Thousands of artists unite against the unauthorized use of their works by Artificial Intelligence

Jane Anderson
Jane Anderson
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In an unprecedented move, more than 13,500 creative figures from various fields have signed a petition seeking protect your works from unauthorized use in Artificial Intelligence training.

Among the signatories are renowned personalities such as the actress Julianne Moore, the Nobel Prize in Literature Kazuo Ishiguro, the singer and composer Thom Yorke – leader of Radiohead – and the journalist and historian Sidney Blumenthal. All of them denounce that the large companies that develop AI systems are using their works without permission nor any compensation.

“The unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI is a serious and unfair threat”

“The unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI is a serious and unfair threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and should not be allowed”they express in the statement.

Ed Newton-Rex, British composer and former Stability AI executive, has been the driving force behind this initiative. According to him, heThe creative community is extremely concerned for the situation. Thus, Newton-Rex criticizes AI companies for “dehumanize” the art and work of people by referring to them simply as “training data”.

Among the signatories there are other recognized figures such as the musicians Björn Ulvaeus, from Abba, or Robert Smith, from The Cure, the composer Max Richter, the authors Ann Patchett, James Patterson and Kate Mosse or the actors Kevin Bacon and Rosario Dawson.

The petition comes at a crucial time, when lawmakers are considering how to address the issue of data tracking for the development of generative AI. The UK government, for example, is considering a model of opt-out for content crawling for AI. And the signatories warn that this practice represents an unfair and significant threat to the livelihood of creators.

“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend enormous sums on the first two: sometimes a million dollars per engineer and up to a billion per model. But they expect the third – the training data – is free”says Ed Newton-Rex, promoter of the statement.

The petition highlights the growing tension between technological advancement and intellectual property rightsunderscoring the need for a deeper dialogue about the future of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that “it would be impossible to train current AI models without copyrighted material.” Thus, if ChatGPT were trained solely on public domain books and images “it would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.” Based on this denounced model, the company has reached a valuation of 157,000 million dollars.

More info: Statement on AI training