RWA Signs on to Legislative Proposals to Protect the Creative Professions and Mitigate Risk of Harm from Generative AI

August 10, 2023

The Policy Advisory Committee is happy to announce that RWA signed the Legislative Proposals to Protect the Creative Professions and Mitigate Risk of Harm from Generative AI, August 10, 2023, along with twelve other creative organizations. Below is an excerpt from this proposal. View the full document (PDF)

This proposal is lobbying for laws, regulations, and policies that recognize the following and require:

  1. Consent and Compensation: Require all generative AI companies to seek permission for the use of creators’ works in generative AI systems, and to fairly compensate creators who allow their works to be used in “training”1 of generative AI;

  2. Credit and Transparency: Create obligations for all AI companies to disclose what datasets and works they use to “train” their AI systems in the past, present, and future;

  3. Permission and Payment for use in outputs: Require all AI companies to seek permission and pay compensation when creative works are used in outputs, or when names or identities or titles of works are used in prompts—whether through adding a new economic right under copyright law or as a sui generis right, and through a broad, well-articulated federal right of publicity law;

  4. Labeling AI-generated content: Require the conspicuous labeling of AI-generated works as such, with enforcement provisions;

  5. Permission for Generative AI’s Use of a Person’s Identity, Persona, or Style in a Federal Right of Publicity: Create a federal right of publicity that would simplify bringing a claim for use of voice, name, image, or other indicia of a creator’s identity (whether such creator is living or deceased). Unlike current state right of publicity laws, we believe that it should also encompass a creator’s style where readily recognized by the relevant consumers; and

  6. Prohibit Removal of Copyright Information in the Ingest/Training Process: Amend section 1202 of the Copyright Act so that it is a violation to intentionally remove “copyright management information” from a copyrighted work in order to train AI or create an AI training dataset without permission of the copyright owner, whether or not it can be proven that it was knowingly done to induce or enable infringement; and

  7. No copyright for AI-generated outputs: Retain the current copyright law requirement that copyrighted works be human created; we oppose efforts to deem AI-generated content protectable under copyright law, or through the creation of even a limited sui generis right. Providing copyright or similar incentives to use AI to generate content will exacerbate the threat of AI-generated content flooding and overwhelming the market for human works that the Constitution seeks to promote and protect.