Artists Speak Out on the Harms of Unlicensed AI “Ingestion” and the Value of Human Creativity
Artificial Intelligence is being sold as a dazzling and inevitable piece of technology. And while we don’t question the promise of AI, at the same time its rapid development and generative capabilities have caused alarm for many artists, writers, and performers. In the past few years, unions, advocacy groups, and individual creators have all warned about the same thing: AI companies scraping books, scripts, performances, and images to train models without permission, credit, or pay poses an existential threat to human creativity. The generative capabilities of AI and the way these models have been trained on billions of unlicensed and sometimes pirated works concerns artists across genres about whether they’ll be able to keep creating at all and whether audiences will still value the human side of creative works. Below are a few perspectives from a wide range of creators on how unchecked AI ingestion harms creative livelihoods, and why the irreplaceable value of human creativity cannot be automated.
David Baldacci
David Baldacci, bestselling novelist, and member of the Authors Guild, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2025. He explained how he found his entire body of work had been used to train large language models and described the experience as both a personal violation and professional threat:
“In about five seconds three pages came up that had elements of pretty much every book I’d ever written… I truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I’d ever created.”
Baldacci underscored the crucial difference between human inspiration and digital copying, rejecting the idea that AI systems learn like human readers. He noted that after decades of reading John Irving, he cannot recall every line or reproduce Irving’s work word for word:
“None of my novels read remotely like an Irving novel. Why? Well, unlike AI, I can’t remember every line that Irving wrote, every detail about his characters, and his plots”
Baldacci also warned that if AI floods the market with knockoff books in an authors’ style, it will devalue their craft and sales would drop. And when sales drop, not only does the lifeline that lets them write the next book disappear but the lifeline for the next generation of authors is also cut short.
“As AI becomes more widespread, the number of such books will only increase, forcing authors into an endless game of whack-a-mole. That will mean lower profits for publishers, and less money to spend on new, emerging writers.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Actor, director, writer, and creator Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been outspoken about his disapproval of AI companies using copyrighted works without permission and the need to keep human creators at the center of culture. In an op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2025, Gordon-Levitt warned about the future of creativity:
“As long as an AI company can copy all of our content into their model at no cost and spit out quasi-new content for close to no cost,” he wrote, “there’s no logical business case for paying human creators anymore.”
Gordon-Levitt’s point isn’t just about art for art’s sake. If AI companies are capitalizing on the value generated by human creativity, the incentive structures, like copyright law, which reward human creators must be upheld and respected to sustain creativity and culture. And once AI can produce “good enough” images, music, or text—why wouldn’t other companies follow the AI companies’ lead and cut corners by no longer investing in real human artistry? The danger is not that AI will become too good, but that the economic foundation supporting creative work will collapse. As Gordon-Levitt put it:
“Without a system [that rewards people for their work] and with no economic incentive for people to be creative, our media landscape and public square will become absolutely devoid of anything, but algorithmically regurgitated slop optimized for attention maximization and ad revenue.”
Sarah Silverman and Other Comedians
Performers and comedians raised concerns when AI models replicated their creators in punchlines and other creative works. Comedian Sarah Silverman joined fellow creators in suing AI companies that trained models on her written works without permission:
“You’re spending billions of dollars to develop AI technology. It is only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited.”
Comedian Tom Rhodes explained that comedic timing, state presence, and the live interaction with audiences can’t be fully captured by scraped text alone, yet AI can still produce material that competes in the marketplace:
“AI terrifies me on many levels, but I don’t worry about it replacing comedy… Nothing compares to a live performance where anything can happen. And AI could never imitate the ingenious quirky witticisms of my mother and the way she looks at the world.”
Karla Ortiz
In July 2023, concept artist and illustrator Karla Ortiz testified before the Senate to voice her concerns about her work being used without consent by AI companies to train their models. Ortiz described the uncertainty and anxiety that Generative AI has introduced into the lives of working artists:
“I am no longer certain of my future as an artist—a new technology has emerged that represents an existential threat to our careers: generative artificial intelligence.”
While Ortiz is not fundamentally against generative AI, she emphasized that AI companies must operate fairly and ethically:
“I am not fundamentally opposed to Generative AI. But AI needs to be fair, and ethical for everybody—and not only for the companies that make AI products. AI needs to be fair to the customers who use these products, and also for creative people like me who make the raw material that these AI materials depend upon.”
Ortiz’s message is a rallying cry—the future of art depends on fairness, ethics, and protection of the human creativity behind image, design, and story.
Kelly McMahon
Kelly McMahon, an illustrator and graphic designer has voiced concerns about how AI erodes the value of human creativity. She explained that if people assume art is just “content,” that can be produced fast, cheaply, automatically, they may be less willing to pay human artists and artists may lose the incentive to hone their craft. McMahon stated:
“Reducing everything down to ‘content’ has taken the value out of what so many artists have spent their entire lives learning how to do… I don’t think the average person understands that ripping off an artist’s style … is not complementary to the creator, it’s exploitative.”
Joel Beckerman
Composer Joel Beckerman stressed that art is a process. No one writes a masterpiece their first try—you get better by being supported through the early work. If the earlier steps in the journey are devalued, if emerging artists are discouraged because their early experiments cannot find financial space, then the next generation of artists may never grow:
“People connect with artists’ stories and songs … there’s a richness to human stories and the connections between audience and artists that cannot be duplicated by AI…Nobody is creating great music the first time they create music … so the question is, how do people get better … if there’s no market for when they first get started?”
Paul McCartney
Sir Paul McCartney of The Beatles, warned that if creators are ripped of ownership or control, if their work is used without credit or consent, then the incentive to continue creating, diminish:
“AI is a great thing, but it shouldn’t rip creative people off. Protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them. As simple as that.”
In a 2024 Guardian article, McCartney said:
“We[’ve] got to be careful about it because it could just take over and we don’t want that to happen particularly for the young composers and writers [for] who, it may be the only way they[’re] gonna make a career. If AI wipes that out, that would be a very sad thing indeed.”
Hollywood Professionals
In March, actors Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and over 400 Hollywood professionals, including writers, directors, producers, sent an open letter to the White House expressing concerns about AI’s impact on the entertainment industry. The letter warns that without proper copyright protections; AI could impact America’s knowledge industries by enabling unauthorized use of their work. According to the letter:
“When AI companies demand unfettered access to all data and information, they’re not just threatening movies, books, and music, but the work of all writers, publishers, photographers, scientists, architects… and all other professionals who work with computers and generate intellectual property. These professions are the core of how we discover, learn, and share knowledge as a society and as a nation.”
Conclusion
What David Baldacci, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sarah Silverman, and other artists of all genres and from all places are urging is a straightforward point: it is fatal to human creativity and culture if copyright laws and creators’ rights are not upheld against mass unauthorized AI scraping and ingestion. As Baldacci made evident in his testimony before the Senate, the debate is not about choosing between technology and books—it’s about protecting the human creativity and the incentives that produced those books in the first place.
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