Meet the Lawyer Leading the Human Resistance Against AI

The big question is: What will the courts think?

These are some of the most closely watched legal brawls of the moment. For Silicon Valley, the dawn of the AI age has been a spiritual revival; after a decade of increasing public wariness about tech’s influence on the world, the roaring enthusiasm for tools like ChatGPT has created a new boom. Call it the Second Age of “Move Fast and Break Things.” There’s plenty of hype, and eye-popping valuations. (OpenAI’s current reported value, for example, is $80 billion.) But it’s distinct from the recent hype cycles around the metaverse and crypto in that generative AI is actually useful. It’s still a gold rush, for sure. This time, though, the hills aren’t hollow, and the industry knows it. These lawsuits, which allege that OpenAI, Meta, Stability AI, and other companies broke the law when they built their tools, threaten the steamroller momentum of the generative AI movement. The stakes are sky-high.

The outcomes could help entrench the industry as we know it—or force it to make radical changes. And while a security guard might not have recognized Butterick, the legal teams at AI companies certainly know him by now. Their futures could depend on how well, or poorly, he makes his cases.

Butterick grew up in New Hampshire. He was a strong student, good enough to get into Harvard in the late ’80s. When he was there, though, he felt alienated from his more conventionally ambitious classmates. They were already thinking about things like law school. He was drawn to a more esoteric world. Tucked in the basement of his dormitory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a long-running printing press called Bow & Arrow Press operated a workshop, giving students a unique opportunity to learn traditional printing techniques. It was a cozy, beloved hangout, with whitewashed, poster-covered walls, machinery that looked ancient, and an atmosphere that attracted offbeat aesthetes. When Butterick found it, his life changed.

He became obsessed with typography. He started working in font design when he was still in school. “People in my life thought it was a ridiculous thing to do,” he says. He loved playing with the old tools, but even more than that, he loved thinking about new ways to create beautiful typefaces. After he graduated in 1992, he had his own ambitions: He’d heard there were exciting things happening in the tech world in San Francisco, and it seemed like the perfect place for a guy who wanted to bring typography into the computer age. Two years later, he moved west.

Like so many young Ivy Leaguers who show up in the Bay Area hoping to make a name for themselves in tech, Butterick decided he might as well try his hand at a startup. “My dotcom adventure,” he calls it, sounding half-embarrassed. He founded a web design company, Atomic Vision. By the time he was 28, he had around 20 employees. But he didn’t love managing people. When an opportunity to sell the company came in 1999, he took it.

Flush with cash and unsure what to do next, Butterick figured he’d follow in the footsteps of countless other young adults who don’t know what they want out of life: He went to grad school. He enrolled at UCLA to get a law degree. After graduating, he started a website called Typography for Lawyers. “It was meant to be a nerdy sideline,” he says. “But it snowballed.” Turns out, lawyers love fonts. He turned the website into a shockingly popular book of the same name, which he published in 2010. Courts and private firms across the country started using his typefaces. After adopting his Equity font, a Fifth Circuit judge praised it as a fully-loaded F-150 compared to the Buick that was Times New Roman. “The stuff of finicky opinion-readers’ dreams,” the judge wrote.

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