Received from: Writers’ Guild of Great Britain
Writers in the UK are seeing the industrial-scale theft of their work to train large language models, in breach of existing copyright law.
In addition, many writers rely on supplementary work to boost their income, which is notoriously precarious, and are seeing both writing and non-writing jobs being replaced by AI.
The government has said it is committed to protecting copyright and has put the creative industries at the heart of its growth strategy, yet we are still waiting for concrete action – leading many to believe that the government is siding with big tech over creators.
We call on Congress to support campaigns calling on government to introduce urgent regulation (including transparency measures), to enforce and strengthen existing UK copyright legislation, and to protect jobs in the creative industries in an age of AI.
Writers’ Guild of Great Britain
AMENDMENT
After point 1 insert 2 new points:
2. ensure that creative workers, including journalists, are compensated for the use of their work in “training” AI systems
3. ensure that future “training” use is permitted only where the creative worker has granted permission (“opted in”)
National Union of Journalists