Oscar winning actors, Nobel laureates, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, best selling authors and knights of the realm are among the thousands of signatories to an open statement about the threat of AI to the creative arts.
A list of more than 13,500 (and counting) figures in the creative industries have put their names to the statement that calls the unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI models a “major, unjust threat” to livelihoods.
Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus sits at the top of the list, with Radiohead front man Thom Yorke, actors Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon, and writers Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and Harlan Coben among the most prominent names.
“Major, Unjust Threat”
The website aitrainingstatement.org simply features the 29-word statement at the top, followed by a list of its signatories.
The statement in full 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.”
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There are also fields for other people to add themselves, asking for their name, profession and email address for the sake of verification.
Paranoid About the Androids
There’s perhaps no surprises that Thom Yorke and his Radiohead bandmates feature prominently on the list of names expressing their concern about the creep of this technology.
Other stars of the music world include Björn Ulvaeus of Abba, Robert Smith of the Cure, Geoff Barrow of Portishead, Nitin Sawhney and composers Sir John Rutter and Max Richter.
Author Sir Kazuo Ishiguro – who has dabbled in the science fiction of AI and the future of tech, most recently in his novel Klara and the Sun – leads a who’s who of authors that also features Sir Ian Rankin, Lady Antonia Fraser, James Patterson, William Boyd, Val McDermid and Harlan Coben.
With AI technology being used increasingly in movies, Oscar-winners Julianne Moore and F. Murray Abraham are among a multitude Hollywood names who have signed the statement. Along with the likes of Kevin Bacon, Kate McKinnon, Rosario Dawson and Sean Astin.
Poets, painters, playwrights, producers and many more are also among the growing the list.
Not OK, Computer
Organizations such as the Songwriters Guild of America, The Society of Authors, Penguin Random House, and the Sony, Universal and Warner music groups have also signed the statement, that has been put together by Ed-Newton Rex.
The CEO of Fairly Trained – a non-profit that certifies generative AI companies for training data practices that respect creators’ rights – said that creators and their work are being dehumanized.
“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, computers, and data,” he told The Guardian newspaper.
“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.”
“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.” – Ed Newton-Rex, Fairly Trained
While individual users can take steps to stop ChatGPT training on their data, this is much harder for creators to do en masse with work that is in the public domain.
