Thom Yorke among thousands of artists to issue AI protest

Leading actors, authors, musicians, and novelists are among 11,500 artists to have put their name to a statement calling for a halt to the unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, describing it as a “threat” to the livelihoods of creators.

The open letter, comprising just 29 words, says: “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.”

Those who signed it include Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, award-winning actors Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and ABBA songwriter and performer Björn Ulvaeus.

OpenAI and other tech firms building generative-AI products use data scraped from the internet to train their AI models. Depending on the nature of the generative-AI tool being trained, the data can include text, images, videos, music, and speech.

The data helps to build and refine algorithms for tools that let users have a human-like conversation in text or spoken form, or build images and/or videos from text prompts. It can also power speech tools and even create music from scratch, all from a few basic instructions entered by the user.

The main issue is that the data has often been scraped without consent from the artists, and without the tech firms offering any compensation or credit.

Makers of the generative-AI tools have claimed that its data collection methods fall under the protection of “fair use” according to copyright law, but an increasing number of artists have been speaking out against the practice, claiming copyright infringement.

In the last year or so, a number of lawsuits relating to the issue have landed in U.S. courts, forcing firms like OpenAI to defend themselves over copyright claims.

In a bid to offset further legal action, an increasing number of firms engaged in creating generative-AI tools have begun seeking licensing deals with media publishers that will give the tech firms access to content for training in exchange for some form of compensation package.

With generative AI still a relatively new form of technology, regulators are having to play catch-up, and so it’s likely to take some time before the issue is fully resolved.