AI IS THROWING CREATIVES UNDER THE BUS
[If in North London, there’s a meeting 2pm Saturday 15th, All Good Bookshop, Turnpike Lane. All welcome.]
The government is throwing creatives big and small under a shiny new bus.
A new consultation on “AI”, so called Artificial Intelligence, will tear up copyright law, which is what protects all creatives from theft.
Actions and resources at the bottom of this page.
What’s the problem?
LLMs – large language models – are trained on data. For creatives, this is not ‘data’ – it is our art. It is years of sweat and skill writing a book or a play, painting or photographing in our style, developing skills as an actor, editor or translator, etc.
The tech companies usually trained on copyrighted material without asking, knowing that this probably broke the law in the US, UK and EU.
The government proposes that it would be impossible for creatives to sue the AI companies or receive any other form of compensation for past wrongs.
The government does propose that you can ‘opt out’ of your stuff being used in future. Opt out is wrong in principle – UK copyright law is usually ‘opt in’. It is also cumbersome and impractical. I have countless works across maybe 25 platforms.
This is a capitulation to large, unscrupulous and untrustworthy companies driven by greed.
Don’t give in without a fight. This can be fought.
Sign the statement online, respond to the consultation (Society of Authors has a brief), write to your MP, share this information.
There are many other issues with so called AI. It uses vastly more energy and drinking water (for cooling.) It’s not intelligent. AI search can be dangerously wrong. It is being suggested for dozens of roles where it’s likely it will be catastrophic.
Creative Industries statement against AI training (online petition.)
https://www.aitrainingstatement.org
(While petitions are useful, do at least one other thing as well.)
Society of Authors statement
Artificial Intelligence
A longwinded and biased government consultation concludes 25 February
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
Guardian report
