Kevin Bacon, Kate McKinnon, and other creatives warn of ‘unjust’ AI threat

Thousands of creatives, including famous actors like Kevin Bacon and Kate McKinnon, along with other actors, authors, and musicians, have signed a statement warning that the unpermitted use of copyrighted materials to train AI models threatens the people who made those creative works. 11,500 names are on the list of signatories so far.

Here is the one-sentence statement:

“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.”

The statement was published by Fairly Trained, a group advocating for fair training data use by AI companies. Fairly Trained CEO Ed Newton-Rex told The Guardian that generative AI companies need “people, compute, and data” to build their models, and while they spend “vast sums” on the former two, they “expect to take the third – training data – for free.” Newton-Rex founded Fairly Trained after he quit Stability AI, accusing generative AI of “exploiting creators.”

Several professionals and organizations like News Corp and the Recording Industry Association of America have sued AI companies for using copyrighted work while training AI models.

The RIAA is among the organizations that have signed Fairly Trained’s statement and has even posted about it. As has the News/Media Alliance.

There are also some notable names not appearing among the signatories. Scarlett Johansson, who had a high-profile spat with OpenAI after accusations it modeled GPT-4o’s voice after her, isn’t on the list. Neither are actors like Dame Judi Dench and John Cena, who signed up to have Meta AI’s voice chat system replicate them.