The Authors' Association is launching the AI=Jatwerk campaign on 17 October. With this campaign, the professional association of writers and translators, on behalf of 2,000 members, draws attention to large-scale copyright infringement by tech companies, as well as emphasises the value of work written and translated by humans.
The campaign kick-off will take place on Friday afternoon, 17 October, with a protest on Amsterdam's Spui and a special window display at bookshop Athenaeum. Gustaaf Peek holds a glowing speech, Hannah van Binsbergen provides a rousing recital, Maria Vlaar is captain.
Posters will be displayed and flyers distributed in the four major cities. A Boomerang card will also be available. From 17 October, the union calls on members and other authors to download the special toolkit with campaign materials and use it on their own social media. This way, writers and translators can show that they do not accept their work being pirated.
Friday 17 October 2025
17:00 (walk-in from 16:45)
Athenaeum Bookstore, Spui 14-16, Amsterdam
More information
The biggest copyright infringement ever
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with copyrighted texts. The work of Dutch writers and translators is also used for this purpose. Writers should be able to choose whether they want AI to be trained with their work, and if they want to, they should receive fair compensation for it. Now, large tech companies use this work without permission, often even through illegal copies circulating on the internet. The Authors' Union calls this the biggest copyright infringement ever and thinks developers of large language models should clearly state which datasets they train their models with.
"We can't have US big tech just stealing away our national culture for its own gain. Before you know it, we will only be presented with uniform AI slogans and synthetic texts. Life is more varied than anything a chatbot can offer."
Liesbet van Zoonen, president Authors' Union
"A novel is a form of contact between people, through the written word. A computer system can never replace that."
Anja Sicking, writer and chair of the Literary Authors Section
"Translation machines have not improved nearly as much in the last five years as everyone thinks. And with artistic, innovative language, AI will never get along anyway. Literary writers want to create something no one has ever seen before. A translation machine that just mimics old work will never be able to match that. End of story."
Mattho Mandersloot, Korean-Dutch translator
