Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, actress Julianne Moore and Radiohead singer Thom Yorke are among the 10,500 signatories of a creative industries statement warning AI companies that unlicensed use of their work is a “major threat.” and unfair” for the livelihoods of artists.
He statement It comes amid legal battles between creative professionals and technology companies over the use of their work to train artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT and claims that using their intellectual property without permission is a violation of copyright.
“The unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI is a significant and unfair threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and should not be allowed,” the statement read.
Thousands of creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theater and television have given their support to the declaration, with authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ann Patchett and Kate Mosse, musicians such as Robert Smith of The Cure and the composer Max Richter and actors such as Kevin Bacon, Rosario Dawson and F Murray Abraham.
The organizer of the letter, British composer and former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, said people who make a living from creative work are “very concerned” about the situation.
“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend enormous sums of money on the first two: sometimes a million dollars per engineer and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to receive the third, the training data, for free,” he said.
Newton-Rex is the former director of audio at technology company Stability AI, but resigned last year due to the company’s belief that using copyrighted content to train AI models without a license constitutes “fair use,” a term under US copyright law that means permission of the author. No owner needed.
Newton-Rex added: “When AI companies call this ‘training data,’ they dehumanize it. “What we’re talking about is people’s work: their writing, their art, their music.”
In the US, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin are among a group of authors suing ChatGPT developer OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, while artists are also suing the tech companies behind Image generators already major record labels including Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are suing AI music creators Suno and Udio.
Newton-Rex also warned that an “opt-out” proposal for content scraping being considered by the UK government would be very damaging. this month the The Financial Times reported that ministers would consult on a plan that would allow AI companies to mine content from artists and publishers unless they “opt out” of the process.
Last month, Google, a major player in AI, called for restrictions to be relaxed on a practice in the United Kingdom known as text and data mining (TDM), where copying copyrighted works is allowed for non-commercial, such as academic research.
Newton-Rex said the opt-out was flawed because most people are unaware of such schemes.
“I have implemented opt-out schemes for AI companies,” Newton-Rex said. “Even the best-run opt-out schemes are overlooked by the majority of people who have the opportunity to opt-out. You never find out about it, you miss the email.
“It is totally unfair to place the burden of opting out of AI training on the creator whose work is being trained. “If a government really thought this was a good thing for creators, then they would create a voluntary participation plan.”
Newton-Rex said the number of signatories to the statement and the breadth of creative talent they represent made it clear that creators would consider an opt-out scheme “totally unfair”.
The statement is also signed by creative industry organizations and companies, including the American Federation of Musicians, the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, the European Writers’ Council and Universal Music Group.
A UK government spokesperson said meetings had been held with AI companies and the creative industries about copyright, adding that it was an area that “requires thoughtful engagement and, as part of that, we are determined to listen to a wide range of points of view to help. inform our approach.”
