More Than 10,500 Artists Unite in Fight Against AI Companies' 'Unjust' Use of Creative Works

More than 10,500 artists and creators -- including ABBA's Bjorn Ulvaeus, actress Julianne Moore, actors Kevin Bacon and F. Murray Abraham, as well as former Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon, author James Patterson and Radiohead's Thom Yorke -- signed a statement condemning AI companies' unauthorized use of creative works for training their models. The initiative, led by former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, demands an end to unlicensed training data collection amid mounting legal challenges against tech firms. "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," reads the statement.

The protest comes as major artists and publishers battle AI developers in court. Authors John Grisham and George R.R. Martin are suing OpenAI, while record labels Universal, Sony and Warner have filed lawsuits against AI music creators Suno and Udio. The signatories reject proposed "opt-out" schemes for content scraping, calling instead for explicit creator consent.

Farts in the Supreme Court need to legislate

[Pinky's Brain]

Congress isn't going to do shit. The EU is completely paralyzed waiting for the US to tell them which way to jump ... until this gets to the US Supreme Court the status quo will stand.

It could get hilarious, we could see the first trillion+ dollar judgements if copying into a training set requires a license. The statutory damages on registered works alone will get there for the big boys.

Re:

[classiclantern]

My best guess is the courts will (eventually) rule that content creators must be paid for their work. There are already thousands of rulings supporting copyright. When AI must pay for content they have 2 choices, train LLMs with Public Domain media for free or pay for a limited set of up-to-date content. I expect Subscribers will pay only for the content they need and no more. That means the Subscriber chooses from a catalog of LLMs loosely tailored to their needs. If you have a question about Shakespe

Re:

[mysidia]

My best guess is the courts will (eventually) rule that content creators must be paid for their work.

There's hardly any basis for it. The most likely outcome would be that downloading data and training a model with that data does Not infringe upon copyright at all. You are not reproducing and distributing Nor are you publicly performing a work by training a model.

On the other hand: when using the trained model to generate images based on it - the resulting image might be infringing. This Infri

Re:

[gabebear]

I call BS on LLMs not copying, if a model can trivially reproduce enough of a copyrighted work then the model is a copy and is infringing if the model is used or published. Copying copyrighted work is allowed as long as it's not “a substantial part thereof", which is what I see most people trying to argue(that it's only copying little bits). How much copying happens is up to the trainer which means the trainers/model-creators are also violating copyright when they copy too much and publish their model

Re:

[presidenteloco]

While it's true that the information from the original work is in some sense copied into the AI model, that information is also thoroughly mixed with information from the rest of the vast training data set. The information from one work is fragmented into contributions to many numerical weights in different parts of the artificial neural network. A good analogy is that when you shine a light on an artwork, say one that is displayed outside in public, the light reflects off all the different atoms of the a

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

There is no distribution or performance requirement for copyright infringement.

Re:

[Travelsonic]

When AI must pay for content they have 2 choices, train LLMs with Public Domain media for free or pay for a limited set of up-to-date content
Isn't that a false dichotomy that misses (rather badly) that copyright is automatic? IF they use say appropriately licensed creative commons works,. those are still copyrighted worjs if created where copyright is automatic, for instance.

Maybe ... we REALLY need to stop using "copyrighted" as a synonym for "needs to pay" or "off limits" - when the issue is more lice

Re:

[Mspangler]

"train LLMs with Public Domain media for free"

So we could get the level of literacy of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters? James Fenimore Cooper? Daniel Defoe? Jack London? Edgar Allen Poe? H.G. Wells?

I can think of ever so many worse outcomes.

Of course when Chandler's and Christie's works hit public domain the LLM may get just a little paranoid.

The difference

[bhcompy]

What is the fundamental difference between asking JJ Abrams to rip off Spielberg's style and asking a computer to do it? Both were trained on the same source material. You don't need any special permission or license to use that material (legally obtained or not) as inspiration as long as your output isn't substantially the original work (which isn't the claim here). Outside of some "divine inspiration", the output of all artists is influenced/based in part on inputs they've previously digested regardless of whether those inputs were copyrighted or not. How is that any different?

Re:

[ebunga]

It's one thing to be inspired by something, it's another to copy and paste their work into yours. "Generative AI" as it is implemented right now does not create anything. It merely copies.

Re:

[Travelsonic]

"Generative AI" as it is implemented right now does not create anything. It merely copies.

Point one, IMO, seems hardly substantiated if one wants to get really pedantic in that a specific combination of elements not existing before exists now - seems in that basic context it'd be created whether man or machine does it.

Second one IMO DEFINITELY needs a citation. My understanding of LLMs and AI is rudimentary at best, but it seems like this is not how they are supposed to work, not even "as they are currently implemented. IMO if that is correct (that this notion is incorrect)... can we not?

Re:

[dgatwood]

It's one thing to be inspired by something, it's another to copy and paste their work into yours. "Generative AI" as it is implemented right now does not create anything. It merely copies.

No, not really. It is more like a series of probabilities. If you train on a book that includes the line "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," it might know that there's a 1% chance that "the" is followed by quick or lazy, a 1% chance that fox is preceded by quick and brown, a 1% chance that lazy is followed by dog, etc.

The original data is not present in the training set, except in very limited circumstances where there are not very many items in the training set that match against the query we

Re:

[presidenteloco]

"Merely copies" reflects a misunderstanding of how artificial neural net models work. They copy and mix information from vast input datasets, representing abstracted commonalities discovered in the whole of the input. Then they output a different mix of information, depending on large parts of the intermixed and abstracted information model, and depending on the particular prompt requesting some output. Note that it's called a prompt (a prompt to take the action of touring
associatively relevant part

Re:

[bhcompy]

Which would mean you could sue for infringement. They aren't suing for infringement. They're challenging the learning.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

The model is irrelevant, pretending the model was of primary importance was an early and successful disinformation campaign which is now losing its effectiveness. As they say, the primary issue is "use of creative works for training".

Human reading and viewing is generally not considered copying, whereas copying is considered copying. JJ Abrams could view Spielberg's movies without license and without fair use, the AI companies need fair use for their training software to view Spielberg's movies ... because

Re:

[ewibble]

Technically to view a movie on the internet I need a computer to copy it as well. Its up to the courts to decide if its fair use or not.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

The transient copies are exempted by DMCA and before that implied license doctrine, which judges are never going to apply to allow AI training.

They copied a ton of stuff behind terms of service and paywalls too ... fair use is their only shot. Fair use or bankruptcy.

Re:

[presidenteloco]

Of course taking the information from the movie into our human biological neural net is copying the information (and its copyrightable patterns).

That's not different in kind to what the computer is doing copying it to be represented as many additions/substractions to many weights between the nodes of an artificial neural network.

That's the crux of the issue.

We're going to need some new understanding, in the legal system, of what is really going on with AI learning and output generation/synthesis.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

They could change decades of jurisprudence and common sense of what constitutes a copy because it's convenient to AI companies ... or they could just not. I'm going to assume the judges will just not.

Re:

[gabebear]

If you ask someone to rip off someone's copyrighted work, and they do, then both you and the person who did it can be prosecuted. So you think LLMs should be held to the same standard?

Re:

[bhcompy]

I can't be sued for writing a book in the style of, say, Michael Crichton. I can be sued for creating output that is substantially similar enough to be considered a violation (I take Jurassic Park, rename it Jurassic Meadow and rename the characters, but keep the story). Regardless, that's suing someone based on the output they create, which isn't what's happening here. They're challenging the learning.

Artists...

[DaFallus]

Reduce copyright back to 15 years or fuck off.

Re:

[Travelsonic]

Copyright being shorter again would help so much (perhaps more controversially, if retroactively applied to works based on publishing date so things that should have been public domain long ago can become public domain as intended).

The more I think about it, I wonder how much copyright being as long as it is has contributed to the perception of a lack of creativity not just in regards to companies milking existing IPs, but also in terms of fear of being sued over some stupid thing being too similar in w

Re:

[sconeu]

In addition, no retroactive extensions would be a good fix as well. Authors who copyrighted their stuff pre-CTEA knew what they were signing up for. There was no reason to extend their copyrights.

Ants unite on the beach to stop the tide.

[nightflameauto]

Based on the amount of money being thrown around when the buzz-bomb "AI" gets mentioned? There is no stopping the hoovering of creative work into the computer replacement for creative work. And even if *WE* stop it here, there's a whole world of countries out there that will just let their version keep chugging along, until our creative industries fade into oblivion due to the wash-over of the spilling tides, nay tsunami, of AI generated creative works. And as much as our creative industries have lowered th

Give them their fair compensation

[oumuamua]

Their work was 0.00000001% of the training set, here is your 0.1 cent share of profit https://www.genolve.com/design... [genolve.com]

Most of their works ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

... should already be public domain.

The founding fathers had it right. Seven years, extendable by seven years, once.

Accurate number

[sunderland56]

Actually fewer than 100 artists signed it. The rest were AI-generated bots.

Fuck Copyright, Fuck Corporations.

[Mirddes]

I get it, these companies are stealing the creative works and styles of these artists to train their AIs.

however in the absence of all that noise, we MUST train an opensource creative commons AI on the sum of human accomplishment for the benefit of humanity. no one has ever created anything in a vacuum. our literary, artistic and scientific advances, innovations and expressions are all derivative of our experiences.

until the abandonment of the price system the argument these artists make is sound and i supp

as an outsider...

[CEC-P]

"Nobody can make a movie or game until they go through us! Hope you have a $100k to $1 mil budget minimum!" - sincerely, entitled assholes who should have gotten a fallback position. This really seems like "oh no, we can't put the switchboard operators out of business!" level crap. I know art has been around since humans existed so it's not quite on the same scale but they said the same thing about computers and now anyone with a brain uses a digital pad and pen with vastly superior layers and revision hist

Tuber

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

YouTube videos tracking all the movie "tributes" and paeans to what went before are some of the best viewing.

AI just cuts out the middle man.