“Not fit for purpose”
European translators, journalists and writers express their strong opposition to the Third Draft of the EU’s Code of Practice for the AI Act’s implementation.
CEATL (the European Council of Literay Translators’ Associations), EFJ (the European Federation of Journalists) and EWC (the European Writers’ Council), representing more than 550 000 authors from 159 asssociations, express their strong opposition to the third draft of the EU’s Code of Practice under the EU’s AI Act legislation in a joint letter (read it here) to Henna Virkkunen (Executive Vice-president of the European Commission for technological sovereignty, security and democracy) and the EU AI Board.
Excerpts:
No large language model without the work of professional human authors
… None of the existing large language models (…) could function without the high-quality work of professional authors, journalists and literary translators. (…) Without our work, the development of generative AI is terminated. On the other hand, the past two years have shown that AI applications are being misused to replace precisely those from which they had previously copied on a massive scale.
Great imbalance in favour of the AI industry instead of following EU law
We are dealing with the greatest imbalance since the very beginning of the digital age. The EU AI Act was designed to regulate this imbalance in such a way that, on the one hand, advanced technologies can be further developed – but without being developed at the detriment of authors, citizens, people whose works and data are the only relevant ingredient for any data-based system, commonly called ‘AI’.
Last February, 15 representative organisations of authors and performers sent a joint letter to EU Executive Vice-President Virkkunen and Commissionner Micallef to express their concerns about the second draft of the Code of Practice, urging the EU to encourage the development of a responsible AI industry that respects our authors’ and performers’ intellectual property rights.
The Code of Practice is not fit for purpose and lacks respect on authors’ legit interests, (…) and circumvents EU law (…)
The drafting of the Code of Practice was not collaborative with rightsholders at all.
… in its current version, the draft is (…) completely unacceptable from the point of view of more than half a million individual authors CEATL, EFJ and EWC represent in the text area. It ignores the key concerns and recommendations we have detailed and reiterated in our comments on the previous iterations of the draft and in several joint letters sent. In doing so, the process makes a mockery of all our sustained and constructive efforts to make this Code of Practice fit for purpose and contributing to the proper application of the AI Act.
28 March 2025:
38 European and international federations, CEATL among them, also oppose the 3rd version of the Code of Practic: “No Code would be better than the fundamentally flawed third draft.” Read the statement here.