Artists Sign Open Letter Against Unauthorized AI Training

Almost 13,000 signees, including prominent figures from film, music, and literature, have issued an open letter protesting the unauthorized use of creative works for training artificial intelligence (AI), as reported today by ARTnoticias.

The letter features endorsements from stars such as actors Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore, Rosario Dawson, and F. Murray Abraham, along with renowned author James Patterson and Radiohead leader Thom Yorke, according to The Washington Post.

Other reports indicate that the warning conveyed in this letter, sent out on Tuesday, does not oppose the deployment of these technologies itself, but rather addresses the underlying practices that affect the livelihoods of artists across various disciplines.

The letter specifies that “the unauthorized use of creative works to train generative AI poses a significant and unfair threat to the livelihoods of those behind these works and must not be allowed.”

This movement has also garnered public support from artists such as Joel Shapiro, Gregory Edwards, Amoako Boafo, Joanna Pousette-Dart, and Tishan Hsu, as well as photographer and painter Lynn Goldsmith, noted ARTnoticias.

In early April of this year, over 200 musicians, composers, lyricists, and other artists signed another open letter, drafted by the Artists Rights Alliance, calling for the responsible use of AI in music.

They expressed the need to “protect ourselves against the predatory use of AI to steal the voices and images of professional artists, violate creators' rights, and destroy the musical ecosystem.”

In July, more than 15,000 writers, including Jennifer Egan, Michael Pollan, Min Jin Lee, and Margaret Atwood, supported an open letter from the Writers Guild to major AI companies.

They urged these companies to obtain consent, provide credit, and fairly compensate authors before incorporating copyright-protected works into datasets used to train generative AI technologies.

artists, AI, letter