More than 13,500 people including Hollywood actress Julianne Moore and Radiohead star Thom Yorke have put their names to a statement which warns of a "major, unjust threat" to their livelihoods from the use of their work by artificial intelligence companies.

The statement reads: "The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted."

It has also been signed by ABBA star Björn Ulvaeus, author Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, actor Kevin Bacon, The Cure frontman Robert Smith and writer Harlan Coben.

The letter was organised by composer and former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, who insists people who work in the creative industries are extremely concerned about the current situation with AI.

He told the Guardian newspaper: "There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free ...

"When AI companies call this ‘training data’, they dehumanise it. What we’re talking about is people’s work – their writing, their art, their music."

It comes after another actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt spoke out about the dangers facing the creative community from companies using works such as movies to train AI systems - and insisted studios need to renegotiate deals with their stars.

During an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event, he said: "The sleight of hand of calling something ‘artificial intelligence’ makes you ignore the fact that these were created by humans ...

"They [the studios] own the intellectual property and I don’t own any of it ... All these deals should be renegotiated in light of this new technology ...

"If we don’t get ahead of that flood, we’re going to drown in it."