Update: as of 2 November, this statement has gathered over 33,500 signatures and continues to grow.
A statement on AI training has been launched today (22 October 2024) with 10,500 – and counting – signatures from across the creative industries, including SoA Fellows Kate Mosse, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian Rankin.
Other Fellows who have signed the statement include Malorie Blackman, William Boyd, Tracy Chevalier, Antonia Fraser, Roger McGough, Margaret Drabble and Joanne Harris.
It’s also been signed by a number of executives from the creative industries and creator rights organisations, including the Society of Authors (SoA), the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society and the Publishers Association.
This statement is intentionally short and simple and takes a form of wording to enable a broad range of creators to support it.
‘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.’
Please consider adding your voice to this statement calling for AI companies to license the creative works upon which they’re trained.
It is a critical moment to send this message as unlicensed training on creative works has rapidly taken hold in the AI industry, and we’ve recently seen an increase in lobbying by tech companies to use creative works without a licence from or payment to creators and rightsholders.
We hope that a short statement like this, signed by a large number of creators and the companies who represent them, will have a significant impact in changing behaviours.
Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, chair of the SoA Management Committee, who writes as Sam Blake, appeared on the BBC’s The World at One on Wednesday 23 October to dicuss the statement:
The SoA’s generative AI letter
The SoA wrote to tech companies this September, asserting members’ rights around uses of their works by generative AI, following the passing of a resolution at our Extraordinary General Meeting in May.
In this letter, we established the foundational principle that, without the licence or consent of the author, the use of copyright works by AI developers amounts to copyright infringement, and we urged these companies, instead, to ‘agree terms on a commercial basis with respective rightsholders’ through available licensing opportunities.
In August, the Creative Rights Alliance (CRA) issued a similar letter to tech companies on behalf of its member organisations (including the SoA), which represent over 500,000 creators.
See also
- Where we stand on AI.
- If you find that your work has been used without consent, you can contact the SoA for bespoke guidance. We would also encourage you to contact us to share experiences and feedback – this is vital to help inform our policy work.
- See our practical guidance for authors concerned by the potential impact of generative AI.