This has been making the rounds in the AI/Art infospace, that a group of testers of OpenAI’s upcoming Sora video gen model broke ranks and leaked access to the model publicly when they weren’t supposed to, and posted this open letter on Huggingface in support of the effort (signable version here).

ARTISTS ARE NOT YOUR UNPAID R&D
☠️ we are not your: free bug testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens ☠️

Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company. While hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.

▌║█║▌║█║▌║ DENORMALIZE BILLION DOLLAR BRANDS EXPLOITING ARTISTS FOR UNPAID R&D AND PR ║▌║█║▌║█║▌

Furthermore, every output needs to be approved by the OpenAI team before sharing. This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.

I guess I feel mildly sympathetic about “sticking it to the man” in a general way, but maybe I feel mostly confused on the specifics here. Not to sound too cynical, but were the people behind this letter not aware of what the nature of the agreement must have been when they presumably signed it?

None of what’s being described by them seems all that new or different for software companies, which routinely leverage unpaid labor out of their user base (ahem, social media anyone?), and *of course* inviting artists for early access is part of PR & advertising. That’s just a given for me on something like this. I can understand not wanting to be a part of that for sure, but I just end up wondering: why sign up then in the first place?

All that said, let’s find ways to pay artists for helping build these technologies, and let’s actually actively listen to their feedback (instead of, for example, banning them), because artists bring a whole other holistic and humanist set of skills to AI development that are so well-represented by the overwhelmingly technical, academic, PhD, research, math and engineering-types who currently populate the halls of AI power.

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