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 technology,” the letter said. “It’s only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited.”

The Authors Guild’s call to action comes as AI companies have faced increased scrutiny and litigation for allegedly infringing copyrighted works in training processes. Earlier this month, comedian Sarah Silverman and a group of authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, Inc. and Meta Platforms, Inc., claiming the companies used copyrighted books to train AI without their permission. It was just one complaint in a mountain of intellectual property lawsuits AI companies have faced in recent months.

Concern about infringement has also reached Congress. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property heard from AI experts and artists on whether using copyrighted content to train AI models amounts to infringement. The guild’s leadership met with staff for several lawmakers, including US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in June to discuss protective measures for writers, according to a recent release.

In Tuesday’s letter, the authors cited the US Supreme Court’s recent decisionin Warhol v. Goldsmith, arguing that the court’s decision to side with the photographer shows “no court would excuse copying illegally sourced works as fair use.”

The guild, which advocates for copyright protection for writers, said AI threatens to further damage the writing profession, which has been hit hard in recent years. According to the letter, the median income for full-time writers in 2022 was only $23,000, marking a 40% decline over the past decade.

“The introduction of AI threatens to tip the scale to make it even more difficult, if not impossible, for writers — especially young writers and voices from under-represented communities — to earn a living from their profession,” the letter said.

The authors asked leaders to mitigate the damage by obtaining permission to use copyrighted work and compensating writers for use of their works both in generative AI programs and in AI outputs.

“We’re not robots to be programmed, and AI can’t create human stories without taking from human stories already written,” romance novelist Nora Roberts said in a statement Tuesday.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. OpenAI, Alphabet, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.