Axel Scheffler: Grüffelo drawer wants to take action against AI companies

Kids around the world love the monster that Axel Scheffler, 68, co-invented: The Grüffelo is a terrifying monster with striking teeth and a green wart on the tip of the nose, which is fooled by a mouse. Only: AI language models seem to love him too. Scheffler himself recently reported on how easy it is with them to create a monster themselves that bears an astonishing resemblance to the Grüffelo.

Now Scheffler has said that he is already thinking about further steps – and is considering a lawsuit. “I would rather team up with other artists and go to court together,” he told Zeit. He now needs legal advice and is already talking to his publishers whether they would support a lawsuit.

“I’m horrified, this is clearly my character; only the backgrounds look very different than I draw them,” Scheffler commented on the pictures that an AI had created in an experiment of the medium.

The German Penguin Random House publishing group was the first book publisher in Europe to file a lawsuit against the AI company OpenAI for copyright infringement. Together with the author and draftsman Ingo Siegner, they complain about AI-generated images of the »little dragon coconut«.

According to the »Zeit« is now the defence of OpenAI. The company argues that an AI stores nothing like a database, because a language model deliberately does not reproduce content one-to-one. Rather, AI is trained in such a way that it recognizes mere patterns and connections in order to generate completely new content.

Meanwhile, the Hamburg-based Carlsen publishing house is also going to court together with the author Marc-Uwe Kling and the illustrator Astrid Henn. They are suing copyright infringement at the “NEINhorn”. The fact that children’s book publishers are going ahead, explained the publisher of Carlsen Verlag, Sandra Harzer-Kux, with the words: “Because children’s and youth literature is not only told with texts, but also with pictures, she is particularly vulnerable to AI fakes.”