to handle the complexities of AI-generated content, machine learning, and cross-border data flows. In Kenya, the Copyright Tribunal recently ruled that purely AI-generated or machine-autonomous outputs were not eligible for copyright protection because copyright required human intellectual creation. Where AI tools were utilised as an aid, the situation becomes more nuanced, but the law remains unclear.
This legal uncertainty creates a dangerous environment for African creators. On the one hand, they are told that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, which means that if someone uses AI to create a work based on their style, they may have no legal recourse. On the other hand, their original works are being scraped into AI training datasets without their consent, and they have limited ability to enforce their rights across international borders.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many AI companies are based in the United States, Europe, or China, while the creators whose work is being used are in Africa. Enforcing copyright across borders is expensive, time-consuming, and often impractical for individual creators who lack the resources of a multinational corporation.
The Path Forward: What African Creators Can Do
Despite these challenges, there are steps that African creators, policymakers, and institutions can take to protect themselves and build a fairer creative economy.
First, African creators must become educated about their rights. Many artists do not know that they have moral rights—the right to be identified as the author of a work and to object to derogatory treatment of it—as well as economic rights. Understanding these rights is the first step towards defending them. Lawyers like Hamza Ssekamate in Uganda are already advising creators to use the legal tools available to them, even as the law evolves to catch up with technology.
Second, African countries need to modernise their copyright laws. The current frameworks in many jurisdictions are outdated and inadequate for the digital age. Policymakers should look to the ongoing legal battles in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union for guidance, but they must also develop solutions that are tailored to Africa’s unique cultural and economic context. This includes addressing the issue of African creative data sovereignty—the right of African people to control how their cultural expressions are used by AI systems.
