Margaret Atwood, James Patterson, and more than 9,000 authors signed an open letter to AI industry leaders calling for compensation and consent for use of their works.
The letter, organized by the Authors Guild, was delivered to Big Tech companies OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft. The letter said the companies’ AI products—such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT—are trained on vast amounts of information available on the internet, including copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry that act as “food” for which “there has been no bill.”
“You’re spending billions of dollars to develop AI technology,” the letter said. “It’s only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited.”
The Authors Guild’s call to action comes as AI companies have faced increased scrutiny and litigation for allegedly infringing copyrighted works in training processes. Earlier this month, comedian Sarah Silverman and a group of authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, Inc. and Meta Platforms, Inc., claiming the companies used copyrighted books to train AI without their permission. It was just one complaint in a mountain of intellectual property lawsuits AI companies have faced in recent months.
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