The UK's Society of Authors has withdrawn from the Charter of Ethical AI Use in the Creative Industries, which it helped launch less than two weeks earlier, after criticism from its own members. The charter is still live, and the society's next steps are due to be discussed at its AGM on November 19.
The Bookseller reported that members were emailed on October 21 to thank them for their feedback and to say the Society was pulling out. Chief executive Anna Ganley told the magazine she has spoken with all of the charter's partners and that the SoA will "pause, listen to members' views and take these back to our partners." Members have also been invited to share their views in a survey.
According to the SoA's announcement on its website, the charter was created with the Creators' Rights Alliance in the UK, the Authors Guild in the US, the Australian Society of Authors, the Writers' Union of Canada and the New Zealand Society of Authors. It aims to define how generative AI services should be deployed to protect and support human creators, in the absence of any meaningful government regulation. Industry bodies such as agents, publishers and prize bodies were invited to sign up and pledge to use generative AI only in a transparent, responsible and ethical way.
The charter builds on UNESCO's ten core principles of responsible AI and commits signatories to respect the CLEAR framework for protecting creators' livelihoods. Authors including Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Tracy Chevalier and Kester Brewin publicly backed the initiative. Chevalier called it "a step in the right direction towards transparency."
Members said they were not consulted
The backlash followed quickly. Members objected that they had not been consulted before the charter went public, and some felt that a framework for the "ethical" use of AI sat uneasily with the Society's stance on the technology.
On October 15, Ganley published a blog post on the SoA website apologising for failing to communicate the charter's purpose and insisting that the Society's position on generative AI is unchanged. She wrote that the SoA considers the technology harmful to the creative industries, to writers' livelihoods and to the environment, and that "there can never be any truly ethical use of generative AI," because LLMs have been trained on copyrighted works without permission or payment.
In the same post, Ganley explained the thinking behind the charter. She said the SoA is concerned that organisations in the publishing industry are using generative AI "in the shadows," where its use and impact cannot be monitored, and that it wants public, transparent commitments from publishers about whether, how and where the technology is being used. The charter, she wrote, is meant to start urgent discussion so that those who strongly oppose generative AI can push others to act responsibly.
Speaking to The Bookseller after the withdrawal, Ganley said authors must have meaningful choice, consent and control over their work, and that the publishing industry is built on human writers, illustrators, translators, narrators and photographers. She said the priority should be looking after creative workers rather than the US tech giants that exploit the UK books ecosystem.
The Bookseller says no other organisation has withdrawn from the charter so far, leaving the Authors Guild and the other partner bodies signed up to a framework the SoA has now left. For writers watching how publishers adopt AI, the practical effect is that the pledge still exists but one of its architects is no longer behind it, pending the member survey and the AGM.
The Society is also supporting the Australian Society of Authors in writing to Australia's attorney general and prime minister about the government's AI copyright proposals, which include an opt-out scheme and a statutory or extended collective licence for AI training on material deemed "unprotected" online.
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