'Unjust threat' Murdoch joins artists in fight against AI firms' content use

It is an unlikely alliance: the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a panoply of leading artists including Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, actor Julianne Moore and author Kazuo Ishiguro. This week both began very public fights with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to build the increasingly powerful and lucrative new technology.

- Mark Sweney

More than 13,000 creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theatre and television released a statement warning that AI firms training programs such as ChatGPT using their works without a licence posed a "major, unjust threat" to their livelihoods. By the end of the week that number had risen to 25,000.

It came a day after Murdoch, owner of the publishing group News Corp, whose newspapers include the Wall Street Journal, the Times and the Australian, launched a case against the AI-powered search engine Perplexity accusing it of "illegally copying" some of his US titles' journalism.

The stars' statement is a concerted effort to challenge the idea that creative works can be used as training data without recompense on the grounds of "fair use" - a US legal term meaning permission from the copyright owner is not needed. Adding to their anger is the fact these AI models could then be used to produce fresh works that compete with those of human beings.

AI was a sticking point in last year's strikes by Hollywood actors and writers, which secured agreements to ensure the new technology stays in the control of workers, rather than being used to replace them. Several continuing legal cases are likely to decide whether the copyright battle will be similarly successful.

In the US artists are also suing tech firms behind image generators, major record labels are suing AI music creators Suno and Udio, and a group of authors including John Grisham and George R R Martin are suing ChatGPT developer OpenAI for alleged breach of copyright.