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 in the 1990s where most of their classes revolve around staying healthy and making art. Later, when they are adults, 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, artificial and empty. 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. And real life, too: in his most recent book, Klara and the Sun, the Nobel Prize-winning author writes from the perspective of a solar-powered "Artificial Friend", a highly intelligent robot who grapples with understanding human nature.
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, the composer and conductor John Rutter, and actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore. They called the use of unlicensed creative work for training AI "a major, unjustSomething that is not right or fair in a moral sense. 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 from millions or even billions of sources across the internet, courtesy of the big tech companies hosting them.
It is a highly controversial process which many view as a kind of plagiarismCopying someone else's work and pretending it is your own. , whereby AI steals content without consent, compensation or credit to the people who created it.
Imagine, for example, that you spend all week painstakingly 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, without even taking the time to thank you.
It is dystopianRelating to an imagined society where there is great suffering or injustice. . But it is already the norm. In the UK, the government is set to consult on a scheme that would allow AI companies to "scrape" content from publishers and artists who do not actively opt out.
It is forcing creative professionals to confront an existentialRelating to the state of human existence. Existential dread can refer to grappling with your own experiences of responsibility and death. threat. Though many still do not regard AI art as "real", it accounts for a fast-growing share of so-called creative output. Last week, ITV sparked controversy after advertising for an expert to use AI to generate programme ideas for UK television.
It is dire to think of a future where humans are no longer creative, generative beings, inspired by every little bug, rock and flower. Even more so to imagine future creativity as a mere data game, with AI models churning out endless, soulless entertainment concepts to keep us occupied.
But, some warn, this is indeed the future we have to look forward to if we fail to heed the warnings of our great 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 industries and depriving humans of the chance to exercise their creativity and make great art for the rest of humanity.
No: AI-generated art is a wonderful thing. We 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 participating in this interaction, and AI art will remain no match for human creativity.
Keywords
Unjust - Something that is not right or fair in a moral sense.
Plagiarism - Copying someone else's work and pretending it is your own.
Novella - A long short story or short novel.
Dystopian - Relating to an imagined society where there is great suffering or injustice.
Existential - Relating to the state of human existence. Existential dread can refer to grappling with your own experiences of responsibility and death.
AI protest by 10,500 creative leaders
Glossary
Unjust - Something that is not right or fair in a moral sense.
Plagiarism - Copying someone else's work and pretending it is your own.
Novella - A long short story or short novel.
Dystopian - Relating to an imagined society where there is great suffering or injustice.
Existential - Relating to the state of human existence. Existential dread can refer to grappling with your own experiences of responsibility and death.