Thousands of Authors Demand Compensation for Work That Trains AI

Margaret Atwood, James Patterson, and more than 9,000 authors signed an open letter to AI industry leaders calling for compensation and consent for use of their works.

The letter, organized by the Authors Guild, was delivered to Big Tech companies OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft. The letter said the companies’ AI products—such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT—are trained on vast amounts of information available on the internet, including copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry that act as “food” for which “there has been no bill.”

“You’re spending billions of dollars to develop AI ...