The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has issued a statement on artificial intelligence and machine learning use. Excerpts of their statement follow. The complete text is here: “Current Statement on AI/ML Use”.

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Current Statement on AI/ML Use

The Board of Directors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has been monitoring the rapidly evolving technological and legal landscape as it pertains to machine-generated works….

The Board recognizes there is much to learn, and is cautious to offer advice or warnings in this area for two reasons: one, the rate of adaptation and technological evolution is accelerating at unprecedented speeds; and two, foundational legal principles pertaining to copyright and fair use have yet to be definitively established.

Despite this, SFWA feels that there are relevant time-honored principles that can help guide our community through understanding and reacting to the evolving technological and legal landscape….

1. Creators must be compensated for the use of their work.

While the degree and scope of data collection involving published work is still unclear, all indications are that the popular machine learning products have incorporated substantial amounts of creative work without regard to the rights of the authors and artists whose work makes those technologies possible. To whatever extent these machines appear to generate works of art, it is because they incorporate the work of creative people. To date we have seen no real recognition of this debt, even as these software tools are increasingly used by opportunists to flood our markets with trash….

SFWA therefore calls on legislators, regulators, and technologists to ensure that creative workers are adequately compensated when their work is used to train these systems, or else to ensure that their work is not used in the first place.

2. Creators’ contributions to a work must be credited.

One of the difficulties for our community in grappling with these technologies is the lack of transparency we’ve encountered from the companies developing them. Any complex technology has barriers to understanding, but hiding the inputs into a complex system only compounds its problems. SFWA again calls upon legislators, regulators, and technologists to make sure that training sets are clearly disclosed, so that creators may satisfy themselves that their rights have been protected…

3. Creators’ privacy must be protected, especially for unpublished work.

… online communities, including SFWA’s forums and Discord server, often have strict policies against sharing what other authors post with third parties and thus violating their privacy.

SFWA has become aware of several incidents and trends that threaten these online communities. We wish to be clear that any distribution of material copied from our own online communities to any third party, regardless of purpose, is a violation of that privacy….

4. Writing and publishing genre fiction is a business with important norms.

Several fiction markets have recently made clear that they will not consider works generated wholly or in part from AI tools. SFWA reminds writers to check submission guidelines every time they submit work to stay current on what that market is considering. Markets may bar work that is AI-written, -developed, or -assisted; unfortunately, there are no widely accepted definitions for these terms. In the absence of such consensus, SFWA urges transparency from all parties: for markets to articulate their terms as clearly as possible and to be forgiving of good-faith corner cases and mistakes, and for writers to be candid about technologies used…

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In light of the concerns discussed in this statement and elsewhere, SFWA’s Board of Directors has instructed its staff and volunteers to avoid seeking out and intentionally using generative AI/ML tools for any internal or publicly published material for SFWA, except for the purpose of discussing these technologies as part of our educational mission…. We pledge to our peers in the creative world that we are doing our best not to profit by the misappropriation of their work, and to forgive honest missteps as they return that courtesy to us.

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