Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen and James Patterson are among the signatories of the letter organized by the Authors Guild.
Thousands of writers have added their names to a letter calling on AI companies to stop using copyrighted work without permission.
Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, James Patterson, Suzanne Collins and Viet Thanh Nguyen are among the prominent authors who endorsed the letter addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, IBM and Stability AI.
In the letter organized by the Authors Guild, the largest organization of professional writers in the United States, the signatories called attention to the “inherent injustice of exploiting our works as part of your AI system without our consent, credit, or payment”.
“These technologies mimic and regurgitate our language, stories, styles, and ideas. Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poems provide ‘food’ for AI systems, endless free meals,” the letter reads.
“You spend billions of dollars developing AI technology. It only makes sense that you pay us to use our writings, without which AI would be banal and very limited. “
“The introduction of AI threatens to tip the scale to make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for writers — especially young writers and voices from marginalized communities — to earn a living from their profession,” the letter added.
Generative AI models like ChatGPT use massive amounts of data gathered from the internet to create content that mimics human speech.
The Authors Guild letter is the latest salvo from the arts world against companies developing AI.
Thousands of Hollywood actors and writers are on strike over various issues including the role of AI in filmmaking.
Last month, US authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly misusing their work to train its chatbot ChatGPT.
Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, both based in Massachusetts, are seeking unspecified damages for copyright infringement for allegedly mining ChatGPT with information copied from about 300,000 books without permission.