On Friday, Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and three Senate Judiciary Committee colleagues reintroduced the Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks (TRAIN) Act, legislation designed to help copyright holders determine whether their works were used to train generative artificial intelligence models. The legislation was first introduced to the Senate last November.
The bipartisan measure, cosponsored by Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), would create a legislative subpoena allowing creators to access training records through a process similar to that used for internet piracy cases.
"If your work is used to train AI, there should be a way for you, the copyright holder, to determine that it's been used by a training model, and you should get compensated if it was," Welch said. The bill aims to address what supporters call the "black box" problem in AI development, where companies rarely disclose how their models are trained or what copyrighted materials they use.
"AI should be in service to the American people—not the other way around," Hawley said. "But under current law, Big Tech's AI companies are stealing the works of today's creators as they box out the next generation of creators."
The bill has garnered support from numerous industry organizations representing writers, musicians, and other creative professionals. Publishing industry supporters include the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.
"Authors have a right to know when their works have been copied into AI systems without their permission," the Authors Guild said in a statement. "This bill helps to achieve that commonsense goal by creating an administrative subpoena process that allows copyright owners to obtain information from AI companies about the works used to train their models."
Other organizations endorsing the TRAIN act include the AFL-CIO, ASCAP, and SAG-AFTRA.
In April, Welch gave the keynote talk at a summit on the topic of AI and copyright convened by the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C. There, he discussed the TRAIN Act, saying, "The work of the creative community has never been more important and never more needed than it is right now. The real contribution that the creative community makes—that the arts make—in music and literature and film, whatever that form may be, is to help us understand the world we're in."
With the emergence of generative AI, Welch said, that work can be "silently appropriated and monetized essentially by corporate interests that had nothing to do with the creation... and deny any compensation with the artist and the creator is entitled to."
After explaining what the TRAIN Act entailed, he offered, "The principle here is the same as we've always had, and that is, the creator is entitled to the protection.... What we're trying to apply it to is this whole new world that we're in where generative AI can just vacuum up everything."
