AI giants are stealing our creative work

We’re living through an explosion in generative AI – artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney that can spit out text, music or images from a brief prompt. And we’ve all seen it on our feeds: Studio Ghibli-style images of pets, scarily real footage of Trump sipping cocktails next to Benjamin Netanyahu, or diss tracks featuring dead rappers.

This fake art isn’t just produced by algorithms that are trained with vast amounts of energy and by people paid poverty wages. It also depends on AI giants using creative work and refusing to pay for it. Companies like Meta and OpenAI are hoovering millions of copyright books, songs and films into their AI tools without permission – creative work that the companies admit they would never be able to afford if they were actually paying for it.

Writers, musicians and artists depend on this work to make a living, but these multimillion-dollar companies claim that stealing it comes under fair use provisions that are designed for research, criticism, teaching or comedy.

But how can it be fair when these AI tools pump out work that copies the style that an artist has taken a lifetime to hone, or even regurgitate chunks of copyright work – for free?

Corporations can’t just steal people’s work and get away with it. We ’re investigating whether we can mount a challenge to AI firms strip mining our creative work. But we need your help.

As we continue our investigations and legal analysis, we want to hear from photographers, film-makers, musicians and more, so we can uncover more evidence of their work being used to train generative AI.

But the strongest challenge right now is for writers who have published fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama under copyright. Last month, the Atlantic showed how Meta is using the LibGen database, with its millions of copyright books, to train their model, Llama. They even published a handy database, so anyone can check whether their work was part of the training data.

If big tech has stolen your creative work, we’d love to hear from you. Together we can stand up for human creativity.