A new statement is the latest attempt by creatives to protect their work from the growing AI bubble.
More than 13,000 creatives from around the world, including famous actors, singers and authors have signed a statement warning artificial intelligence (AI) companies that the unlicensed use of their work to train generative AI models is a “major, unjust threat” to their livelihoods.
The list of signatories include Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, songwriter Björn Ulvaeus, actors Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore and Kate McKinnon and musician Aurora, among thousands of others.
In full, the short statement reads: “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.”
This statement is one of several attempts by creatives to stop companies from using their creative output as training fodder without consent.
The statement was organised by British composer and Fairly Trained founder and CEO Ed Newton-Rex, who told The Guardian that AI companies expect to take training data from creatives for free.
“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,” Rex said.
“When AI companies call this ‘training data’, they dehumanise it. What we’re talking about is people’s work – their writing, their art, their music.”
Until November last year, Newton-Rex was VP of audio at Stability AI, the start-up behind the AI-powered text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. But he resigned from this role because he disagreed with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is “fair use”.
He said that despite his colleagues having a more “nuanced” view on this issue than some competitors, he wasn’t able to change the “prevailing opinion” on fair use at the company.
Legal battles
Creatives and corporations have been embroiled in a long battle surrounding the use of AI in creative industries.
In August, a copyright lawsuit filed by a group of artists against AI companies, including Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt was allowed to proceed by a US judge. The class action lawsuit alleges that Stable Diffusion used the artists’ works as “training images” to produce AI-generated images “in the style” of the original images.
While members of SAG-AFTRA, the US actor’s union behind the Hollywood strikes last year, have been striking against huge video game franchises for failing to provide “equitable treatment with respect to AI”. The union said that the strike comes after 18 months of failed negotiations.
Earlier this year, the union struck a deal with talent marketplace platform Narrativ that will allow performers to license their AI voice replicas for use in digital audio ads. SAG-AFTRA said the start-up agreed to its requirements around AI informed consent, compensation and individual control, as well as additional guardrails.
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