Companies that use generative artificial intelligence and are able to generate creative content are also expected to disrupt the livelihoods of creatives around the world, according to a group of creatives who have spoken publicly on the issue.

“The unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI poses a major, unwarranted threat to the livelihoods of the people behind these works and must not be allowed,” said one of 11,500 actors, musicians, authors, photographers and Composers signed declaration around the world, read.

Abba’s Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Thom Yorke and Björn Ulvaeus are among the tens of thousands of creatives who have signed this open letter calling on these companies to stop indiscriminately educating about content they believe should be licensed.

“This is a major problem for many artists, musicians, actors, authors and other creators whose works are being exploited by AI companies,” said Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive who released the statement.

As a former head of audio at Stability AI, Newton-Rex is well-versed in the internal data training practices of generative AI companies. He resigned because the company believed that training its AI models on copyrighted content without licensing constituted “fair use.”

Generative AI models generally scrape as much content as possible from the internet, download it, and train their model to create new work that is in the style of the work they were trained on, Newton-Rex told ABC News .

“None of this revenue benefits the original artists,” Overlai founder Luke Neumann explained in a blog post about his new mobile app, which aims to protect photography in the age of AI.

Neumann, who also signed the letter, launched the free app Overlai along with world-renowned photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier when they noticed that text-to-image generators could easily reproduce both photographers’ unique styles. And Neumann emphasizes how much work goes into conservation photography – the travel costs and staying in one place for weeks, sometimes months, to document a delicate ecosystem.

“I think AI companies really need to think long and hard about how long they need organic data and whether they want to deal with these fragile business models of the people out there collecting these things,” Neumann told ABC News.

Multiple lawsuits from creatives, from writers to musicians to comedians, have mounted against some of the largest generative AI companies for copyright infringement.