Creators' Rights Alliance on AI

What it is

The Creators' Rights Alliance is a UK coalition of trade associations, unions and collecting societies speaking with one voice on copyright, contracts and working conditions. As of its August 2024 AI statement it listed 22 member organisations* representing more than *500,000 creative professionals: authors, artists, photographers, illustrators, translators, performers, musicians and journalists.

The membership is the reason to take it seriously. The Society of Authors, ALCS, Equity, Directors UK, the Musicians' Union, the National Union of Journalists, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, the Ivors Academy, the Association of Illustrators, the Association of Photographers, DACS and the Featured Artists Coalition are all in it. It is chaired by Nicola Solomon, previously chief executive of the Society of Authors for twelve years.

For a UK creator, this is the closest thing there is to a single organised position.

The core statement

The August 2024 declaration is the load-bearing sentence, and it is deliberately blunt. CRA members "do not authorize or otherwise grant permission for the use of any of their works... in relation to... the training, development, or operation of AI models... unless the creators have specifically agreed to licensing arrangements."

That is a collective reservation of rights, issued on behalf of half a million people at once.

What they are asking for

Their demands of AI developers:

- Full transparency about which works were used in developing a model.

- Permission asked in advance, from creators and rights holders, before use.

- Payment for all uses.

- Attribution of every creator.

- Removal of unauthorised copyrighted works already inside systems.

- The right to say no, on ethical or economic grounds, without having to justify it.

The policy positions worth knowing

From their written evidence to Parliament:

Opt-in, not opt-out. "Opt-in is the only logical and fair way." Their reasoning is practical rather than ideological: once work is in circulation a creator has no way to monitor who has taken it, so an opt-out regime asks people to police something they cannot see.

No text and data mining exception that lets platforms scrape creators' work into training sets without prior express permission.

Mandatory disclosure. "Developers must be compelled to disclose all the sources of the 'information' used to develop their systems." They want a statutory register of how developers sourced data, filed before development starts rather than after.

A route to recall and recompense that is simple, accessible and affordable. Rights you can only enforce with a litigation budget are not rights most working creators have.

Unlearning. They want work to be capable of being "undigested and 'forgotten'" across systems, and are candid that the technology to do this does not really exist yet.

Also on the list: implementing the Beijing Treaty for performers, and a standing Creators Council so government engagement is continuous rather than consultation by consultation.

The evidence they lean on

- 72,508 ebook titles pirated in the Books3 dataset, used to train large language models including Meta's LLaMA.

- Getty Images* has taken action in the UK and the US over Stability AI's alleged misuse of more than *12 million of its images.

- An OpenAI impact assessment put exposure risk for poets, lyricists and creative writers among the highest of any occupation, at 68.8%.

- 61% of creators surveyed agreed that increased AI use could replace writers in their craft area.

- Creator individuals and businesses contribute £115.9 billion a year to the UK economy, with freelancers making up roughly a third of the workforce.

Why it matters

The most useful thing here is what the CRA is not. It states plainly that its members "are not against new technologies" and acknowledges that many creators use AI as an assistive tool. The ask is compliance with existing law during development and deployment, not prohibition.

That distinction matters for anyone arguing this in public. The strongest version of the creative rights position has never been that the technology should not exist. It is that consent, credit and payment are ordinary commercial expectations everywhere else, and the only reason they were skipped here is that skipping them was cheaper and nobody stopped it.

If you are a UK creator, the practical value is that your union or society is probably already a member, which means a position has been filed in your name and you can point to it.

Key takeaways

- A coalition of 22 UK organisations speaking for over 500,000 creators, chaired by Nicola Solomon.

- Its August 2024 statement is a blanket reservation of rights: no AI training use without a specific licensing agreement.

- The policy line is opt-in only, no text and data mining exception, mandatory source disclosure, and an affordable route to recall and payment.

- Explicitly not anti-technology. The demand is consent, transparency, attribution and remuneration.