Are tech companies killing the arts? A group of thousands of high-profile creatives is campaigning to win back their intellectual property from the gobbling robots.
AI protest by 10,500 creative leaders
Are tech companies killing the arts? A group of thousands of high-profile creatives is campaigning to win back their intellectual property from the gobbling robots.
"We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all."
In Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a group of children grow up in an eerie boarding school where most of their classes revolve around staying healthy and making art. Later, they learn the truth about their identity: they are clones, mass-produced so that they can provide organs to humans in need at the cost of their own lives.
In this alternate universe, many believe that these human-made clones are soulless. A compassionate teacher at the school collects their artwork and seeks to use it to prove that they have organic creativity - in other words, a human soul.
So you would expect Ishiguro to be an excellent judge of what constitutes art. Perhaps, then, we should be worried about Ishiguro's signature on a recent letter about AI, which attracted over 10,500 other signatories. The letter condemns the mass "unlicensed use of creative works" to develop artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT.
Among the other creative professionals who put their names to the letter are Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the actress Julianne Moore. They called the use of unlicensed creative work for training AI "a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works".1
This unlicensed use is called "scraping" - when AI-powered models and tools are trained by gobbling huge amounts of pre-existing data, courtesy of the big tech companies hosting this data.
Imagine, for example, that you spend all week painting a beautiful portrait or writing a heartfelt novellaA long short story or short novel.. An AI model could scrape your work and reproduce it in a matter of seconds. There would be almost no point in trying to make your own work.
It is scary to think of a future where humans are no longer creative, generativeHas the power to create or produce. beings. Even more so to think of our great artists being replaced by machines.
But, some warn, this is indeed the future we have to look forward to if we fail to heed the warnings of our creative minds before it is too late.
Are tech companies killing the arts?
Yes: Not only are tech companies stealing the work of millions of people without their consent to develop AI, they are also stealing jobs in the creative industry and depriving humans of the chance to make great art for the rest of humanity.
No: AI-generated art is a wonderful thing. We can have anything we want at the tip of our fingertips, an amalgamation of all of our greatest works made in mere seconds. What is there to complain about?
Or... AI art will never be real, because art is about the interaction between two people: the artist and the consumer of the artwork. Since AI is not a person, it is not capable of taking part in this interaction, and AI art will remain no match for human creativity.
Keywords
Novella - A long short story or short novel.
Generative - Has the power to create or produce.
AI protest by 10,500 creative leaders
Glossary
Novella - A long short story or short novel.
Generative - Has the power to create or produce.