There is nothing unethical about using generative AI to write or make art. Those who say otherwise either haven’t thought through their position, or they are lying for rhetorical effect. Or both.
If Andrew Tate wrote a book titled How To Enslave Your Woman For Fun and Profit, would he be within his rights to demand that no woman ever read that book? If you believe that AI is unethical because it was trained on writers’ and artists’ work without their consent, congratulations—that is exactly the position you have taken. You can’t pick up one end of the stick without also picking up the other.
Whether or not writers and artists were fairly compensated for the use of their work is a separate issue. Many of these AI companies obtained their training data by indescriminately scraping the internet, which means the used a lot of pirated work. But if using copyrighted material to train an AI system is fair use—and here in the US, the courts have ruled that it is—then all that they owe you is the cost of your book. So if your book is $2.99 on Kindle, that is what OpenAI owes you. Congratulations.
Does Brandon Sanderson owe Barbara Hambly royalties? Brandon Sanderson has sold something like $45 million in books, comics, and other media. Barbara Hambly struggles to pay her bills. Barbara Hambly wrote Dragonsbane, the young adult book that inspired Brandon Sanderson to write fantasy. Clearly, her work had a deep and lasting influence on him. So does he owe her?
If you believe that AI companies owe artists and writers more than simply the price of their own published work, this is a question that you must wrestle with. If it counts as “stealing” to train an AI on artists’ and writers’ work, then every artist and writer is also a thief, and owes royalties to the people who inspired them. Which is why the word “plagiarism” has a tight definition, and why our legal code recognizes fair use.
There is nothing unethical about using generative AI to write or make art. Almost everyone who says otherwise is either lying to themselves about that fact, or lying to you.
Why would someone lie about that? For the same reason people accuse you of being a racist, or a sexist, or a fascist, or a white supremacist, or a Christian nationalist… because using that term gives them power. They don’t actually want to make a reasoned argument. They just want to “win” the argument without ever having to make it in the first place. They use words that they know will get the reaction that they want, and they scream them as loudly as they can until they get it. That’s what the public discourse looks like in 2025.
To be fair, this is not just something that happens on the left. Plenty of people on the right will scream “woke” or “based” or “demonic” to cow people into accepting their point of view. These words do have meaning, and can be used to make a well-reasoned argument—just like “racist” and “fascist” have meaning. But most of the people who use these words are just wielding them like rhetorical clubs to bully their way around.
There is nothing unethical about using generative AI to write or make art. Most of the people who say otherwise are just using the word “ethical” to mean “things I don’t like.” They don’t believe in objective good or objective evil, and instead believe that things like truth and morality are relative. In other words, they think that good and evil change depending on who’s looking at it. This is why so many writers today can’t write a compelling villain (or a compelling hero, for that matter). They just don’t understand how good and evil work.
So why should you listen to them when they scream at you for using AI? You shouldn’t. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Or worse, they do, but they’re lying to you, because they want to compel you not to use AI in your art. Why? Because they’re afraid that if you do, you’ll create something better than what they can create. And on that point, they’re probably right.
