Last year, I became Chair of two not-for-profit organisations devoted to creators’ rights and remuneration: the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and the Copyright Licensing Agency. I’ve been a Director of both organisations for a number of years, and am nervously delighted to be chairing them at a time when novel technologies pose so many questions around authorship, creativity and the contexts within which these exist.
I’d also be lying if I said I knew what was going to happen next, or indeed what ought to happen. What I am sure about, however, is the power and value of human creativity in all its forms—and the dangers posed by the denigration, exploitation and erasure of creative labour. How can AI serve rather than supplant writers, artists, illustrators, filmmakers, game designers and musicians? What is the creative community itself most concerned, excited and curious about?
These were some of the themes of a recent report published by the CLA, for which I wrote the Foreword, an edited version of which is reproduced below. Naturally enough, recognition and remuneration were at the top of most creators’ lists, alongside the integrity of artistic works. But there was also a deep interest in finding new audiences and forms of work, alongside the belief that legal and regulatory institutions will, eventually, ensure creators are fairly compensated.
I tried to look at the bigger picture; and, in particular, at how creators’ challenges and concerns are connected to the largest questions posed by Generative AI.
The creative industries are worth over a hundred billion pounds each year to the UK economy. They employ over three million people. These are remarkable statistics. Yet they barely begin to describe the value generated and sustained by creativity in all its forms: its capacity to move, educate, illuminate, delight, console, conserve, and bear witness. It’s through words, stories and self-expression that we come to know ourselves, individually and collectively; that we educate and inspire coming generations; and that we can declare and debate what a society should value and aspire towards in the first place.
Technology isn’t the enemy of any of these things. From the printed word to cinema, from photography to video games, human creativity has for centuries been both a driving force behind innovation and a spectacular example of our capacity to harness it for artistic ends. As the CLA’s new report makes clear, however, the latest generation of technologies present a stark mix of opportunity and threat when it comes to creativity as a human act.
Most fundamentally, we are moving at unprecedented speed towards an age in which it will be impossible to tell how and whether any particular words, sounds, images or claims were generated by humans, Artificial Intelligence, or some combination of the two. This is only possible because the current generations of Generative AIs have ingested billions upon billions of human words and works—and because their outputs continue to be fine-tuned upon the basis of countless interactions with their users. Despite the label “artificial,” everything that gives these outputs value remains bound up with human hearts and minds: the inputs defining them; their truth or significance; the meanings and purposes behind these.
While the future of such technologies is unknowable, a remarkable consensus is already emerging around key principles in the face of present challenges. Unless we know what information a system was trained upon, we cannot and should not be expected to trust its outputs. Unless we know whether we are dealing with the work of a human, a machine or some combination of the two, we cannot make informed choices either as citizens or consumers. And until we can be assured that the rights of human creators are respected by Generative AI, we cannot be expected to trust it either legally or ethically.
In this context, the needs of the creative industries map directly onto the widest of concerns about AI’s impacts on society: the acceleration and enhancement of countless undertakings, but also the ease of AI-facilitated disinformation, manipulation and exploitation, and the resulting corrosion of trust and understanding.
AI is neither autonomous, “good” nor “bad.” Rather, it is a kind of amplifier applied to human nature: a statistical tool capable of producing endlessly plausible outputs, yet fundamentally incapable of regulating or comprehending itself. Perhaps the most important question we need to ask, in this context, is what we want from technology in the first place—and how can it serve rather than usurp our capacities for self-knowledge, learning and thriving.
Such questions matter more than the internals of any individual system. And it is perfectly possible to answer them hopefully, so long as we don’t make the mistake of seeing technology’s future as a single, inevitable path; or of casting human self-expression and understanding as luxuries rather than integral aspects of any thriving society.
As the report shows, creators aren’t afraid of technology. Indeed, they are anxious to explore its gifts and possibilities. But they cannot and should not be expected to tolerate the exploitation of their work and talents by opaque, unchallengeable systems; or the undermining of their labour’s dignity and integrity by the reduction of “content” to an undifferentiated mulch of mediocrity.
The issue is not so much what AI can do as what it should do; and how its potentials can be married to our capacities for creation, collaboration and contemplation. How can human knowledge and skill can be deepened rather than usurped by technology? How might the infrastructures surrounding human creativity—of teaching, learning, publication, performance, rights, remuneration, recognition—be bequeathed intact to future generations?
Just as human words and works are the crucial ingredients without which Generative AIs cannot exist, so the skills demanded by an algorithmic age are rooted in our capacities for critical thinking, creativity and self-reflection: in our ability to ask of automated systems questions worth answering, rather than settling for a future of endlessly unambitious inauthenticity.