Thousands of Artists Sign Petition to Stop AI Models From Scraping Data

Over 13,500 artists, creative content creators, and organizations have signed a new petition to stop tech companies from scraping data to train their AI models.

The website hosting the signatures for the Statement on AI training shows celebrities and public figures like the actress Julianne Moore, the writer Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, and the musician from Radiohead Thom Yorke.

“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,” reads the document, and part of the limited information shared on the site.

According to The Guardian, the organizer of the letter is Ed Newton-Rex, a British composer and former AI executive, who explained that those who live from creative work are very concerned about the situation with AI training.

“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. 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,” said Newton-Rex to The Guardian.

Newton-Rex used to work for the tech firm Stability AI as head of audio and has been sharing his concerns over AI training and copyrights since he resigned last year.

The British composer has also criticized the opt-out measures as the UK government is considering a scheme to allow companies to opt-out of AI scraping. “It’s totally unfair to put the burden of opting out of AI training on the creator whose work is being trained on. If a government really thought this was a good thing for creators then it would create an opt-in scheme,” said Newton-Rex.

The petition keeps gathering signatures from people from music, literature, film, television, theater, and more.