Thousands of creatives, including prominent actors such as Kevin Bacon and Kate McKinnon, along with various other actors, authors, and musicians, have endorsed a statement cautioning against the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials to train AI models. The list of signatories currently includes 11,500 names.
The statement reads: “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.”
This statement was released by Fairly Trained, an organization advocating for the fair use of training data by AI companies. Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of Fairly Trained, expressed to The Guardian that generative AI companies require “people, compute, and data” to develop their models and, while they invest “vast sums” in the first two, they “expect to take the third – training data – for free.” Newton-Rex established Fairly Trained following his departure from Stability AI, where he accused generative AI of “exploiting creators.”
Some notable figures are absent from the list of signatories. Scarlett Johansson, who had a well-publicized conflict with OpenAI over allegations that it modeled GPT-4o’s voice after her, is not among the signatories. Additionally, actors such as Dame Judi Dench and John Cena, who signed up with Meta AI’s voice chat system for voice replication, are also not on the list.