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Creative Economy and Generative AI - October 4, 2023

Madeleine Varner:

Hello and welcome to the FTCs roundtable discussion on the creative economy and generative 

AI. My name is Madeleine Varner and I'm a Senior Technology Advisor in the Office of 

Technology with a background in investigative research. Today we'll be discussing artificial 

intelligence tools that can output content on command, also known as generative AI. We've 

gathered professionals from a broad range of creative fields to discuss how these tools are 

reshaping their respective lines of work and how they're responding to these changes. 

Participants today include screenwriters, actors, programmers, editors, musicians, models, and 

more. Thank you all for being here and voicing your unique perspectives. 

Before we begin, please note that the FTC is recording this event, which may be maintained, 

used, and disclosed to the extent authorized or required by applicable law, regulation, or order, 

and it may be made available in whole or in part, the public record, in accordance with the 

commission's rules. In practice, this means that we'll be sharing a recording of this as well as a 

transcript on the event webpage after this concludes. 

Now, we're going to be hearing some opening remarks from Chair Khan. Chair Khan?

Chair Lina Khan:

Great, thanks so much. Hi everybody. So great to be here with you all today. The FTC is hosting 

this roundtable to hear directly from creators about how generative AI is affecting your work and 

livelihood, and I'm just so glad that we have this opportunity to be engaging in a very timely and 

important discussion. I wanted just to provide some backdrop for what the FTC’s role is here. 

The FTC was created 109 years ago against the backdrop of an industrial revolution that had 

delivered enormous technological progress, but had also concentrated power and control in the 

hands of a few. For example, the advent and expansion of railroads meant that farmers could 

now move their wares across the country dramatically expanding the number of markets that 
 

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they could reach, but consolidated control over the railroads also meant that farmers were often 

at the mercy of a single company that had the power to arbitrarily hike rates and set 

discriminatory terms.

And the anti-monopoly movement and antitrust laws that followed were fundamentally about 

securing terms of fair dealing across markets to ensure that Americans be it farmers, small 

businesses, workers, or consumers could engage in commerce on fair terms no matter what the 

technological advances of the day were, and so Congress created the FTC to enforce these rules 

of fair competition, and a key part of our mandate is ensuring that these core principles continue 

to apply even as technologies and business practices evolve. Lawmakers actually explicitly gave 

the FTC the authority to conduct detailed market inquiries so that we could track and keep pace 

with new market developments. 

Today as we see growing use of automated systems, including those sometimes marketed as 

artificial intelligence, we again want to make sure that we're keeping pace, that we're fully 

understanding how these new tools could be affecting people on the ground in positive ways, but 

also potentially in harmful ways and potentially unlawful ways.

One particular area, of course, is generative AI, and I think we're all waiting to see what the full 

impact of generative AI will be, but there's little doubt that this technology could really 

transform how we live and work and communicate. And at the FTC, we're in particular looking 

closely at how some of these tools could turbocharge fraud, entrench the dominance of firms that 

control the necessary raw inputs like cloud services and computing power, and potentially lock 

in business models that incentivize the endless surveillance of our personal data. As these 

technologies involved, we're fully committed to using all of our tools and authorities to maintain 

open, fair, and competitive markets without tolerating exploitative or deceptive business 

practices, and we think it's extraordinarily important to not assume that there's some inevitable 

endpoint about how these technologies will be used, but instead recognize that the laws and 

policies against which these new tools are introduced will significantly shape who benefits and 

who is harmed. That's really what we see as the FTC’s rule.

We've been very clear that we want to make sure the market understands that there's no AI 

exemption to the laws on the books, so all of the laws that already prohibit unfair methods of 

competition or collusion or discrimination or deception, all of those laws still entirely apply. I 

know that generative AI in particular poses a unique set of opportunities and challenges to 

creative industries. We've already heard significant concern about how these technologies could 

virtually overnight significantly disempower creators and artists who may watch their life's 

creation be appropriated to models over which they have no control. Really, really eager to be 

hearing from all of you. 
 

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Over the summer, I had a chance to meet with some of the writers who were part of the WGA 

and picketing and really understand from them what their concerns were. I was really thrilled to 

see that they were able to reach an agreement that includes certain protections for writers from 

how AI could be deployed.

Very much recognize that this is a fast-moving dynamic situation, but it's clear that for enforcers 

and regulators to be keeping pace and understanding what's happening on the ground is going to 

be absolutely essential, and we really couldn't do that without you all, so thank you so much for 

taking the time to share your experiences and views with us today. Our Office of Technology, 

which we launched earlier this year, is really a critical part of this effort. We wanted to make 

sure we have the skill sets on board to help us understand how are these tools really working and 

know what's really going on. And they, in close partnership with the Bureau of Consumer 

Protection, Bureau of Competition and Office of Policy Planning, were essential to putting 

today's event together, so my deep gratitude to everybody who was involved with that as well. 

Really looking forward to hearing from you all. I know Maddy and others have teed up some key 

questions and then we can have a discussion. With that, I will pass it back to Maddy to kick it 

off.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you, Chair Khan. We're going to turn it over to Commissioner Slaughter for her remarks. 

Commissioner.

Rebecca Slaughter:

Thank you, Maddy, and thanks to Chair Khan and all the FTC staff members who've worked to 

make today's event possible, and thank you in particular, to all of our roundtable participants, 

artists from such a wide range of creative media. Today's discussion involves two very different 

concepts, art and technology that are connected by an essential input, humans. Art is 

fundamentally human. Humans may use technology to assist in creating art, but something 

cannot be art without human input. Technology is, by definition, not human. Yet technology 

including generative artificial intelligence requires human intelligence. While humans may 

endeavor to make generative AI that is ever more intelligent, it cannot and will not replace 

human creativity. The value of creative arts to society is so fundamental that it is enshrined in the 

Constitution. You all are the humans who have mastered a craft and you share it with all of us for 

the benefit of the public and society as a whole.
 

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In return, such works of art may be granted copyright protection. Copyright provides your 

livelihood and the ability to continue to create and promote further creation and learning. 

Generative AI poses important questions and concerns about how copyright law and policy must 

be applied or adapted to continue to both protect creators and promote the useful arts, but 

copyright is not and cannot be the only tool to address the deeply personal concerns creators hold 

about how their works are used. The Writer's Guild of America has demonstrated the power of 

collective bargaining to secure important rights on how they will interact with, use, and be 

subjected to generative AI. Many but not all states have laws that provide rights to publicity, 

which may provide avenues for legal protection and compensation, and as the chair noted, the 

FTCs prohibitions against unfair and deceptive practices and unfair methods of competition 

apply to applications of AI just as much as they have to every other new technology that's been 

introduced in the market over the last hundred years.

These are powerful tools we can use on behalf of creators, workers, and consumers, and there 

may also be gaps in the law that need to be filled. As artificial intelligence processes, uses, and 

applications evolve, we cannot lose sight of the fundamental truth that technology is a tool to be 

used by humans. Humans are not and should not be used by technology. One of my favorite 

things about the work of the FTC is how it matters to real people in their real everyday lives, 

how it matters for real humans. I return to where I started, that art is fundamentally human. As 

the FTC considers how its tools can help fight fraud, deception, and unfair methods of 

competition related degenerative AI, it's critical to hear from stakeholders and that's why I'm so 

grateful to all of our speakers for their time and insight today. 

Thanks again and I'll pass it back to you, Maddy.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you, Commissioner Slaughter, and just to note, my remarks today don't necessarily reflect 

the views of the commission or any individual commissioner.

The Office of Technology is fortunate to be to be able to organize today’s roundtable alongside 

staff from across the agency—I want to give an immense thank you to those in the Bureau of 

Consumer Protection, Bureau of Competition, and Office of Policy Planning for your efforts 

leading to today.

We look forward to hearing the lived perspectives of those from across different creative 

industries, ones that are actively being transformed by the development of new generative AI 

systems. 
 

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Our Office works to keep pace with emerging developments in digital markets, including in the 

rapidly involving generative AI space. Our software engineers, researchers, and practitioners use 

their deep expertise to examine the different layers of these technologies–including training data 

and infrastructure used to develop AI models and the models themselves in order to better 

understand how these technologies are built and the ways it might impact market participants and 

pose harms to consumers, workers, and small businesses. 

In addition to understanding the technical underpinnings of generative AI, we root our internal 

expertise in the day-to-day lived experience of those who are most impacted. Shining a light on 

how emerging technologies impact people and communities is an important way for us to orient 

our law enforcement and policy work. 

We know that generative AI relies on a critical input to function, large, diverse data sets of 

human content. One method to build such data sets is web scraping, often performed unseen, and 

without the knowledge of creators whose work is being collected. We have heard from 

individuals, some of which are participants today, that this dynamic deeply impacts those who 

share work online, particularly creative professionals whose livelihoods can depend on having a 

public portfolio or presence to attract customers. Today, we'll have the opportunity to hear 

directly from these people. 

Today's roundtable is an important opportunity to ensure that we are assessing the full range of 

the impacts of generative AI on creative communities and help ensure that we are using our full 

set of authorities to tackle unfair or deceptive acts and practices and unfair methods of 

competition in these fields. 

We're grateful to the creative professionals who have lent their time today to share their 

experiences, and we're looking forward to an engaging and insightful roundtable.

And with that, we're going to kick things off with Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the National 

Executive Director and Chief Negotiator for SAG-AFTRA. 

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland:

Thanks so much, Madeleine. Can you all hear me okay? I'm hoping so. Hi everybody. I'm 

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. I'm the National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator of SAGAFTRA, and we are the union that represents over 160,000 members who are the faces and 
 

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voices that entertain and inform the world, and I just want to say thank you for the opportunity to 

speak on a topic that's so important, not just for creative talent, but for workers across all 

industries. 

As AI technology, and generative AI in particular, affects anyone who's concerned with consent 

and with protecting their own intellectual property rights. Generative AI, generative artificial 

intelligence, poses a threat to the livelihoods of many. But to be clear, we at SAG-AFTRA are 

not opposed to new technologies and we're not opposed to the existence or even the use of AI. AI 

in particular is an essential tool that is going to be widely used in the decades to come and it can 

have a variety of creative and innovative uses in the entertainment industry, and the 

implementation of AI we are looking to achieve would result in the technology augmenting 

human creativity rather than replacing it.

When used ethically and in a manner that recognizes intellectual property rights, AI can help 

people in their careers and can further opportunities. It can create access to employment for 

people with disabilities and those who would otherwise be prevented from pursuing work in the 

entertainment industry. What SAG-AFTRA is eager to do is to channel the benefits of AI into a 

future that's beneficial to our members, to workers in other industries, and to the public in 

general. The key is that the companies using AI technology must be required to get the informed 

consent of any individuals whose voice, likeness, performance, persona, or intellectual property 

is being used to generate content and companies need to compensate these individuals fairly. 

Informed consent and compensation addresses a lot of the most important ethical questions 

attached to how generative AI works. It also would ensure that the hundreds of thousands of 

individuals who work in the entertainment industry will be paid for the part they play in creating 

content for these companies who are using human beings to create their profit.

It's important to understand that all AI generated content originates from a human creative 

source. No AI algorithm is able to make something out of nothing, and that human generated 

content that's used in the training data reflects real and substantial work and its intellectual 

property and it deserves legal protection. There's a bit of a double standard that can be seen 

happening in a lot of these conversations around AI. After all, if an individual decided to infringe 

on one of these company's copyright protected content and distribute it without paying for the 

licensing rights, that individual would face a great deal of financial and legal ramifications. 

So, why is the reverse not true? Shouldn't the individuals whose intellectual property was used to 

train the AI algorithm be at least equally protected? An actor's brand is their voice, as is their 

likeness and their unique persona, and no company should be able to appropriate that and use it 
 

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however they wish without permission. What we are proposing is about keeping our world and 

our industry human-centered. AI and its algorithms must be here to serve us, not the other way 

around. Thank you.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you so much. Next, we're going to hear from John August, a screenwriter and member of 

the Writer's Guild of America West Negotiating Committee. John?

John August:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. 

I'm here on behalf of the Writers Guild of America West, a labor union representing thousands of 

writers in film, television, and streaming series. Our members and the members of Writers Field 

of America East have just concluded a 148-day strike where artificial intelligence was a key 

issue. As Duncan just noted, our fellow artists at SAG-AFTRA are still on strike, with AI as a 

core issue for them as well, but the fight for protection over our craft and livelihoods doesn't stop 

at the bargaining table. While we have been able to achieve groundbreaking protection for 

writers, we need public policy solutions, too. 

Obviously, copyright is an area of government scrutiny, both the copyright ability of AI 

generated work and the degree to which training AI models infringes upon copyright. WGA

writers do not hold copyright to most of the scripts we write; those are works made for hire, so 

studios— our employers— hold the copyright, but through the power of our union, we have over 

the decades negotiated an assortment of contractual rights in the works we create, including the 

right to payment for reuse of our work. It's a good reminder that while copyright is important, it's 

not the end of the story when it comes to protecting artists. 

The Guild’s new agreement offers helpful guidance in thinking about future public policy on AI. 

Our agreement defines that AI is not a writer and the material it generates is not equivalent to 

human writing for purposes of our contract. That means that AI cannot rewrite us, nor can it 

compete with a human writer for credit and the associated financial benefit of that credit. 

Further, the studios now have to tell us if they are providing us with material generated by AI 

and then it cannot require us to use AI tools. 
 

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We won these protections because we're a strong union that successfully carried off a nearly five 

month strike. But we need to remember that most writers and most artists in this country don't 

have unions to protect them. It's best to think of writers and other artists as tiny businesses, each 

competing in the marketplace to sell their work. Writers and artists each develop a unique style, 

voice and brand in order to distinguish themselves. AI fundamentally disrupts that market in 

ways that could be devastating to the creative economy. 

Large language models like the one that underpins ChatGPT have scraped massive volumes of 

data, including our words and our unique perspectives. This is theft, not fair use. Our works—

protected by copyright and our own contractual rights—are being used entirely without our 

authorization, without any attribution or compensation. Right now, you could ask ChatGPT to 

write something “in the style of” a particular writer, and they would try to do that—appropriate 

the unique voice of a writer without that writer's consent. 

As FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya recently suggested, this could constitute an unfair method 

of competition. It is using stolen goods to undercut the price of a seller and create market 

confusion, and it's not a hypothetical. Right now, authors are finding AI generated knock-offs of 

their work published on Amazon. They're having to fight to get those fakes taken down, and 

protect their brands.

This form of AI appropriation may also have consumer implications. From electronics to organic 

eggs, consumers expect to be told the origin of a product and its authenticity. Consumers make 

choices based on that information. The same will likely be true with AI. 

So, with our strike and this contract, the Writers Guild was able to win groundbreaking AI 

protections for writers. But it's important to remember that our deal only covers the film and 

television studios. Most of the real work in AI is being done by companies like Google, 

Facebook, and OpenAI with which the Guild has no contractual relationship. Public policy will 

play a crucial role in protecting our members. 

In conclusion, AI does have the potential to assist the creative community, but only with the 

consent of that community. Without guardrails, AI poses a profound threat to writers and the 

integrity of our creative work. AI and its use raises major questions of intellectual property, 

transparency of competition, all of which require careful oversight to protect the creative 

economy.
 

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Thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of film and television writers.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Next we're going to hear from Neil Clarke, Founder and Editor of the AwardWinning Sci-Fi magazine, Clarkesworld. Neil?

Neil Clarke:

Hi, I'm the Publisher and Editor of Clarkesworld, a science fiction and fantasy magazine that has 

been publishing for 17 years. We publish stories not only from established writers, but also new 

voices from all over the world. These people represent the future of my field, and it is essential to 

maintain the avenues through which they can be discovered. 

Like many of my colleagues, we do this by maintaining an open submissions process in which 

anyone can submit their stories for consideration. Not long after ChatGPT was released, we 

started noticing some unusual submissions in our queue and quickly realized that they were 

generated. It started small. A few in November, around 50 in December, over a hundred in 

January. In the first 20 days of February, it spiked and we received over 500. On the morning of 

the 20th alone, we received over 50 and the daily trends were indicating that we would double 

our normal monthly submission volume of 1100 by the end of the month.

This was unsustainable, so for the first time in over a decade, we closed submissions for 

something other than a software update. We needed breathing room to process what we had 

received and time to figure out some way to block, deter, or minimize these submissions. Even 

before this happened, we had a standing no AI policy. We knew these models were trained 

without permission on the copyrighted works of others, and it didn't sit right with us. It's also 

unclear that the people submitting these works actually own the rights they require. There are 

those who have argued that we should be considering these stories on their own merits rather 

than rejecting them for being generated. I can confidently state that they were among the worst 

stories we've ever received.

The problem is not quality at the moment, but rather the sheer speed and volume at which these 

works can be produced. The best way to describe them is to call them spam, but it's spam at a 

level we've never seen before. The generated submissions came from outside the science fiction 

fantasy community, typically from countries with a much lower cost of living and higher 

unemployment. We traced the source of much of this activity to YouTube, TikTok, and blog 

content hosted by side hustle con artists that would waive a stack of cash and make false claims 
 

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about earning riches from ChatGPT. Their intent was to earn advertising revenue or sell classes 

to those that tried and failed. They knew these tactics would not get people published. We 

happened to be on a list of a hundred or so magazines that were used as part of these schemes. 

Over the months that followed, copycats would refine their approach.

Several creating videos that specifically targeted Clarkesworld and even added directions on how 

to avoid detection. We reached out to YouTube and others in the hopes of having these videos 

taken down, but no one ever responded. I'm also the developer of the submission system that's 

used by Clarkesworld and a few other magazines. During the period we were closed, I spoke to 

professionals with experiencing credit card fraud prevention, network security, spam detection, 

and even some sympathetic people working on AI research. I evaluated many of the public and 

commercial detection tools and found their claims significantly overstated. The number of false 

positives and false negatives made them unusable. To make matters worse, I observed that 

foreign authors were far more likely to be incorrectly flagged as AI and an experienced eye 

remains the only reliable method of detection. When we reopened, the tools and techniques we 

adopted worked for about two months before the spans changed tactics and the levels shot up 

once again.

It's been back and forth since. Some days are good, many are bad. Unfortunately, we still have to 

review each of these suspicious submissions manually, but for now, we've been able to stay 

open. Between the time spent reviewing submissions and maintaining the software to control 

them, my workload has easily doubled. It's been exhausting, and this is only the early days. 

Submissions are still being submitted manually by people. Once they start employing bots to 

submit these words, what we currently receive in a month may arrive in hours. Quantity and the 

lack of reliable detection tools will eventually break our ability to do our job. This is not the limit 

of my troubles with AI. Stories and art posted to our website have been utilized the training data 

for language models without our knowledge or permission. Anthologies I've edited and 

published have been pirated and included in the Books3 database used to train various models. 

This has concerned our authors and some are even withdrawing their work as we can no longer 

protect them. While it is likely that there are many positive uses for this technology, I don't 

believe that authors, artists, translators, narrators, and others should be required to sacrifice their 

work to improve or build these models. Progress can still be made responsibly without stepping 

on creatives. Regulation of this industry is needed sooner than later, and each moment they are 

allowed to continue their current practices only causes more harm. Their actions to date 

demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to do it themselves. Thank you.

Madeleine Varner:
 

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Thank you. Next, we're going to hand it off to Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software 

Freedom Conservancy. Bradley?

Bradley Kuhn:

First, I thank the FTC for organizing this panel. It's admittedly humbling to be here among these 

key individuals from such a broad range of important creative endeavors. Folks will surely notice 

that I'm not appearing by video today, and I, again, thank the FTC for providing a method for me 

to join you today without requiring that I agree to Zoom's proprietary terms and conditions. 

As a matter of principle, I avoid using any proprietary software, but in this case, it is not merely 

esoteric principle. Zoom is among the many Big Tech companies that have sought to cajole users 

into consent for use of their user data as training input for machine learning systems. 

If consumers take anything away from my comments today, I hope they remember to carefully 

read the terms and conditions of all software platforms they use, as they may have already agreed 

for their own creative works to become part of the company's machine learning data sets.

I admit it may take you a week to read all of those terms, but it's sadly the only way you'll know 

what rights you've inadvertently given away to Big Tech. 

The creative works that I focus on, however, is the source code of software itself. Software is 

unique among creative endeavors because it is so easy to separate the work that's created by 

humans, which is the source code, from the form of the work that's enjoyed day to day by 

consumers, which is the compiled binary. I'm an activist in the area of software freedom and 

rights specifically because I believe every consumer deserves the right to examine how their 

software works to modify, to improve, and to change it, be it altruistically or commercially. Free 

and Open Source Software, abbreviated FOSS, aims to create through licensing and other means 

an equal field for all software professionals and hobbyists alike and to grant rights to consumers 

so they have true control of their own tools.

For 30 years, our community has created FOSS and made it publicly available. Big Tech for its 

part continues to refuse to share most of its software in the same way. So as it turns out, nearly 

all the publicly available source code in the world today is FOSS, and most is licensed under 

terms that are what we call copy left, a requirement that anyone who further improves or 

modifies the work must give similar permissions to its downstream users. This situation led 

FOSS to become a canary in the coal mine of Big Tech's push for machine learning.
 

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Hypocritically, we've seen Big Tech gladly train their machine learning models with our publicly 

available FOSS, but not with their own proprietary source code. Big Tech happily exploits 

FOSS, but they believe they found a new way to ignore the key requirements that FOSS licenses 

dictate. It's clear Big Tech ignores any rules that stand in the way of their profits.

Meanwhile, Big Tech has launched a campaign to manufacture consent about these systems. Big 

Tech claims that the rules, licensing, and legislation that is applied to creative works since the 

1800s in the United States are suddenly moot simply because machine learning is, in their view, 

too important to be bogged down by the licensing choices of human creators of works. 

In the FOSS community, we see this policy coup happening on every level from propaganda to 

consumers to policy papers to even law journal articles. I realize that I sound rather pessimistic 

about outcomes here. I'm nevertheless hopeful sitting here in this panel today because I see that 

so many of my colleagues in other fields are similarly skeptical about Big Tech's self-serving 

rhetoric in this regard. And I hope that we can work together to counter that rhetoric fully. Thank 

you.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Next, we're going to hear from Umair Kazi, director of Policy and Advocacy at 

Authors Guild. Umair?

Umair Kazi:

Thank you, Maddy. Thank you, Chair Khan, Commissioner Bedoya, and Commissioner 

Slaughter for centering the voices of creators in this important debate around generative AI. And 

thank you to the FTC staff for organizing this excellent program. 

I'm here today on behalf of the Authors Guild, the nation's oldest and largest professional 

organization of published authors. Since its founding, the Guild has served as the collective voice 

of American authors. Our 14,000 plus members include traditionally published and independent 

authors, novelists in all genres and categories, nonfiction writers, journalists, historians, poets, 

and translators. The Guild's core mission is to support working writers by protecting free 

expression and copyright, and fighting for fair contracts and for authors' ability to earn a livable 

wage. 
 

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Generative AI poses a serious threat to the writing profession, and we believe that guardrails 

around its development and use are urgently needed. AI developers have copied millions of 

copyrighted works without permission. These works are not only copied many times in the 

course of compiling training data sets and ingestion, but are embedded in the very fabric of the 

language models. These works are also used when users prompt the AI system. It is inherently 

unfair to use copyrighted works to create highly profitable tech, which is also able to produce 

competing derivative works without the creator's consent, compensation, or credit. 

There's a serious risk of market dilution from machine generated books and other works that can 

be cheaply mass-produced, and which will inevitably lower the economic and artistic value of 

human created works. We are already seeing that AI is being used to generate low quality 

eBooks, impersonating authors, and displacing human authored books in the marketplaces like 

Amazon. In one instance earlier this year, AI-generated books started dominating Amazon's 

bestseller list in the young adult romance category. We have seen AI-generated books pop up for 

sale on closely related or very similar topics as those authors have listed for pre-orders, a growth 

in the number of unauthorized summaries of books, and fake books using names of renowned 

authors.

Generative AI is being used to create unauthorized derivative works such as a developer using 

ChatGPT to write the concluding books in George R. R. Martin's, “A Song of Ice and Fire”

Series and chatbots like the Dan Brown Chatbot. Beyond the obvious economic impact are the 

more personal and painful incursions upon authors' voices and personhood. Pulitzer Prize 

winning author and Authors Guild councilmember Min Jin Lee has likened the experience of 

having her work used by AI to identity theft. "AI company stole my work, time, and creativity," 

she recently wrote on X/Twitter. "They stole my stories. They stole a part of me." It's not just 

well-known and bestselling authors that are suffering. Freelance journalists and professional 

writers of web and marketing content are reporting losing work at an alarming rate. An Authors 

Guild member who writes marketing and web content reported losing 75% of their work as a 

result of clients switching to AI.

A content writer featured in a piece about ChatGPT's impact in the Washington Post stated that 

he had lost a half of his annual income. There's a widespread and real concern among writers that 

AI will decimate the profession. In our recent survey, 69% of authors said that generative AI 

threatens their careers, and an overwhelming 90% said that authors should be compensated if 

their works are used in training. These concerns are born out of the experience of enduring longterm precarity. 
 

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As our most recent income survey found, the median writing related income for full-time authors 

is just over $20,000 per year. The consequences of this precarity with generative AI is quickly 

compounding reach beyond the writing community. Do we really want a world where our books 

and literature are algorithmically synthesized mimicries of the richness of human experience? To 

safeguard the incentives for creators to continue creating incentives so vital to our democratic 

culture that they are inscribed in the Constitution, the Authors Guild 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 creative works and to fairly compensate creators.

2. Credit and transparency. Create obligations for all AI companies to disclose what data 

sets and works they use to train the systems. 

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. 

4. Labeling AI-generated content. 

5. No copyright for AI-generated outputs. We oppose efforts to deem AI-generated content 

protectable under copyright law or through creation of even a limited suite generous 

right. 

Providing copyright or similar incentives to use AI to generate content will exacerbate the threat 

of AI-generated content flooding and overwhelming market for human works. Thank you for 

your time, and I will now turn it over back to Maddy.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Next, we're going to hear from Douglas Preston, a bestselling author and a former 

president of Authors Guild. Douglas? 

Douglas Preston:

Thank you. All right, I'm glad to be here. Thank you, everyone. 

In addition to being an author and the former president of the Authors Guild, I'm also the 

plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, along with 15 other authors and the Guild 

itself. And we're asking for damages for unauthorized use of our copyrighted work and training 

and building ChatGPT. And going forward, we're asking that OpenAI and other AI developers 

get permission from authors, properly license our books, and compensate us fairly for that use. 
 

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When ChatGPT first came out, like many authors, I was fascinated with it and began playing 

around with it. And at one point, I asked it to write a poem in heroic couplets about one of my 

characters. And I was floored at the level of detail it knew when it generated this poem, and that's 

when I realized it must've ingested many of my books.

And at the same time, many authors were discovering that ChatGPT-3 knew everything about 

their books as well. And some realized it was even being used to create works that imitated their 

own. My friend George R.R. Martin, who was already mentioned, was very disturbed when AI 

was used to write the last book in his Game of Thrones series using his characters, his plot lines, 

his settings—even his voice. 

So we at the Authors Guild investigated, and here are some of the facts we uncovered. ChatGPT3 used more than 150,000 copyrighted books to feed into its AI system, which led us to the next 

question. "Where did OpenAI get our books?" They're not just sitting out there on the web 

unprotected. Well, the Authors Guild found that OpenAI got many, if not most, of these books 

from pirate websites such as LibGen run out of Russia.

So these pirates had stolen our books, and then OpenAI stole them from the pirates, I guess. 

ChatGPT would be lame and useless without our books. Just imagine what it would be like if it 

was only trained on text scraped from web blogs, opinion screeds, cat stories, pornography and 

the like. 

Now, Sam Altman himself testified that books provide the really high value literary content that 

large language models require. And he also testified that his goal with OpenAI is to support 

creativity. But supporting creativity by stealing from creators is like claiming you're supporting 

the candy store by shoplifting. 

This is our life's work. We pour our hearts and our souls into our books. They aren't just 

products, they're a part of us. 
 

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And that's why we joined together, the 17 of us authors, in a class action lawsuit on behalf of all 

professional novelists against OpenAI. There's nothing complicated about this lawsuit. OpenAI 

illegally ingested our books to create a product that is currently valued at tens of billions of 

dollars, and they did this without our consent or compensation. And as Umair mentioned, the 

average full-time author in America makes only $20,000 a year. This is a classic case of Robin

Hood in reverse, stealing from the poor to give to the already obscenely rich. 

In their race to be first, AI developers are swallowing everything they can get their hands on 

without regard to copyright ownership, intellectual property rights, or moral rights. And they're 

doing this without the slightest consideration given to supporting the livelihood of America's 

creative class. 

Now, it's been mentioned before. The founders of our country wrote copyright protection into the 

very first clause of the Constitution—it was that important to them. They believed that their 

scrappy little country one day would become the creative engine of the world, and that's what 

we've become, and we can't allow AI developers to ignore copyright protection and injure the 

entire literary community of our country in their mad rush to succeed. They can succeed and they 

can also partner with America's authors in a mutually beneficial relationship. 

Thank you.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Next, we're going to hear from Tim Friedlander, president and founder of the 

National Association of Voice Actors. Tim?

Tim Friedlander:

Cool. Thank you for having me here today. I am the president and co-founder of the National 

Association of Voice Actors, and I'm here to represent the interests of the million strong voice 

actors in the United States and the surrounding ecosystem of Americans that work with them, 

ranging from engineers to script handlers to directors, producers, and PAs. 

Not all voice actors are celebrities or well-known voices. Most are blue collar, working class 

voice actors who are working 40 plus hours a week. Over 60% of the voice actors are located 
 

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outside of LA and New York. We're not anti-tech or anti-AI, as many have said before. The 

ability to record audio on our computer at home was game changing. I'm a child of the 80s. I still 

remember the time that I died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail for the first time. We are not antitech or anti-AI. We are pro voice actor.

I'm also a member of SAG-AFTRA and a professional musician for over 30 years, first in the 

classical arena, and now most recently in hip hop for the last 10 years. We stand in solidarity 

with our fellow creative industry artists who are in unions. But unlike them, 80% of the 

voiceover industry is non-union, meaning we lack the protections and contract that organize 

workers enjoy. Without the intervention of the Federal Trade Commission, AI and synthetic 

voice clones will place our members at an unfair competitive disadvantage and decimate our 

profession. It's difficult enough to compete against other humans. Now mom and pop voice 

actors across the country have to compete against digital clones of themselves and against 

multimillion and billion dollar tech companies. It's incredibly easy to use AI to capture the voice 

of an actor from content available on the internet, and to use that sample to create whole works 

for sale or non-commercial distribution.

Voice actors have been creating and delivering digital audio of ourselves for decades. Contracts 

we signed years ago are now being used to justify the inclusion of our audio in synthetic voice 

models. And every time that happens without the consent, control, and compensation of the 

voice actor involved, the value of that voice actor's product, their voice and the sound of their 

voice, is diluted and unfairly diminished. We consider this to be a form of theft. We agree to 

license our voice to clients. The client is buying the exclusive rights to that recording, that 

performance, but also the sound of our voice. We could potentially now be in conflict with a 

clone of our own voice, which causes harm to both the voice actor and the company. Pepsi and 

Coke can't have the same voice providing their commercials. Chevy and Ford can't have the 

same voice. Currently the only protections that we have from voice actors having their audio 

uploaded to these sites are the terms of service that people agree to.

Companies can change their terms of service, and currently it's easy as checking a box that says, 

"I have the right to upload this audio." We've seen damages this year very clearly. A voice actor 

in New York worked for a company for three years, and year four, they were let go because they 

were told the company had enough of their audio, and they were going to now create a synthetic 

version of their voice. In February, Twitter doxxing: Voice actors such as Michael Schwalbe and 

Abbey Veffer had their voices cloned and had Twitter accounts made that gave out their personal 

addresses in their own voice and said racist and homophobic things. Thousands of synthetic 

voices are currently online on websites from video games all over the internet. Fan dubs are 

being created and turned into adult content, and then sharing those fan dubs on YouTube using 

the voices of those voice actors.
 

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And most recently, a voice actor in Washington state lost an audiobook job when they decided to 

take the job in-house. Around that same time, the audiobook company made a press 

announcement that they were now using ElevenLlabs for all of their audiobook productions, 

effectively replacing all of those human narrators with synthetic voices. 

Additionally, an extra burden has now been placed on the voice actors to prove that the audio 

they're delivering is not AI-generated. Many voice actors have reached out to NAVA asking for 

some way to prove that they delivered human-generated audio. 

But it's not all terrible. I personally am working on a synthetic voice that I have consent, 

compensation, and control for. There are some things that humans can't physically do, such as 

narrate the New York Times cover-to-cover every morning, or provide a realistic voice for 

someone who is nonverbal. But this tech should enhance and not replace voice actors.

We're asking for a few things. 

First, the three C's. For us, this is consent, control, and compensation. Consent to have our voices 

in the models. Control over where that model and that voice can be used. And compensation to 

be paid fairly. A federal right of publicity. 

If the FTC is not able to do this through rulemaking, we would request the FTC's support for 

federal legislation to establish that right. Transparency of ingested content on which these 

foundational models are trained in order to know if our voice is present. Protections prior to the 

generation of any AI-created content that might include voices of professionals that have not 

provided consent and are not being compensated. Protection of our voices' biometric data for 

privacy and commercial purposes. An independent third party to verify that audio files are 

ethically sourced. And finally, clear labeling of any AI-generated content to ensure the 

consumers are fairly informed. 

And as such, NAVA recently endorsed the [US Senators] Schatz and Kennedy’s AI Labeling Act 

of 2023, which is Senate Bill 2691 that we are fully endorsing. 

Thank you for your time.
 

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Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. We're going to hear now from Sara Ziff, founder and executive director of The 

Model Alliance. Sara?

Sara Ziff:

Thanks, Maddy. 

My name is Sara Ziff, and I'm the founder and executive director of the Model Alliance, a 

nonprofit organization that advances workers' rights in the fashion industry. I come to this having 

worked as a model myself for many years and experiencing the pitfalls of what remains a largely 

unregulated industry. Models are typically hired as independent contractors through management 

companies which, unlike talent agencies, are held to very few legal standards. So when we talk 

about how generative AI is impacting workers, we need to consider the context of an industry 

that is truly like the Wild West– where workers have few protections at baseline and also cannot 

collectively bargain here in the US. 

Our community of models, content creators, and other fashion creatives are concerned about the 

impact of generative AI. We recently conducted an informal poll to get a better sense of their 

concerns, which generally fall into two key areas:

The first is around the use of 3D body scans in connection with generative AI, and the second is 

around the creation of AI-generated models – particularly AI models of color.

Increasingly, companies are asking models to undergo scans that generate a 3D model of their 

body or face. In our poll, nearly 18% of models who responded had been asked to undergo a scan 

by a brand or a management company. 

When a model signs a management agreement, she typically hands over a power of attorney, and 

thus rarely, if ever, sees her own contracts with the brands. As a result, models have little 

transparency into their own business dealings. 
 

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Those who had been scanned described not being given information about how their scans would 

be used, unknowingly handing away rights to their image, and not being fairly compensated. For 

people whose livelihoods are their image, this is particularly troubling in light of the rise in 

deepfake technology, specifically deepfake pornography.

The second concern is around the creation of AI models and influencers, which are digitally 

created, fictitious representations of human models. 

Fashion workers are worried about the threat of these AI models replacing jobs – not only for 

models, but also photographers, stylists, and hair and makeup artists among others. 

Members in our community have expressed particular concern about companies using AIgenerated models as part of their diversity and inclusion initiatives. 

For example, Shudu, a digital model who was created through AI in 2017 by the world's first alldigital modeling agency, has appeared as a face of high-end brands such as BMW and Louis 

Vuitton. Critics have called this a form of “digital blackface” since Shudu is a Black woman, and 

the creator who profits off her image is a White man. 

And earlier this year, Levi's announced that they are creating AI-generated models to increase 

the number and diversity of their models. In an industry that has historically been discriminatory, 

creating digital representations of models of various ages, ethnicities, and body types rather than 

hiring and paying a diversity of real models is concerning. 

I appreciate the FTC's mandate is to protect both competition and the consumer, and that the 

agency is set up to prevent unfair methods of competition and deceptive practices affecting 

commerce. With that in mind, there's a real risk that AI may be used to deceive investors and 

consumers into believing that a company engages in fair and equitable hiring practices and is 

diverse and inclusive, when they are not. 
 

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To address these concerns, we first aim to pass the Fashion Workers Act, our signature bill, 

which would establish basic labor protections for models and content creators working in New 

York's fashion industry. This would help address the lack of transparency that leaves models in 

the dark about how their digital image is being used, and establish a necessary foundation for 

regulation around generative AI in the fashion industry.

In considering regulation, it's essential that we center the experiences and expertise of those who 

will be directly impacted. And to that end, we're also developing a research study in partnership 

with the Worker Institute at Cornell University to better understand the impact of generative AI 

on fashion workers, particularly workers of color, and develop policy recommendations. So if 

anyone is interested in learning more or getting involved, we welcome you to reach out. 

At The Model Alliance, we believe now is a critical time for solidarity between workers across 

creative fields who contribute heavily to our culture and economy. Unfortunately, it's not

enough to win protections through collective bargaining agreements. There are many workers, 

including members of our community, who cannot engage in collective bargaining, and so we 

have to ensure that they are included.

As many others have said, we're not anti-technology. We're anti-exploitation. And we believe 

this round table is an important step toward ensuring our creative community is afforded the 

protections we need and deserve. 

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. We're now going to hear from Karla Ortiz, a concept artist and illustrator.

Karla Ortiz:

Hi. FTC Chair Lina Khan, Commissioner Slaughter, Commissioner Bedoya, Maddy Varner, and 

all esteemed officers at the FTC, thank you for allowing me to be a part of this amazing panel to 

discuss generative AI and its impacts on the creative economy.
 

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My name is Karla Ortiz. I have worked as a professional concept artist, illustrator, and fine artist 

for the past 14 years and have been training for that all of my life. My work has helped shape the 

world's big-budget films and TV shows including Marvel Studios Loki 1 and 2, Avenger Civil 

Wars, Guardian of the Galaxy 3, and most known for my design of Dr. Strange – look in the first 

movie, which you can see him right there.

I deeply, deeply love what I do. Making a living as a professional requires a whole life of 

practice and study. The creative economy only works when the basic tenants of consent, credit, 

compensation, and transparency are followed. The country's creative economy, represented here 

by notable figures from each sector of our industry, is great because it adheres to those tenant. 

That success is gravely threatened by generative AI. For the first time in my life, I am worried 

about my future as an artist.

Generative AI technology that uniquely could use to consume and exploit the hard work, 

creativity, and innovation of others, no other prior technology is like this. I first encountered 

generative AI around a year ago. I'm still shocked by its blatant exploitation. My work and the 

work of almost every artist I know was stolen without consent, credit, or compensation. Without 

transparency, we can't even know the extent of how much of these companies have taken. They 

took our work and data to train for-profit technologies that then directly compete against us in 

our own markets using generative media that is meant to mimic us.

AI companies also engage in deeply unethical practices. For example, data laundering, where a 

company outsources its data collection to a third party under the pretext of research to then 

immediately use that for commercial purposes. An example of this is LAION. Specifically, it's 

more popular LAOIN-5B, a dataset that contains 5.8 billion text and image pairs, which again 

includes the entirety of my work and the work of almost everyone I know.

Beyond intellectual property, datasets like LAOIN-5B also contain deeply concerning material, 

like private medical records, non-consensual pornography, images of children. Even social media 

pictures of our actual faces end up in that dataset. Many of the largest and most prolific sellers of 

generative AI use these datasets. These companies describe their stolen training material as 

publicly available data or openly licensed content to disguise their extensive reliance of 

unauthorized use of copyrighted and private data. These companies even break their own 

promises not to sell users information.

These are just few examples of the unprecedented volume of copyright infringement and 

violation of other rights. No matter what these sellers say, most, perhaps all of these models rely 

on stolen works. Not just this, but many of these highly profitable companies encourage users to 
 

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use artists full names to generate imagery, exploiting our very identities and reputations. Some 

artists have had their names used in props hundreds of thousands of times, maybe more. And 

these numbers come from incomplete records, by the way. My own name, Karla Ortiz, has also 

been used thousands of times. I never gave consent. I never got credit. I never got compensation.

Perhaps most harmfully, these exploitative products compete directly with artists and are already 

replacing us. That may be the most disturbing harms of generative AI. Not vast murdering sci-fi 

nonsense, but one built on works taken without credit, consent, compensation and transparency, 

and marketed and used as a replacement for the creators of those works at a fraction of the cost. 

The whole process is rotten.

As a side note, due to all of this, I am also a plaintiff in a class action against generative AI 

image companies as well. Their plan is simple, to go as fast as possible, promising promises of 

progress and innovation while normalizing the exploitation of creative professionals, hoping that 

by the time anyone tries to stop them, it'll be too late to protect us American, or “median 

humans” as a prominent AI executive likes to call us.

But with help of the FTC and others looking out for American rights, we hope that game will not 

succeed. I think this panel is a great step in that direction. Regulatory agencies should act now to 

protect artists, consumers, and other Americans from this unconscionable exploitation. 

Regulatory agencies should demand full transparency from generative AI companies and opt-inonly practices.

Lastly, regulatory agencies should strongly consider seeking algorithmic disgorgement on 

products built on data acquired without consent, credit, or compensation, regardless whether that 

company is transparent or not. Urgent measures like these will be needed to avoid, in my 

opinion, the diminishing or outright destruction of most, if not all creative professional 

livelihoods and the protections of all of our rights. 

Thank you.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you so much. Next, we'll hear from Steven Zapata, a concept artist and illustrator 

speaking on behalf of the Concept Art Association.
 

 Page 24 of 40

Steven Zapata:

Thank you so much and a huge thank you to the FTC for putting on this event and to all of the 

attendees. I have to say the representation here is exemplary and I'm sure we are all so thankful 

to see it.

My name is Steven Zapata. I'm a concept artist and illustrator, and I'm here speaking on behalf of 

the Concept Art Association, an advocacy organization for artists working in entertainment, 

particularly concept artists, those artists who generate striking visuals in the early design process 

of an entertainment property.

CAA is committed to elevating and raising the profile of concept artists, their art, and their 

involvement in the entertainment industries. We're here today because a future with unregulated 

AI will hurt concept artists and all other sorts of artists across many fields. We need regulation, 

intervention, and oversight. The massive datasets that text-to-image models are trained off of 

contain the copyrighted works of artists, whether it be work done for ourselves or work done for 

companies in a work-for-hire capacity.

To advertise our work, most of us put our art online, on social media and our personal websites. 

This leaves it exposed to unethical scraping practices, which can result in AI models being 

created that can mimic the signature styles of particular artists. The companies offering these 

models often encourage users to request work in the styles of particular artists by name, and 

many of these generations end up online with our names attached to these pieces that we didn't 

make. These pieces have subject matters and qualities that we have no control over. And the 

negative market implications of a potential client encountering a freely downloadable AI copycat 

of us when searching our names online could be devastating to individual careers and our 

industry as a whole.

Also, the nature of the typical work-for-hire contract has put us in a bad bind. Almost every 

commercial artist today works under all-encompassing work-for-hire contracts that surrender all 

rights to a company. And unfortunately, visual artists don't have strong union representation to 

push back on this. As it stands, you can work hard for a company like Disney for 25 years and 

they can take all your work, train a model on it, and then have a free and tireless replica of you to 

use in perpetuity. That may currently be legal, but it certainly is not just. It is clearly unfair that 

our work should be used without our permission or even our notice to train products that we will 

have to compete directly against in our very marketplace.
 

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Given these industry pressures, artists may be coerced by clients to utilize these systems 

themselves to stay up to speed with the market, thus normalizing the exploitative practices and 

foundations of these models. This will inevitably damage the perception of our field and art in 

general, as it will contribute to the idea that beautiful art is made easily. I can assure you, it is 

not. And insofar as it is made easily by an AI, it is because it has been trained off of the beautiful 

work of thousands upon thousands of artists who had to invest time and effort into creating their 

art.

So we need regulation, intervention, and oversight. We as creators should have complete control 

over how our work is used, but we need help. Some of the potential actions and remedies that we 

hope to see include, first and foremost, ensuring that all commercial AI models utilize only 

public domain content or legally licensed datasets acquired in an opt-in capacity. Opt-out is 

completely insufficient here. This could mean current companies shifting to the public domain 

and possibly destroying their current models in the process so that opt-in becomes the standard.

We also need transparency on datasets, and divulging your dataset should be compulsory. 

Mainstream models like DALL-E 3 don't reveal their training data and don't let you search it, but 

they do offer an inefficient one by one opt-out system that you can use if you think maybe your 

art is in there. But because these AI systems can't unlearn, this will only remove the images from 

future training datasets used by this one company and it's already too late to get out of the most 

current model. Future tools that would verify compliance with future regulations will also 

depend on this transparency.

We should also have AI companies pay a fine for their past practices and pay all affected artists a 

fee per generation. This is to compensate artists for utilizing their works and names without 

permission, should be retroactive for as long as the company has been for-profit. We must close 

research to-commercial loopholes, interpreted or actual, that allow for-profit companies to 

monetize the results of non-commercial research.

To close: consent, credit, compensation, control. This is what creators reasonably seek in this 

new era where our work will be used to add tremendous value to these new technologies. We 

need oversight. We need compulsory transparency and tools to verify compliance.

Thank you.
 

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Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. We're now going to hear from John K. Painting, director of the Electronic Media 

Services Division of the American Federation of Musicians. John?

John K Painting:

Thank you, Maddy. Good afternoon, everyone. It is an honor to be here.

As the labor institution which represents and protects the interest of musicians who prepare and 

perform instrumental music in recording studios for sound recordings, film, television and 

streaming services, as well as in live theater, symphony, opera, ballet, clubs, festivals, and more 

all over the US and Canada. The American Federation of Musicians is certainly no stranger to 

dealing with the encroachment of technology on our profession. 

But the rise of generative artificial intelligence yields a more existential fight than we have faced 

before, as we approach the potential disappearance of performers livelihoods and by extension 

the disappearance of a component of humanity and culture.

From our history dealing with technological advancement, like our sister entertainment unions 

and guilds, the solutions sought have been traditionally approached in two ways: collective 

bargaining with industry and legislative lobbying. Both paths tend to seek secondary income to 

those performers whose work has been diminished by advancing technology.

For example, in 1942 with live performance and radio orchestras threatened by recorded music, 

the AFM struck the record labels and eventually succeeded in establishing the Music 

Performance Trust Fund, supported by label revenue that sponsors free live concerts around the 

US and Canada. 

More recently, the AFM has had to combat the encroachment of prerecorded music into live 

engagements, such as preventing virtual orchestras from replacing pit musicians and musicals. 
 

 Page 27 of 40

We've been here before and we will be here again. Make no mistake, generative AI is coming 

and it will change everything.

Back in 1927, in the face of the technological advancement of adding sound to motion pictures, 

then-AFM President Joseph Weber said, "Nothing will destroy the usefulness of an organization 

surer than to set its face against progress. No matter how unfavorable we may at present see the 

same to our interests, we must face these changes head on rather than stick our heads in the 

sand."

But if I'm a regional live theater producer, for example, with a six-figure annual budget to spend 

on pit musicians, how much do you think I would be willing to pay to have a piece of technology 

that replaces that cost entirely? And in that scenario, should the consumer still be paying the 

same ticket prices to see that artificial musical? Is disclosure of that fact enough? What if every 

theater in the country had the same technology?

Compared to previous technological shifts, the job losses here could be steep: recording and 

scoring of all types can be wholesale replaced if composers and songwriters can replace the 

output of live performing instrumentalists with an AI-generated facsimile. Producers may replace 

the composers and songwriters themselves. Live touring across all genres would be impacted if 

bands and artists could tour with AI- generated backing musicians, holographic orchestras, AI 

backing tracks.

A machine-generated creation which utilizes a performer's voice, face, or in our case 

instrumental sound without the actual participation of that performer in the creation is 

tantamount to replacing the performer entirely. It removes the human from the creative process 

and the performing process. When that happens, the work is gone, the wages are gone, the 

secondary residuals are gone. But it's more than just economics. The humanity contained within 

artistic and cultural expression will be gone too.

Solutions cannot merely be the bargaining of replacement remuneration if the job opportunities 

are replaced wholesale, or establishing minimum hiring requirements for producers who choose 

to be union signatory, or extensions of copyright law to establish a financial value to the 

performers material. That may be sufficient for those whose material is being used to train the 

system, but what does that mean for the young cellist who's practicing today? What will that 

mean for their job prospects in five, ten, fifteen years if recording work and orchestra work dries 

up?
 

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The solutions need to be wider than the traditional paths we've all taken owing to the cultural 

damage that this problem yields. As soon as it becomes broadly accepted that art no longer 

requires the involvement of human creativity, we'll have crossed the point of no return. 

Consumers should not be expected to accept such an alternative at the same price points. 

Musical expression transcends culture and time. It will always be a part of our society, but that 

doesn't guarantee it as a viable career. The end game must be the protection of the profession. 

Thanks so much for your time.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. And finally, we'll hear from Jen Jacobsen, executive [inaudible 01:06:37] Rights 

Alliance. Jen.

Jen Jacobsen:

Thanks, Maddy. And thanks to the FTC commissioners and staff for the opportunity to 

participate today. We're so grateful to the commission for your work on this issue. And I'm 

honored to be here alongside all these other representatives of the creative community.

I'm Jen Jacobson, Executive Director of the Artist Rights Alliance, which is an artist-run 

nonprofit that fights for the right of musicians, songwriters, and performers to be treated and paid 

fairly in the digital marketplace. Like many of the groups represented here, ARA is a proud 

member of the Human Artistry Campaign, a coalition of over 150 groups in 30 countries 

spanning creative professions and advocating for responsible and ethical AI.

Musicians are not against AI. We don't want AI to be banned. In fact, musicians have been using 

AI-driven tools for years to auto tune vocals, generate beats, assist with studio production, and in 

other parts of the creative process as well. What's new today, though, are the expansive AI 

models that ingest massive amounts of musical works and mimic artists voices without obtaining 

creators consent or compensating them.
 

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Musicians want to be treated fairly, whether that means enforcing existing laws designed to 

protect creators and consumers, or in some cases enacting new laws where there are specific gaps 

to be filled. 

Unfortunately, in today's reckless, careless rush to launch new generative AI products, we are 

seeing what is euphemistically referred to as AI training or learning, but which is in fact illegal 

copying of artistic works on a massive scale without consent or compensation and often without 

the artist even knowing. 

Of course, this is a clear infringement of creators copyrights, but it is also an “unfair and 

deceptive act” that impacts both artists and consumers – and leads to unfair competition in the 

music marketplace.

Musicians’ work is being stolen from them and then used to create AI-generated tracks that 

directly compete with them. For example, we might see dominant streaming platforms packing 

playlists with AI music that they obtain free of charge or at a massive discount, which then 

lowers their own royalty obligations and diminishes artists wages. 

The increasing scale of machine-generated music dilutes the market and makes it more difficult 

for consumers to find the artists they want to hear. It makes it harder for artists to connect with 

their fans, and it devalues human creativity. 

And perhaps even more disturbingly, AI models are now using artists’ faces, voices, and 

performances without permission to make digital impersonations that not only create consumer 

confusion, but also cause serious harm to both fans and artists. These deep fakes have depicted a 

band canceling a concert that wasn't actually canceled. They've shown artists selling products 

that the artists never endorsed. We've seen false depictions of musicians badmouthing their own 

fans. This isn't a hypothetical harm. This type of consumer deception and fraud are happening 

right now. It's hard to imagine anything more personal to an artist or to anyone than being 

depicted as doing or saying things that they would never do or say. It's not only confusing to 

fans, but humiliating to the artists themselves and undermines their public image.

This conduct may violate “right of publicity” laws in several states, but it needs to be recognized 

universally as a misappropriation that causes real harm not only to the artists, but to the entire 

market by confusing consumers and creating unfair competition. And no one is as wellpositioned to protect consumers and fans in all fifty states than this agency.
 

 Page 30 of 40

The final point I want to make is about the importance of choice. Many AI companies who have 

illegally vacuumed up hundreds of thousands of musical works and recordings now say that 

artists can simply contact the company and “opt out.” This is essentially proposing a new form of 

uncompensated labor that musicians and composers have to perform if they want to avoid 

exploitation. It's also completely impractical given the proliferation of new services ingesting 

work without permission. Such burden shifting is not only unfair, it is morally wrong and 

antithetical to basic principles of artistic integrity. Artists have the right to control whether and 

when their work is being used, especially when these uses compete with their own livelihood or 

violate their own values. 

Art is about a human-to-human connection, about sharing emotions and lived experiences. 

Machines can't share emotions or lived experiences because they haven't had any. Only humans 

can do that. For musicians, like all the other creators represented here today, the unethical use of 

AI poses an existential threat to our livelihood. But for all of us, the very foundations of human 

creativity and culture are at stake. It's hard to imagine anything more important than that. 

Thank you again for including ARA in this discussion, and I look forward to answering any 

questions.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you, Jen. And thank you everybody for your remarks. So now we're going to move into a 

Q and A portion. And I just wanted to note too that Duncan Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA 

had to leave a little early to return back to the bargaining table.

So to get started, I'm going to open with the first question. 

Recently there's been some attention paid to the idea of offering opt-outs to artists who don't 

want to particular company from using their works to train generative AI models. Do such 

measures offer sufficient protections for creators? I'm going to go first to John August from the 

Writers Guild of America West. John?

John August:
 

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Thank you. As Chair Khan said in our opening remarks, the advent of AI doesn't change 

fundamental ways that the world is supposed to work, and that world works in permission first. 

That's why we think it's critical that we require artists have affirmative consent before the work 

can be used to train generative AI models and that they have to be compensated fairly when they 

do so. The same should be true for all artists, including artists like us who do work for hire and 

don't hold the copyright on our work.

And this system needs to be opt-in and not opt-out. As Jen just said, there are so many 

companies out there developing and training AI models, to be forced to continually track all of 

them down to opt out is an enormous administrative burden on individual artists. It's not 

practical. It has to be opt-in rather than opt-out.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Karla, I'm curious about your thoughts on this.

Karla Ortiz:

Yeah, so opt-out is an ineffective and inappropriate standard for commercial use of copyrighted 

works including a generative AI. Once a model is trained on data, it cannot be deleted unless the 

whole model is retrained from scratch. By the time a model is made public, it's already too late to 

opt out. Number two, most AI companies keep that training data secret, preventing artists from 

even knowing if their works were used to train a model. Number three, existing opt-out 

procedures often ask users to list works used to train the model they own, but as we just 

mentioned, that training data is secret, so it's an impossible task. And four, there are hundreds of 

AI models already in the market and more. 

Does that mean we have to opt out on each and every one of them? That's a full-time job. What 

about if those models update? What about if they don't publicize and they use third parties? What 

if those models in the opt-out forms are not an artist's native language? What about artists who 

never spend time online or don't even know this is happening?

Basically, tech companies must respect artists ownership rights. These seeking to profit from 

others works should have the burden of obtaining permission. Explicit opt-in is the only way 

forward. It's really how we ensure generative AI models exclude unauthorized works from the 

beginning. Thank you.
 

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Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well.

Neil Clarke:

I wholly agree with all the things that have been thrown on the table there. This is what you get 

when the fox designs the chicken coop. The wrong people are making the decisions when you 

have something like this happening. And there's no standard, there's no consequence for them 

ignoring these things at the moment either. So we really need to have them seeking consent, 

explicit consent, to include these works.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. I'm going to move on to our next question. Like “opt-outs,” the idea of licensing out 

work for training purposes either by individual creators or others who may retain rights to said 

work has garnered attention. What interests or concerns do you have with this kind of approach? 

And I'm going to kick it to Jen Jacobson of ARA first. Jen?

Jen Jacobsen:

Thanks Maddy. ARA does believe that it's possible to have a market for licensing our work to 

responsible, ethical AI developers. The entire music streaming market is based on licensing, so 

we know it can work. But there are three things I would say about it.

First, artists need to have complete opt-in choice, as we've just heard, about whether to license 

their work or not. 

Second is artists need to have enough power to negotiate fair license terms with these gigantic AI 

developers. There's actually a bill in Congress sponsored by representative Deborah Ross that 

would give small and independent musicians an antitrust exemption so they can come together 

and negotiate collectively, both with AI developers and streaming platforms, which is something 

they do not have the leverage to do currently. 
 

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And the third thing I would say is there is not a one-size-fits-all licensing system that will work 

for all creators or even for all musicians. Assuming there is a level playing field for negotiating, 

we think the best way for musicians to license their work is in the free market, which may look 

different for every use, every artist and every company.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Steven Zapata. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Steven Zapata:

Without a doubt, licensing will be essential in the future, but we must accomplish that through an 

opt-in system, otherwise there would be no real negotiating leverage for creators. And the focus 

of licensing, I think should go towards new opt-in foundation models, not the fine tuning of 

existing unethical models. As to when companies hold the rights to work done for hire and want 

to license or train off of that, we need regulation. 

I mean, visual artists, for example, lack the union representation to push back against contracts 

that claim all ownership. And without regulation, I think predatory contracts will just run 

rampant in this sector. And collective licensing is also troubling. The early experiments we are 

seeing with "contributor funds" from companies like Shutterstock are paying out less than 

pennies. I mean actual fractions of a penny per used image. That's all they want to pay a creator 

for their life's work and to create a tool that will directly compete against them forever. 

If that's not unfair, I don't know what is.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. John K. Painting of AFM. I'm curious about your thoughts.

John K Painting:

Sure. This goes back a bit to part of the solution I mentioned in my remarks. Let's say I'm the 

drummer for Taylor Swift and her catalog is used to train a generative AI system that can pump 

out an album on a prompt, like give me an album of Christmas songs in the style of Taylor Swift, 
 

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then the drums on that generated album must have used my sound to mimic the style. So not only 

should I have had the option to opt in there, of course, but I should see some form of benefit or 

compensation for that because those new parts are clearly copying mine.

But this is still only a bandage on the problem, because if this scenario works really well, it likely 

means that I'm not getting hired to record any new albums anymore because this system can just 

pump this stuff out. So do these new albums have the same value? Should they cost the same to 

buy and stream? Does the art have the same meaning and the same impact? That's all the 

existential crisis that we're facing right now.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. So I'm going to move on to our next question, which is: What kind of insight do you 

feel like you have now into how your work or likeness is being used by generative AI systems, 

and what kind of transparency do you feel is needed?

And Umair from Authors Guild, I'm going to start with you.

Umair Kazi:

Thanks, Maddy. Our members are keenly aware that their works are being used by AI systems. 

We get reports. Our members try out different prompts and AI systems and chat box reveal 

details about their works. And of course, several of our members have also reported finding their 

books in Books3, which is a data set of containing 200,000 books that's downloaded from a 

pirate source, which was used to train Meta's LLaMA, Bloomberg's GPT, and others. 

But Books3 is kind of an anomaly, is that it was publicly downloadable and its contents were 

visible and searchable. There is a lack of transparency from AI developers about training data 

sets, which makes it very difficult to ascertain which works were actually used to train the 

models and how. 

Much of the information about ingestion comes from the prompting experiments that I 

mentioned. We and other authors have been able to prompt, for instance, GPT to produce 

extensive detailed summaries of works and text in the style of and even incredibly compelling 

outlines for possible derivative works like sequels using settings, characters.
 

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As far as what we want, we want AI companies to be required to fully disclose the complete lists 

of copyrighted works, books in particular is the medium that we deal with most often, that are in 

the training data sets or provide specific links to where the data sets were obtained from. And 

anyone compiling a training dataset should be similarly obligated to disclose the sources. And in 

the case of copyrighted works, a complete list of works that have been included in the dataset.

We also think authors and artists should have the right to say that they don't want their identities, 

works, voice or style used in outputs. And we believe that there should be a requirement to 

conspicuously label fully or substantially AI generated words in online marketplaces.

Madeleine Varner:

Doug Preston, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this question.

Douglas Preston:

Yes, thank you. As a plaintiff in this lawsuit, one of the things that I did was to go to ChatGPT-3 

and ask it many detailed questions about my books, my characters, very minor characters that 

have never appeared in a book review or in Wikipedia, and it was absolutely extraordinary how 

knowledgeable ChatGPT was. It was able to write a whole paragraphs in my style, using my 

characters, using my settings, using everything in my books, and yet it was all stolen from me 

and fake and AI generated. And that was very disturbing. And I also used that Books3 database, 

that dataset that Umair was speaking about, and found that that dataset has all my books, all 40 

of them on it, including many different editions. That was another shock.

But as far as how we know our books are being used in AI training, we have absolutely no idea. 

It's a black hole. OpenAI is training ChatGPT 5 right now, is building it. They refuse to answer 

any questions from the Author's Guild about what data sets they're using, where they're getting 

their books, and how they're being used. There's no transparency at all. It's an absolute black 

hole. All we want is control of our creative work, fair compensation and opt-in consent.

Madeleine Varner:

Sara Ziff, I'm curious about your thoughts on this question.
 

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Sara Ziff:

Yeah, thank you. Models have very little insight into how their work or likeness is being used in 

general, let alone in the context of generative AI. Normally they don't see their contracts with the 

brands and often don't know how their image will be used, whether how much they'll be paid. So 

generative AI introduces the potential for further exploitation in an already exploitative work 

environment. In terms of the transparency we want, I think some key elements would include 

requirements for explicit consent, notification of use, compensation, and liability for 

misrepresentation.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you. Bradley Kuhn, I'm curious about your thoughts on this question.

Bradley Kuhn:

Well, first of all, there's now really no question that the body of Copyleft in FOSS is a huge part 

of the software assisted development machine learning systems such as Microsoft's GitHub 

CoPilot. We've exposed many of these examples, but the companies are also playing cat and 

mouse by simply excluding, on the generative backend, the most egregious examples of 

copyright infringement when they're publicly called out.

In my opinion, there's no reason that big tech shouldn't be regulated to make these systems 

transparent, completely end to end. In my view, the public should have access to the input set, 

have access to the source code of the software that does the training and generation, and most 

importantly, access to the source code that does these forms of backend generation exclusion, the 

latter of which I think would expose the duplicity of big tech's policies here.

Finally, I expect that once we have real transparency, it will bear out what many of the other 

speakers have noted today, that the issues of machine learning systems can't be solved merely 

with a financial compensation model to creators. FOSS really shows this explicitly since most 

FOSS authors are doing the writing of the software altruistically and the compensation that 

they're seeking is the requirement for future improvements to the comments, not a financial 

compensation. So we really need full transparency in these systems to assure that essential nonmonetary policy, licensing term and consumer's rights are upheld.

Madeleine Varner:
 

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Thank you. So I'm going to ask our final question for the day, which is, you've all described the 

harm to creators and their professional interests when companies use generative AI tools in 

certain ways, such as when those tools rely on the use of protected works or people's voices and 

images. Can those uses also wind up harming consumers? And if so, how? 

And for this question, we're going to go to Tim Friedlander from the National Association of 

Voice Actors. Tim?

Tim Friedlander:

Cool. Thank you for this question. The ability to create a synthetic voice from anyone who has 

recorded audio is easy and simple and dangerous. Currently now it only takes three seconds of 

source audio to create a realistic voice clone. And this synthetic content can be used to deceive 

consumers into believing that a trusted voice is communicating with them. This can lead to 

relying on false and misleading information and potentially even implicate the human whose 

voice has been used to harm people. In the last couple of days, we've seen Tom Hanks and 

MrBeast release statements saying that there is synthetic versions of their image and voice cell in 

ads they did not authorize. And currently there's a show streaming on a major media streaming 

channel that is using AI generated voice dubs for their English dubs.

At a minimum the consumers should know when AI is used to generate voices and receive a 

warning that the information they're going to receive may not be accurate. We're also coming 

into an election, and we know that synthetic voices will be used, they have been used, and it's 

possible for anybody to use a synthetic voice for disinformation. And no one, a voice actor or 

anybody in general, wants to be the recognizable voice of disinformation in this coming election.

I want to leave just with a personal thought that we all know the sound of our friends and family 

and our loved ones' voices. You call somebody and say, "Hi, it's me." We know who we're 

speaking to. I spoke with a friend of mine, his name's Patrick, last night. Two months ago or a 

few months ago, he received a phone call from somebody claiming to have kidnapped his 

daughter, was demanding ransom, played a recording or a voice of his daughter screaming, 

"Papa, help me. Help me. Papa, save me." He said, "I knew deep in my bones, that was my 

daughter's voice." His daughter was safe. It was a scam, it was a fake. But he said "The voice 

that I heard on that line was my daughter's voice. It was the same voice I heard when I dropped 

her off at school. And it was the same voice that I heard when I picked her up when I found out 

she was safe." The danger to consumers is real. It is tangible. And it is here now.

Madeleine Varner:
 

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Thank you. And that concludes our Q&A portion. Now we're going to turn it over to 

Commissioner Bedoya for some closing remarks. Over to you, Commissioner.

Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya:

Hi everyone. Can you hear me and see me? Wonderful. Tim, what a note to end on. As a parent, 

that is chilling. And I just want to say before I begin, I want to touch on two issues that I think 

hopefully will compliment some of the conversations that have been had today. I'm profoundly 

worried about fraud and AI use. I'm profoundly worried about what's happening to your work, 

your property, the fruit of your minds, quite literally. 

I just want to offer two thoughts.

The first doesn't really have to do with the law. It has to do more with first principles and really 

what's at stake. And my hope is that this audience in particular, might think that important. The 

second does have to do with a very specific legal application of generative AI that concerns me 

profoundly and that I recently wrote about in the LA Times on Labor Day. But let's first talk 

about what's at stake here.

There is this foundational moment in American letters. I think it was 1837, Ralph Waldo 

Emerson gives this talk called the American Scholar. He goes on about how for way too long 

American writers, American poets have looked to Europe. He basically calls out writing for 

being boring. He says, he has this wonderful line, "Genius is always the enemy of genius by over 

influence." And he says that for 200 years, English poets have been Shakespeare-ized, basically 

saying that people have been copying the work of this genius rather than creating new work. And 

he said, "We need an American voice. We need an American scholar. It needs to be rooted in the 

soil, it needs to be free of these European strictures." And sitting in the audience that day was a 

journeyman printer from Brooklyn named Walter Whitman.

One of the great mysteries of American letters is that basically out of nowhere in 1855, a 

basically middling journeyman printer and occasional journalist creates what is arguably the 

greatest work of American letters, “Leaves the Grass.” This collection turned poetry itself on its 

head. Previously, poetry had restricted itself to certain strictures around rhyme and meter. 

Previously, yes, poetry maybe touched upon love and human sexuality, but it was always demure 

to a certain degree, think Keats' “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” And suddenly everything was possible. 

Suddenly Whitman made it acceptable for people to write in free verse. Whitman made it 

acceptable to write about love and sexuality in a way that was previously considered completely 

not on the table. 
 

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There is no Allen Ginsburg without Whitman. There is no Gabrielle Garcia Lorca without 

Whitman.

When I think about the work all of you do and I think about the challenges we're confronting, 

and you think, what can we expect from generative AI? I think there are people who basically 

expect everything, expect the world, expect there are no limits whatsoever on what is possible. 

And what I think it's important to remember is that because of the fundamentally recursive nature 

of what we call artificial intelligence, where it takes what it's read, what it's seen and returns it to 

you, I think that it is wildly unrealistic and frankly dangerous to think that it will break every 

bound of human creativity.

I think that, to paraphrase Emerson, what can we expect? We can expect a lot of bad copies of 

Shakespeare, but good luck trying to create the next Walt Whitman. I don't think it will ever 

extinguish the genius of human creativity. And it's important we disabuse people of the notion 

that it remotely will. And so, as a question of first principles, I think we need to remember that 

the only place genius comes from is people, is humans. And any effort to persuade the world 

otherwise will fail. But we need to make sure to remind people of that.

Let me get off my rant for a moment and speak about one specific legal application, which is 

something that concerns me, which is the capture of the art of actors and the art of writers. A 

couple weeks ago I started digging into this and I saw two things. 

First of all, I was reading all these industry analyses about what AI promised for industry, and 

they were all over the place, but the one thing they have in common is they say, to the degree 

that work requires social and emotional skills, artificial intelligence is going to struggle.

I was reading these reviews from very fancy think tanks about that. And then Justine Bateman 

posted a note on social media. She said, "Hey, background actors, I hear some of you have been 

scanned on the lot. Why don't you share your stories with the world?" And these stories started 

coming in. "Yeah, hey, I was on the lot. And on day three with no notice, I was told to go to that 

tent over there. I walked into that tent and I was scanned from 360 degrees by 80 cameras. They 

paid me $25. They told me that if I said no, I'd get fired." Someone else writing about, same 

story, surprise request to get scanned, surprise capturing not just in many instances of people's 

bodies, but also their emotions.
 

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Hearing these stories reminded me in Congress perhaps of 1914, when Congress passed the law 

that created this commission that all of you are speaking before today, the Federal Trade 

Commission. In 1914, Congress had the choice of passing a law that specifically enumerated acts 

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 that would be illegal. One House of Congress actually considered that, actually 

voted on it. Then they stopped and said, no, we need to consider the fact that there will be 

innovation in unfair methods of competition. We need to create an institution that is free to meet 

the innovations of large, powerful entities that will stifle competition in American industry in 

whatever corner it may be found.

And when I hear about writers who worry, new writers, young writers worry that the moment I 

arrive, I'm going to be asked to feed my scripts in, to train a new AI. When I hear about 

background actors, young actors, how lots of future actors are discovered, but who are the least 

powerful, least experienced, least savvy of all actors being forced to get scanned in the nude 

sometimes or in other really uncomfortable situations, it strikes me as more than innovative and 

it fills me with concern.

I will say, because this is a law enforcement agency, these are allegations. I did not investigate 

these things, but the shape of what I'm seeing concerns me profoundly. And you have to know 

that in myself, in our chair, in my colleague, Commissioner Slaughter, you have public servants 

who are keenly interested in your stories and what's happening to you and what's happening to 

your work. So with that, I will end and I'm not sure, actually, I did read the script. I don't know if 

I wrap everything or I pass it back to you, Madeline. Let me pass it back to you.

Madeleine Varner:

Thank you so much, Commissioner Bedoya. On behalf of the FTC, I'd like to thank everybody 

for a robust discussion, for sharing your perspectives and experiences and for raising more 

awareness on these issues. We're sincerely so grateful. 

We will be posting the video and transcript of this round table on the event webpage. And in the 

meantime, thank you again so much to all the participants as well as the folks who are watching 

right now. 

We hope you all have a great rest of your day. Thank you.