Human Artistry Campaign

The Human Artistry Campaign launched on March 16, 2023, at SXSW as a united front of the creative industries in the AI debate. It began with roughly 40 member organizations — among them the RIAA, the Recording Academy, ASCAP, BMI, the AFL-CIO, and major performers’ unions — and has since grown past 200 members worldwide, including SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America. It is, by breadth, the largest organized coalition of creators’ institutions ever assembled on a technology question.

Seven principles

Rather than litigate or protest, the campaign works by setting norms. Its seven core principles hold that AI can be a tool for human expression like the synthesizer or the digital audio workstation before it; that use of copyrighted works and of performers’ voices and likenesses for training requires authorization and fair-market licensing; that AI deserves no special exemptions from copyright or publicity law; that copyright exists to reward human creativity, not machine output; that AI systems should keep records and label their output transparently; and that creators must have a seat in AI policymaking.

The campaign’s fingerprints are on much of the subsequent fight: its framing — consent, credit, compensation, transparency — recurs in the Copyright Office’s human-authorship rulings, the NO FAKES Act, and open letters like the one from the Artist Rights Alliance. Notably, its founding documents go out of their way to say AI “has enormous potential” when used to support rather than replace human artistry; the campaign positions itself as pro-artist rather than anti-technology.