Hollywood creatives rally for Congressional AI bill

The Future. A new bill introduced by California Representative Adam Schiff that has the backing of every major Hollywood union hopes to raise the curtain on all the copyrighted works that generative AI systems are trained on. While the bill still has a long way to go, it may force AI companies to start purging their systems of anything that hasn’t been licensed in order to avoid many costly lawsuits.

Generative gatekeeping
Schiff’s “Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act” is joining the fight against generative AI that the writers and actors started last year.

• It would force AI firms to provide regulators with a “detailed summary of any copyrighted works used” to train their public generative tools within 30 days of being added.
• The Copyright Office would then keep a searchable database of the disclosures.
• Companies that fail to comply would face a $5,000 fine per infringement.
• But the fine isn’t what matters — it’s the artillery that it gives creatives to sue AI firms that use their copyrighted work in tools like ChatGPT, Sora, and Stable Diffusion.

Not that suing will be easy. Several lawsuits from groups of high-profile authors, artists, and other creatives are working their way through the courts, and their outcome so far has been complicated by the fluid definition of “free use.” It’s an issue that likely won’t be figured out for a while.

But with a growing number of high-profile artists, labels, and unions speaking up about the dangers, the issue will also likely never be out of the spotlight.