Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
About 800 artists, writers, actors and musicians have signed on to a new campaign against what they call “large-scale theft” by artificial intelligence companies. Signatories to the campaign – called “Theft is Not Innovation” – include authors George Saunders and Jodi Picoult, actresses Cate Blanchett and Scarlett Johansson, and musicians such as REM, Billy Corgan and The Roots.
“Driven by fierce competition for leadership in new GenAI technology, profit-hungry technology companies, including those among the world’s richest companies as well as private equity-backed ventures, have copied a vast amount of creative content online without permission or payment to those who created it,” a press release said. “This illegal intellectual property seizure fosters an information ecosystem dominated by disinformation, deepfakes, and an artificial stream of low-quality material (“AI slop”), threatening the collapse of the AI paradigm and directly threatening America’s AI superiority and international competitiveness.”
The advocacy effort is from Humanitarian Art Campaigna group of organizations including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), professional sports players’ unions, and performers’ unions such as SAG-AFTRA. “Theft is not innovation” campaign messages will appear in full-page ads in the media and on social media. Specifically, the campaign calls for licensing agreements and a “healthy enforcement environment,” along with the right for artists to choose not to have their works used to train generative AI.
At the federal level, President Donald Trump and his allies in the tech industry are trying to do just that Controlling how countries regulate artificial intelligence and Punish those who try. At the industry level, technology companies and rights holders who were previously on opposing sides are scaling back licensing deals that allow AI companies to use protected work — content licensing appears to be a solution that both parties can live with, at least for now. Major record companies, for example, We’ve now partnered with AI-powered music startups To offer their catalogs for AI remixing and model training. So have digital publishers, some of whom have sued the AI companies that trained on their work Support standard licensing Which outlets can use to prevent their content from appearing in AI search results. Some ports have occurred Individual deals with technology companies that allows AI chatbots to display news content (Disclosure: Vox Media, EdgeThe parent company of, has a licensing agreement with OpenAI.)