Creators demand EU ‘meaningfully implement’ AI Act

This August, the European Commission’s AI Act first came into force, creating a regulatory system based on the perceived risk of AI on different levels of industry.

As this AI Act has begun to be implemented across the EU’s member states, a conglomeration of creators and rights holders organisations in Europe called the European Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) have published an open letter to the Commission “calling for meaningful implementation”.

Among the signatories are The European Audiovisual Production Association (CEPI), the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA), the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the EUROCINEMA Association of Film and Television Producers, the the European Grouping of Societies of Authors and Composers (GESAC), among many others.

The letter encourages the AI Act as a “pioneering model of ethical and responsible AI regulation” but notes that “we are contending with the seriously detrimental situation of generative AI companies taking our content without authorisation on an industrial scale in order to develop their AI models.”

“Their actions result in illegal commercial gains and unfair competitive advantages for their AI models, services, and products, in violation of European copyright laws,” the letter continues.

Proper implementation, CCIs hope, will require “general purpose AI model providers to make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary of the content used for training of their models to the obligation for such providers to demonstrate that they have put in place policies to respect EU copyright law”.

If these laws are meaningfully implemented, this will help EU artists and rights holders to be fully capable of exercising and enforcing their rights against malicious actors in the AI sector.

Last week, over 13,500 artists including ABBA, The Cure and Radiohead, signed a protest letter against their work being used to train AI tools.

“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” the statement reads.

Among the 13,500 signatories are Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Thom Yorke and his Radiohead bandmates, and composers John Rutter and Max Richter.

Other industry figures who signed the statement are writers including Nobel-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, Emma Donoghue, Ian Rankin, James Patterson, Ted Chiang and Joanne Harris, as well as actors Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Rosario Dawson and Kate McKinnon.

Several artists have already spoken out about the use of AI in their fields, including Nick Cave, who has previously called ChatGPT songwriting “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human” and labelled the impact of AI in music as “unbelievably disturbing.”

Earlier this year, more than 200 artists – including Stevie Wonder, Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, R.E.M., and the estates of Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra – featured on an open letter submitted by the Artist Rights Alliance non-profit, calling on artificial intelligence tech companies, developers, platforms, digital music services and platforms to stop using AI “to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”