June 29, 2023
We applaud Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey for asserting their rights in the lawsuits against OpenAI, and we are standing by to provide support if requested. Using books and other copyrighted works to build highly profitable generative AI technologies without the consent or compensation of the authors of those works is blatantly unfair—whether or not a court ultimately finds it to be fair use.
These are unprecedented times for writers and creators. The writing profession is facing an existential threat from generative AI, and many authors are already reporting a loss of writing income from journalism and business writing due to companies using AI instead of human writers. AI-generated materials also hold the potential to flood the markets, and inevitably lower the value of human authored works. It behooves us to pursue all available avenues—judicial, regulatory, and legislative—to make sure writers have the incentives to write, or else we will become much poorer as a society.
The Authors Guild has been lobbying aggressively for guardrails around generative AI because of the urgency of the problem; specifically, we are seeking legislation that will clarify that permission is required to use books, articles, and other copyright-protected work in generative AI systems, and a collective licensing solution to make this feasible.
You can find out more about our work on AI policy here.
