1. United States
2. Ariz.
3. Letter

Three days ago 12 million works of art were stolen due to non-consensual scraping of an artist portfolio website called Cara which was built specifically to host human made art and vets accounts to prevent AI art and also has in their TOS that scraping is not allowed and does as much as they can to prevent scraping. It has now been targeted by scrapers for no reason other than to break the few artist protections that we have. Legislation is desperately needed to better protect the work of creatives from AI theft. AI systems scrape and steal vast amounts of data and images, without consent and in violation of copyright and intellectual property laws. These datasets consist of visual, written, and audiovisual works protected by copyright. Artists and creators must be able to authorize or prohibit the use of their work, but the speed at which AI technology moves has left our current protections grossly inadequate. Permission from creators must be sought before a scrape or AI training, and credit and compensation must be given to creators when their work is used for AI training. Companies should be required to show transparency and clearly list all works that were scraped. The burden should not be on artists to check if their work was taken, and then face the tedious process of trying to get compensation or their works removed. Currently, websites like Hugging Face brag that their illegal scrapes cannot be prosecuted because they use a URL instead of the image itself to train generative AI on, and URLs are not protected by copyright. This is a blatant workaround when the image itself is still what is used to train, and the artists are left with just accepting the theft of their work or the cost of a legal fight. Creators have been losing their income in massive numbers as generative AI is used to replace visual art, voice acting, and written materials. This has a larger financial cost, as every job lost has a ripple effect on our economy. It is wrong that human creators are being replaced with technology would not exist without the stolen work of those creators. Our government needs to put clear regulations in place, and current copyright and intellectual property laws must be updated to account for the huge leap in technology. This is an issue I will be voting on in the midterms. Thank you for your time.