Equity, Human Artistry Campaign and Creators’ Rights Alliance discuss the impact of generative AI on the creative industries at the UK AI Fringe Conference

As political leaders and tech bosses gathered for the UK AI Security Summit at Bletchley Park outside London on Wednesday, creative industry representatives discussed the impact of generative AI technology on their industries at the parallel AI Fringe in central London.

While the Bletchley Park agenda focused on the existential threats posed by AI technology, the creative industries panel looked at the more direct impact that generative programs such as ChatGPT, DELL-E and Stable Diffusion have on people making a living. made by human activities. Creativity.

A key topic of discussion was how original works were used to train generative AI tools without the permission of their creators or compensation for the value created by their use.

“We recently discovered that 183,000 books were used to train some of these large language models,” says Nicola Solomon, chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, which represents 22 creator groups in the UK with a combined membership of more than 500,000. .

“The authors were not asked to submit these books, they received nothing, and yet their works are used to train these models and create the new and exciting works that result from them,” she continued.

“We know that millions upon millions of works have been used by visual artists, artists, musicians and other creators to create these models… with the possibility that they are competing with their own works but not receiving payment. or credit, and don’t have the option to say no.”

Solomon pointed out that a recent KMPG study estimated that 43% of the tasks performed by copywriters will be automated by generative AI.

Liam Budd, industry representative at British artists’ guild Equity, said the union was trying to strengthen its members’ rights over synthetic media productions, which were a growing source of work.

“Our members often only call for a one-time fee… If their likeness is forever and always cloned as a digital double… their work becomes almost potentially redundant in the future and limits their ability to make a living. to earn ”, Budd explained.

He said Equity is developing new ethical contracting standards that will give members a stronger negotiating position when offered work on synthetic media production.

“It’s a very difficult environment and we’re at the beginning of this journey, but we’re trying to empower the members,” he said.

He added that Equity is also campaigning for changes to UK law and that the union wants the UK to introduce the “right to self-image”, similar to rights that exist in the US states of New York and California.

Isabelle Doran, chief executive of the Association of Photographers, said it is not necessarily that easy for creators to exercise the right to refuse to make their work available to generative AI tools or to license its use. not too limited.

“From a technical perspective, I don’t think we’ve found a complete solution to protect the work that’s being scraped because it’s being scraped on such a large scale,” she said.

Doran used the example of the image generative AI tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which were trained on the open, large-scale Laion 5B dataset.

“This dataset consists of five billion images. It’s pretty much the entire internet,” she said, noting that since Midjourney and Stable Diffusion launched a year ago, they’ve collectively generated 15 billion synthetic images.

“That’s about the same amount humans have been able to create throughout history,” she said.

Doran continued that it was an almost impossible task for them to find out if their content was fed into generative AI programs, even though the creators stated that they did not consent to the “scraping” of their work.

Gianluca Sergi, a film industry professor, said governments should look five to 10 years into the future to develop policies to protect human creative industries.

For example, he suggested that the UK government could link the country’s tax incentives for inbound productions with guarantees that local creative material would be used on a production rather than being replaced by AI.

“There are immediate concerns about individuals… but there are also much larger conversations about policy making.” If people don’t think about this now, we could end up stuck. That is why it is important to look at the crisis in a much broader way. It’s not just this one person, it’s everyone.”

Moiya McTier, counsel for the Washington and Austin-based Human Artistry Campaign, a global consortium of more than 170 organizations representing the rights of artists and athletes across all disciplines, also participated in the discussions.

The panel was officially launched at SXSW last March and established seven core principles aimed at advancing the development of ethical AI. This includes artist consent, data transparency and fair payment for the value created by the use of original works.

She revealed that the consortium has its roots in the music industry, and said that the wider creative community can implement the lessons the sector has learned in navigating the disruption of streaming.

“They have a model that can be applied to all types of media, the licensing model that currently applies in the music industry, so for example you can sample someone else’s work or use someone else’s lyrics if you want to cover a song.” She said.

“It’s a very effective model to get permission from another artist before they use their work and then have a system in place to fairly compensate everyone involved.”

McTier said that without an effective framework, both jobs and the arts would be at risk.

“Art is very important to our function as a thriving society,” says McTier. “Our society is better when there is art, and generative AI is already making the art landscape worse. We can see that audiences can lose confidence in the content and art they consume by cloning voices and images.”