More than 25,000 artists and cultural workers have signed a new one petition with a simple one-line message: “The unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind these works, and should not be allowed.”
The short statement was written by music composer and former Stability AI director Ed Newton-Rex, who resigned last year because he disagreed with the Company’s free use of copyrighted creative works under “fair use” to train its AI.
Artists including painters Amoako Boafo, Cecilia Vicuña, Joanne Greenbaum and Joanna Pousette-Dart; photographer Lynn Goldsmith; and illustrator Anni Matsick are among the signatories, alongside Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, actor Kevin Bacon and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Newton-Rex first published the petition on X on Tuesday, October 22 with 10,000 signatures. Anyone can sign the statement.
Newton-Rex said the petition was published now because “it is a critical time for creators” to protect their work.
“Many AI companies build their products by recording the life’s work of writers, musicians, artists, actors, photographers and other creatives, without payment and without permission,” Newton-Rex told us. Hyperallergic in a statement.
Earlier this year, a California judge ruled that a group of artists could pursue a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and Deviant AI, despite the companies’ attempts to halt it. Other artists are using the courts to argue for copyright protection of AI-generated art.
Chairman of the Association of Photographers in the United Kingdom Tim Flach, known for his nature and animal photography, including his series Dog gods, told Hyperallergic that he experienced the imitations of his photographic style ‘firsthand’. Flach said he is also a plaintiff in one class action complaint against various AI companies.
Flach said in a statement to Hyperallergic That the “unsolicited exploitation” caused by training AI models on copyrighted works “represents an economic loss for artists, undermines our livelihoods and threatens our survival.”
“We urgently need policymakers to support our concerns, and for technology companies that undertake this large-scale and widespread commercial exploitation to seek permission and pay compensation,” Flach said.
While the sentence-long message has been largely signed by members of creative fields, including musicians, writers and visual artists, a number of academics have also endorsed it, including Oxford Associate Professor of Ancient History Gregory Kantor.
Kantor said this in a statement Hyperallergic that AI models ‘made cheaply’ raise barriers for a future generation of scientists and artists.
“AI is not going to write a history monograph like an Oxford professor, or paint like Picasso,” Kantor said. “However, for top artists and scientists of the next generation to emerge, they must spend years doing routine work and on-the-job training. An economic regime that excludes people from entry-level jobs in the arts or academia will inevitably mean that there will be no next generation.”
The statement comes as Britain invests well over a billion dollars in AI projects. Kantor said he finds it bizarre that Britain is “effectively subsidizing California’s technology industry at the expense of areas where this country retains international significance.”
Newton-Rex said his hugely popular one-sentence petition was not directed at anyone in particular, but rather an expression of what “creatives think about this issue.”
“And what they think is very clear,” Newton-Rex said.
