The Writers’ Union of Canada is one of several authors’ organizations jointly launching a charter for the ethical use of artificial intelligence.

The Charter of Ethical AI Use in the Creative Industries, announced on October 14, aims to outline how generative AI should be used (in relation to text, image, audio, video, or code) in order to protect human creators.

“It won’t solve the large-scale societal threats that unregulated generative AI poses, but it makes a small but significant step towards mitigating some of the risks and supporting responsible practice,”  the charter says. “By signing up to this Charter, industry organisations such as agents, publishers, producers, prize bodies, and trade associations can pledge to use generative AI services in a responsible, ethical and sustainable way, balancing the technological benefits with the potentially devastating impact on people and planet.”

The charter is built on UNESCO’s 10 core principles of responsible AI and has at its core a framework captured by the acronym CLEAR: consent first; licensing, not scraping; ethical use of training data; accountability and transparency; remuneration and rights.

The charter was launched jointly by the U.K.’s Society of Authors, the Creators’ Rights Alliance (CRA) in the U.K., the Authors Guild in the United States, the Australian Society of Authors, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the New Zealand Society of Authors.

“The Union is proud to be a founding partner on this charter,” Writers’ Union chair, Kim Fahner, said in a press release. “It’s the kind of responsible, ethical, ambitious thinking authors have been calling for from governments around the world. But we can only wait so long for government to act. We have work to do, and unregulated AI is in our way, so we’ve erected our own responsible guardrails.”