Human Artistry Campaign (March 2023–ongoing)

The Human Artistry Campaign is a US-anchored cross-industry coalition of 70+ organizations — spanning music-industry trade bodies, performing rights organizations, unions, independent-music associations, and international groups — that launched on 16 March 2023 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, to establish that AI technologies must be developed in ways that support rather than replace human creativity and artistry. Its founding members include the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), SAG-AFTRA, the AFL-CIO, and SoundExchange; the Authors Guild joined subsequently as the coalition expanded beyond music into the broader creative economy. The campaign operates as a policy-advocacy coalition — not a standalone organization — coordinating shared principles and public campaigns across its member organizations, with the seven core principles it published at launch as its foundational policy framework and the NO FAKES Act as its primary legislative vehicle.

Seven Core Principles (March 2023)

The campaign's seven core principles published at the SXSW launch are the foundational policy framework the coalition has carried into every subsequent congressional, regulatory, and public advocacy venue:

1. AI as tool, not replacement. Technology should serve human creativity; AI's role is to assist artists, not replace them.
2. Human creativity is irreplaceable. Only humans can create works carrying the lived experience, authentic meaning, and cultural resonance that copyright law exists to protect; machine-generated output does not carry those qualities.
3. Consent, credit, and compensation. AI developers must obtain licenses and provide consent, credit, and compensation before ingesting copyrighted work into training data; creators retain exclusive control over their work.
4. No new IP exemptions. AI systems must not receive special exemptions from intellectual property law or copyright protections that other industries and technologies are not granted.
5. Copyright protects human creativity only. The exclusive right to authorship should extend only to works produced through human intellectual creativity, not to machine-generated output.
6. Transparency and clear labeling. AI-generated content must be clearly labeled; consumers and platforms require transparency about which content is AI-produced and which AI systems produced it.
7. Creator representation in policy. Creators must have a meaningful seat at the table in AI-related legislation and regulatory discussions — the policy process that will shape how AI is built and deployed must include the people it most directly affects.

The seven-principles framing explicitly mirrors the "consent, credit, compensation" vocabulary the Concept Art Association's parallel federal-policy campaign had been carrying in Washington since December 2022, and the two campaigns' shared vocabulary across the visual-art and music tracks became one of the clearest markers of cross-sector convergence in the US creative-industry AI-good record.

Coalition structure and growth

At launch the campaign coordinated 40+ founding organizations; by 2025–2026 the roster had grown past 70 member organizations. The coalition spans every layer of the music and creative economy: major-label trade bodies (RIAA, IFPI, BPI), performing rights organizations (ASCAP, SESAC, Global Music Rights), music publishers (NMPA), unions (SAG-AFTRA, AFM, AGMA, WGAW, Directors Guild of America), independent music organizations (A2IM, Impala, Folk Alliance International, Americana Music Association, Future of Music Coalition, Music Artists Coalition), civil-society and advocacy bodies (Artists Rights Alliance, Black Music Action Coalition), and cross-sector organizations including the Authors Guild and the Graphic Artists Guild. The international dimension of the founding roster — IFPI, BPI, and Impala alongside US domestic bodies — makes the Human Artistry Campaign one of the widest-reaching cross-sectoral creative-industry coalitions in the US AI-good record at its formation.

The coalition's coordination structure is decentralized: member organizations collectively endorse campaign principles and jointly sign public statements, with no single executive director or traditional nonprofit governance. A Senior Advisor, Dr. Moiya McTier — an astrophysicist and author who serves as the coalition's public "Explainer-in-Chief" — handles external-facing education of policymakers and the creative community about AI risks and opportunities.

AI Training Guardrails statement (October 2024)

In October 2024 the coalition released an AI Training Guardrails statement calling on AI developers to obtain consent and provide compensation before training on copyrighted creative work. The statement drew more than 11,500 signatories from across the creative economy — including James Patterson, Thom Yorke, Robert Smith, Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Scarlett Johansson. The breadth of signatories, spanning literature, film, music, and visual art, extended the campaign's framing beyond its music-industry foundation into the broader argument that unlicensed AI training is a cross-sector consent problem.

NO FAKES Act advocacy

The coalition's primary legislative vehicle is the NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act), a federal bill designed to protect performers' voices, likenesses, and identities from unauthorized AI-generated replicas — deepfakes that can impersonate a real person's voice or image without consent. The campaign has backed the bill across multiple congressional sessions, treating passage as the single most consequential near-term legislative outcome for performers and creators facing AI-generated impersonation.

In May 2025 the coalition organized a petition of nearly 400 prominent artists and creative-industry figures in support of the bill, including LeAnn Rimes, Bette Midler, Missy Elliott, Scarlett Johansson, and Sean Astin. Country music artist Martina McBride delivered in-person testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing titled "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: AI-Generated Deepfakes in 2025," alongside RIAA and YouTube witnesses, providing the kind of working-artist ground-level testimony the campaign deploys to anchor the technical policy argument in lived professional experience. As of mid-2026 the NO FAKES Act had not yet been enacted.

Stealing Isn't Innovation (January 2026)

In January 2026 the coalition launched Stealing Isn't Innovation, a named sub-campaign with 700+ supporters — including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, R.E.M., and Bonnie Raitt — that reframed the AI training-data consent argument around economic and moral propositions rather than legal-technical copyright doctrine. The campaign's title directly counters the AI industry's framing of training-data ingestion as a neutral technical practice or a form of innovation; the coalition's counter-framing positions it as unauthorized taking from working creators whose labor funds the cultural economy the AI products are entering. Coalition-commissioned polling supporting the January 2026 push found 64% of US voters regard voice cloning and deepfakes as a major problem and 66% strongly support Congressional action to protect artists' voices and images from unauthorized AI use.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The Human Artistry Campaign matters to the make-AI-good corpus on three counts. First, its founding coalition is the widest-reach cross-sectoral creative-industry coalition in the US AI-good record — 40+ organizations at launch across music, film, and publishing, growing past 70 by 2026 — making it the closest thing the creative economy has to a unified institutional front on AI consent and copyright. Second, its combination of a shared principles framework, mass-signature campaigns (11,500+ and 700+ in successive waves), artist testimony, and sustained NO FAKES Act legislative pressure over multiple congressional sessions represents the full-spectrum advocacy playbook the music-industry wing of the make-AI-good movement has deployed at scale: principles, public mobilization, legislative testimony, and recurring coalition renewal in a single coordinated vehicle. Third, the campaign's seven-principles vocabulary — and especially its consent-credit-compensation core — shares intellectual territory with the Concept Art Association's parallel visual-artist campaign and with SAG-AFTRA's 2023 collective-bargaining track on AI provisions, showing that the same core consent argument was being carried simultaneously across music, visual art, and entertainment-labor organizing in the 2023–2026 US AI-good record — the cross-sector convergence the corpus maps at the level of individual campaigns.