Concept Art Association Federal-Policy Advocacy on Generative AI (December 2022–ongoing)

From December 2022 onward the Concept Art Association — the U.S. nonprofit serving the professional community of concept artists working in film, television, animation, and games — has run the visual-artist community's first sustained federal-and-state policy advocacy programme on generative AI. The programme was launched on 13 December 2022 with a "Protecting Artists from AI Technologies" GoFundMe publicly fronted by CAA board member and concept artist Karla Ortiz, closed at $285,560 against a $270,000 goal, and is run as a sectoral-lobbying campaign distinct from but structurally adjacent to the Andersen v. Stability AI litigation that Ortiz and two co-plaintiffs would open the following month in the Northern District of California. The campaign's organising form is federal-lobbying-and-state-legislative work funded by community fundraising, with R2P Strategies' Cindi Merifield — formerly chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America — retained as CAA's federal lobbyist on the retainer the GoFundMe was funding, and with Concept Art Association, LLC as the registered federal-lobbying entity through which the work is reported on the Lobbying Disclosure Act record. Its substantive ask is the working "3 Cs and a T" formulation Ortiz installed at the 12 July 2023 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on AI and copyright — consent, credit, compensation, and transparency in generative-AI training data — which has since travelled through the campaign's Washington engagements, its FTC participation, and its California state-legislative co-sponsorship work.

Origins (August–December 2022)

The advocacy programme has two precursor moments on the public record before the federal-lobbying retainer began. The first is the 31 August 2022 virtual town hall hosted by Karla Ortiz and the Concept Art Association — a public organising event with Abhishek Gupta of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute as a co-presenter — that is the corpus's earliest dated public-record CAA artefact on generative AI and that introduced into the concept-art community the working line of argument the lobbying programme has carried since: that text-to-image systems trained on scraped catalogues of copyrighted artwork without artist consent are a sectoral labour and consent problem the federal government has a stake in regulating. The second is the run-up to filing in Andersen v. Stability AI: Ortiz had been organising artist town halls and consulting with machine-learning researchers through the autumn of 2022, and the lawsuit and the GoFundMe-funded lobbying programme were conceived in parallel as the litigation and policy-advocacy sides of the same sectoral argument. On 13 December 2022 the GoFundMe went live, publicly announced by Ortiz on X with the stated purpose of taking the conversation to D.C. and "educat[ing] government officials and policymakers on the issues facing the creative industries if this technology is left unchecked"; the published Year 2 budget allocated roughly $187,500 to a full-time D.C. lobbyist, $25,000 to advocacy events including D.C. visits, and $24,000 to contractor hours supporting legislative work.

Federal-lobbying infrastructure

The campaign's federal-lobbying infrastructure runs through three connected pieces. The GoFundMe funded the retainer of R2P Strategies' Cindi Merifield — a longtime entertainment-industry lobbyist whose career history includes the chief-lobbyist role at the Motion Picture Association of America — as CAA's federal lobbyist on the generative-AI file. Concept Art Association, LLC, the publishing-and-media arm of the organisation alongside its 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is the entity through which the federal lobbying is registered and disclosed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, confirmed in LegiStorm's federal-lobbying record. Karla Ortiz — the CAA board member who fronted the GoFundMe and who would become a co-plaintiff in Andersen v. Stability AI one month after launch — is the public-facing voice through whom most of the campaign's congressional and FTC appearances have been organised. The campaign's chosen substantive framing — consent, credit, compensation, transparency — is the working policy ask the lobbying programme has carried into every subsequent federal venue, and was picked up by Ortiz in her FTC roundtable testimony as "the creative economy only works when the basic tenants of consent, credit, compensation, and transparency are followed."

D.C. meetings (2023 onwards)

Beginning in 2023 the campaign ran a series of in-person and virtual meetings in Washington, with CAA's own advocacy page recording named meetings in the offices of Representatives Michael McCaul (R–TX, House Foreign Affairs Committee), Don Beyer (D–VA), Ted Lieu (D–CA), and Darrell Issa (R–CA, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet), and Senators Martin Heinrich (D–NM, AI Caucus co-chair) and Dick Durbin (D–IL, Senate Judiciary Chair). The same record names a virtual meeting with the Federal Trade Commission's Acting Director of Privacy and Identity Protections, the first of the campaign's FTC engagements and the precursor to the FTC roundtable participation later that year. The pattern across the named meetings — House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs members, the Senate Judiciary Chair, and the Senate AI Caucus co-chair on one side, and the FTC's privacy-and-identity arm on the other — maps directly onto the substantive ask the campaign has carried into Washington: intellectual-property and consumer-protection authorities first, AI-caucus general-policy authorities second, and the FTC's competition-and-consumer-protection track as the federal-administrative anchor.

The 12 July 2023 Senate Judiciary appearance

The campaign's anchor federal-legislative artefact is Karla Ortiz's invited testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property hearing "Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property – Part II: Copyright" on 12 July 2023, chaired by Senator Chris Coons (D–DE) with Senator Thom Tillis (R–NC) as ranking member. Ortiz's written testimony — anchored by the line that "Generative AI is unlike any tool that has come before, as it is a technology that uniquely consumes and exploits the innovation of others" and by the structural argument that "training data is the work of creative people like myself, taken without our consent, without any credit, and without any compensation" — frames the case in terms of working-artist labour and consent rather than abstract copyright doctrine. The hearing produced two of the campaign's most-cited public artefacts: Ortiz's spoken line that "I have never been asked, never been credited, never been compensated" — the most-quoted single Ortiz formulation from the hearing record and the closing line of most subsequent press profiles — and her same-day X post formalising the "3 C's and a T" working framing ("build upon the 3 C's & a T. Consent / Credit / Compensation / Transparency. Lets get it done!!") that anchors the campaign's substantive ask. The CAA-side line "consent, credit, compensation, and transparency" has since been picked up unaltered into the Concept Art Association's advocacy materials, the voice-karla-ortiz record, and adjacent sectoral organising by the Authors Guild and the Graphic Artists Guild.

The 4 October 2023 FTC roundtable and the 15 December 2023 staff report

On 4 October 2023 CAA's Karla Ortiz and Steven Zapata represented the Concept Art Association on the panel of working creators at the FTC's Creative Economy and Generative AI public roundtable, convened by Chair Lina Khan at FTC headquarters in Washington. The panel sat alongside other named witnesses from the music-publishing, voice-acting, modelling, writing, and software-developer sides of the creative economy. Ortiz's panel framing — that the creative economy "only works when the basic tenants of consent, credit, compensation, and transparency are followed" and that AI companies "took our work and data to train for-profit technologies that then directly compete against us in our own market, using generative media that is meant to mimic us" — was reported in VentureBeat's contemporaneous coverage and entered the record through the full FTC transcript.

The roundtable fed directly into the FTC's staff report Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Creative Economy published on 15 December 2023, which synthesised the panel testimony — including the CAA-side framing — into a federal-administrative output reporting the working creators' concerns about training-data ingestion, market substitution, deepfake-impersonation, and the absence of consent, credit, or compensation in the prevailing development practice. The report and its underlying roundtable record have since fed into the FTC's subsequent comment submissions to the U.S. Copyright Office on generative-AI training-data practices, and are the campaign's clearest single federal-administrative anchor.

California state-legislative track

The campaign's state-legislative track runs in parallel with the federal one, in California, and has produced its first signed statute on the public record. CAA supported Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin's California AB 2013 — the California Generative AI Training Data Transparency Act, which would require developers of generative-AI systems to publish summary documentation of the datasets used to train them — through 2024. Governor Newsom signed AB 2013 into law in fall 2024 with an effective date of 1 January 2025 and a compliance deadline of 1 January 2026 for retrospective training-data disclosure, making California the first U.S. state with a generative-AI training-data transparency statute on the books.

In February 2025 Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan introduced California AB 412, the AI Copyright Transparency Act, co-sponsored by the Concept Art Association alongside SAG-AFTRA, the National Association of Voice Actors (NAVA), and the Authors Guild. The bill would extend the AB 2013 transparency baseline into a copyright-specific notice regime, requiring AI developers to provide copyright holders with mechanisms to determine whether their works were used to train commercial generative-AI systems. As of July 2025 AB 412 had passed out of the California State Assembly and was sitting in the California Senate's Judiciary Committee, with a special interim hearing planned during the legislative break; CAA continued to coordinate the artist-side coalition behind the bill into 2025 and 2026.

The named California-side individuals carrying the work at the state-legislative level — Karla Ortiz, Nicole Hendrix, Kelly McKernan, Reid Southen, Andrew Leung, and Tiana Oreglia — overlap substantially with the federal-policy roster, and the campaign's California work is structurally an extension of the federal one rather than an independent track.

The model contract rider

Alongside the federal and state policy work the campaign distributes a model contract rider — a "sample contract rider for work-for-hire contracts and license agreements" that working concept artists can attach to client contracts to refuse the inclusion of their work in generative-AI training datasets without consent. The rider supplies the campaign's worker-level complement to its federal-policy track: where the federal and state work pursues consent-credit-compensation-transparency requirements through statute and administrative action, the rider operates artist-by-artist at the contracting layer of the working concept-art labour market, and is the campaign's most direct mechanism for shifting the consent baseline in the absence of enacted legislation.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The campaign matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on four connected counts. First, it is the corpus's only sectoral-lobbying campaign funded by community fundraising — a GoFundMe-funded federal-lobbying retainer, with a former MPAA chief lobbyist retained on a published budget, run by a 501(c)(3) professional-community organisation alongside its commercial-publishing LLC — structurally distinct from the foundation-funded organising programmes that anchor most of the corpus's other lobbying tracks. Second, together with Andersen v. Stability AI (the litigation track) and the 2023 WGA / SAG-AFTRA AI provisions (the collective-bargaining track), the CAA federal-policy programme completes the creative-industry sector's set of organising on-ramps into the U.S. AI-good record: community-funded sectoral lobbying alongside class-action litigation and union collective bargaining. Third, the campaign installed the working framing — consent, credit, compensation, and transparency — that has since travelled through the creative-industry side of the U.S. AI-good corpus, anchored on the public record by Karla Ortiz's Senate Judiciary testimony and her FTC roundtable framing, and propagated through the voice-karla-ortiz record, the Andersen v. Stability AI litigation's "three Cs" pleading vocabulary, and the Authors Guild's parallel publishing-side organising. Fourth, the campaign's coalition shape on California AB 412 — CAA, SAG-AFTRA, NAVA, and the Authors Guild as named co-sponsors of a state-statutory transparency bill — is the corpus's clearest U.S. cross-sectoral creative-industry coalition on AI training-data policy and the template the visual-artist side has carried into the California AB 2013 signed-statute outcome and into the live AB 412 process at the state-legislative layer.