Some of our greatest creative talents are joining together to make a statement about artificial intelligence. Like, a literal statement: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.” That’s the sensible but succinct content of an open letter signed by more than 1,000 artists, including Julianne Moore, Thom Yorke, Kevin Bacon, Robert Smith, Rosario Dawson, and many, many more.
According to The Guardian, this statement was organized by Ed Newton-Rex, a former executive at the tech firm Stability AI who resigned because he disagreed with the company’s position that training A.I. with copyrighted works constitutes as “fair use.” He went on to launch Fairly Trained, a non-profit organization that offers “certifications for generative AI companies that get consent for the training data they use.”
Speaking with The Guardian, Newton-Rex affirmed that creatives are “very worried” about the ways their work is being fed to artificial intelligence. (Multiple lawsuits are currently ongoing surrounding this very subject.) “There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two—sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third—training data—for free,” Newton-Rex explained. “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.”
Given this open letter is only one sentence long, it’s pretty easy for the creative community to get behind the uncontroversial statement that their work shouldn’t be nonconsensually fed to machines. Stars of all caliber from the music, film, television, and literary worlds have signed on: Rosie O’Donnell; Harlan Coben; Garret Dillahunt; Liza Colón-Zayas; Kate McKinnon; Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA. The statement is also signed by various organizations including SAG-AFTRA, Universal Music Group, Penguin Random House, and more.
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