AI is poised to take a measurable bite out of the world’s creative economy, and the legal tools meant to protect artists are already showing their seams.
Ishita Sharma, managing partner at Fathom Legal, told Decrypt the projections “significantly strengthen the normative case for recalibrating copyright and neighboring rights frameworks,” adding that the debate has moved from abstract innovation to “distributive imbalance” when AI systems extract value from protected works “at scale without proportionate compensation.”
That matters because creators are increasingly reliant on digital channels that are both lucrative and unstable.
UNESCO found digital revenues now represent 35% of creators’ income, up from 17% in 2018, even as public funding for culture remains below 0.6% of GDP globally, a change that has widened exposure to IP infringement while platform power and opaque curation systems push lesser-known artists to the margins.
Sharma noted that “existing fair use and fair dealing doctrines appear increasingly strained in the context of AI training and output replication,” saying the doctrines were built to assess “human, case-specific transformative uses—not the wholesale ingestion of vast copyrighted corpora for commercial model development.”
Even if training is framed as transformative, she said, deploying outputs that substitute for original works “complicates the analysis,” often leaving uncertainty that advantages large technology firms.
The UNESCO report also flagged structural gaps that could amplify those losses, including a digital skills divide, 67% in developed countries versus 28% in developing countries, and limited national capacity to measure digital cultural consumption.
For creators whose style or voice is replicated, Sharma said remedies remain “fragmented and imperfect,” because copyright protects specific expression rather than “style,” while publicity and false-endorsement claims are uneven across jurisdictions, fueling calls for clearer remuneration-focused protections.
The question of who benefits from AI’s growth is being actively contested in legal proceedings.
At the same time, parts of the tech sector are investing in adaptation.
