More than 400 prominent figures in the entertainment industry—including former Beatle Paul McCartney, Ava DuVernay, Taika Waititi, Cate Blanchett, Alfonso Cuarón, and Ben Stiller—have urged the Trump administration to resist pressure from technology companies seeking to weaken copyright regulations on Artificial Intelligence.
According to a report in Deadline, the strongly worded letter arrives as tech giants OpenAI and Google last week responded to Donald Trump’s call for an AI Action Plan, submitting briefs that laid out their proposals for securing American dominance in artificial intelligence.
“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the A-listers—including rock legends, Oscar winners and nominees, blockbuster stars, and more—declared in an open letter addressed to the White House Office of Science and Technology. The letter, which began circulating over the weekend, further emphasised: “America’s arts and entertainment industry supports over 2.3 million American jobs with over $229 billion in wages annually, while providing the foundation for American democratic influence and soft power abroad.” It goes on to warn that AI companies are attempting to “undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.”
Alongside McCartney, Lyonne, Wachowski, Origin director DuVernay, and Oscar-winner Blanchett, the letter was signed by Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Rock, Judd Apatow, and Guillermo del Toro. Other signatories include John Leguizamo, Slave Play’s Jeremy O. Harris, Rosario Dawson, Ron Howard, Paul Giamatti, long-time anti-AI advocate Justine Bateman, Bette Midler, Ayo Edebiri, Dan Levy, Alfonso Cuarón, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Paul Simon, Damon Lindelof, and Aubrey Plaza.
