Kevin Bacon, Kate McKinnon, and other creatives warn of ‘unjust’ AI threat

Thousands of creatives, including famous actors such as Kevin Bacon and Kate McKinnon, as well as other actors, authors and musicians, have signed a statement warning that the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials to train AI models poses a threat to people, who created these creative works. So far there are 11,500 names on the signatory list.

Here is the statement in one sentence:

“The unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI poses a major, unwarranted threat to the livelihoods of the people behind these works and must not be allowed.”

The statement was released by Fairly Trained, a group that advocates for fair use of training data by AI companies. Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of Fairly Trained, said The Guardian that generative AI companies need “people, computing power and data” to build their models, and while they spend “huge sums” on the first two, “they expect to get the third – training data – for free.” Newton- Rex founded Fairly Trained after leaving Stability AI and accused generative AI of “exploiting creators.”

There are also some notable names who do not appear among the signatories. Scarlett Johansson, who had a heated argument with OpenAI after she was accused of recreating GPT-4o's voice, is not on the list. Neither are actors like Dame Judi Dench and John Cena, who have signed up to have Meta AI's voice chat system replicate them.

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