Authors, including Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman signed a petition calling on Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies to stop using their work without consent or attribution.

The open letter, which was written by Authors GuildAmerica’s largest trade association, is aimed at the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI and IBM.

Their three demands are for the companies to obtain permission to use the author’s copyrighted material, for the authors to be compensated for the continued use of their works, and for the use of their works in AI production, regardless of whether the produced material violates applicable law, according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.

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“It’s only fair that authors are compensated for feeding the AI ​​and continuing to update its progress“, she emphasized Maya Sanbag Langpresident of the Association.

“The Writers Guild is taking an important step to advance the rights of all Americans whose data, words and images are being used for massive profit without their consent,” said Jonathan Franzen. “In other words, almost all Americans over the age of six“, he underlined.

The letter of demands, dated July 19, has gathered more than 10,000 signatures.

The letter, published on the Writers Guild’s website, emphasizes that AI technologies rely heavily on the language, stories, style and ideas of writers. “Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays and poetry serve as the foundation for AI systems, yet the authors have received no compensation for their contributions. Projects are part of the material with which language models are trained, such as ChatGPT, Bard. When AI companies like to say that their machines simply “read” the texts they’ve been trained on, that’s inaccurate anthropomorphism. Instead, they copy the texts into the software itself and then reproduce it over and over again“, it is noted.