Some of the biggest names in the creative arts have added their names to a letter addressing what for them is the growing problem of the unlicensed use of creative works for AI training.

The signatories call data scraping a “major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.” The list currently includes 13,500 names, many of them big hitters in their respective industries.

The list includes the novelists Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and William Boyd, the actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and the musicians Robert Smith of The Cure and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. The list also includes numerous composers, music producers, graphic designers, illustrators, journalists and just about every other creative you can imagine who may have fallen prey to the practice of data scraping.

This comes at a time when AI companies are in constant battles with various creative industries, with one lawsuit following another, whether in the music industry, related to creative writing or in news media. Philosophically, artists have called AI’s use of their creations an “assault on human creativity” while there’s also the matter of AI potentially displacing a large chunk of the world’s workforce.

This latest missive decrying AI copyright infringement probably has the largest number of creative high-flyers behind any complaint so far. According to the Guardian, the person who organized it was Ed Newton-Rex, the British composer and former AI executive for Stability AI Ltd. He fell out with the company in June this year over the training of AI models.

“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data,” he told the Guardian. “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.”

His contention is simple: When AI companies use the word “training”, what they really mean is taking someone’s hard work without giving anything back. He doesn’t believe “opt-out” schemes will work, such as the one proposed by the U.K. government, stating that it’s “totally unfair to put the burden” on the artist. The solution, he says, is an “opt-in” model.

As governments around the world have been talking for years about taming the “Wild West” of the internet, one gets the feeling that so far they’ve turned their backs to what is surely a Wild West of AI art theft.

Image: DALL-E