The Human Consent Foundation, a nonprofit co-founded by Cate Blanchett, has filed a 31-page amicus brief in The New York Times‘ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. Joined by artist advocacy groups, it argues that existing licensing systems can clear creative works for artificial intelligence (AI) training.
The licensing argument
The brief, filed Friday in the Southern District of New York, challenges the companies’ position that clearing rights for the content they use is impractical.
“Defendants have argued that licensing creative works for AI training is cost-prohibitive,” the brief reads. “Defendants also claim there is no settled means of valuing training data. The facts demonstrate otherwise. The creative industries already have in place a proven infrastructure and workflows to clear rights for dispersed work at scale and cost-effectively.”
Foundation co-founder and CEO Nikki Hexum said the filing aims to show the court “how the creative industry actually works and acknowledge the solutions that have been built and are continuing to develop for this new digital era.”
“Our goal is to ensure that as the market for AI data licensing grows, the humans who create the value in that market are protected and have a meaningful choice,” said Hexum. “We are not starting from scratch. There is already a functioning market and infrastructure for licensing creative work. We just need to ensure that new AI technology respects those boundaries and choices, including the choice not to participate.”
Foundation and other filings
Hexum and Blanchett founded the organization as RSL Media in May. The foundation, which seeks to protect people’s name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights from unauthorized AI scraping, launched a registry in June for individuals to record the permissions they give AI models to use their likenesses.
Others who signed the brief include Bette Midler, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts, Robert De Niro, Rosario Dawson, Scarlett Johansson, Vince Gilligan and the Stan Lee Foundation.
Separate briefs from several groups, including the U.S. government, support the companies’ position that AI scraping is protected by the fair use doctrine. Tech companies have broadly relied on that argument in lawsuits over AI scraping.
