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The Authors Guild Letter
The July 2023 open letter signed by more than ten thousand authors — Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Patterson among them — demanding that AI companies obtain consent, provide credit, and offer compensation before using published work to train language models.
The letter was organized by the Authors Guild, the largest professional organization for writers in the United States, and addressed to the chief executives of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft. Its demands were minimal: consent, credit, and compensation — the same three terms that have governed the use of creative work in the publishing economy for generations. The letter was the mildest form of collective action available, the form the framework knitters exhausted before turning to direct action. Its signatories were not breaking anything. They were asking, through the most polite available channel, for the recognition of a principle so basic that its contested status reveals the depth of the institutional failure: the principle that the use of a person's labor to enrich a corporation requires the person's consent.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The letter followed the discovery that the Books3 dataset