“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”
– AI Training Statement / https://www.aitrainingstatement.org/
Over 11,000 artists, writers, actors, musicians and others in the creative industries have signed the above statement, expressing their opposition to works being used to train Generative AI models. They include Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore (as highlighted by The Grauniad), but also – some of my own picks from the huge list – Tracy Chevalier, Margaret Drabble, Joe Goddard, Geoff Barrow… and The Reverend Canon Dr Gordon Giles, Canon Chancellor of Rochester Cathedral, Chairman of The English Hymnal Company.
The statement and petition was created by Ed Newton-Rex, who was a lead at Stability AI, but resigned over it’s own position on ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material. He said:
“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free. […] When AI companies call this ‘training data’, they dehumanise it. What we’re talking about is people’s work – their writing, their art, their music.”
Quotes from this piece in The Guardian
I’ve been turning over what I think about the statement today. I am fully supportive of it (and have signed it myself)… but would also want to have some deeper thinking behind it, and would like to see a more extensive position statement about what they are looking to achieve.
As far as I can see from the site, there is no elucidation of ‘the statement’, nor anything offered about what should be done.
This does matter. Earlier in the summer, I was part of a research team funded by BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) tasked with looking at the impacts of GenAI on those working in the Creative Industries. We sent out a wide-ranging survey, worked with the Musicians Union, BECTU, the Society of Authors, and UK Music and hosted three in-person workshops with people from across the creative arts – from directors to translators to musicians, voice artists, children’s authors and beyond – to really drill down into the issues that they were facing.
To summarise: ‘must not be permitted’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Firstly, there was an acute sense that some kind of reparations ought to be justified, given that past works had already been stolen to create the current models. ‘Don’t do it any more’ isn’t seen as sufficient.
Secondly, what about the impacts of licensed works? We spoke to an actor and voice artist who was struggling financially. The offer of £20,000 to take his voice and be able to use it in a licensed way to train GenAI systems was a huge temptation. But… the legal use of that licensed voice would materially then impact his future earning ability, and that of his fellow artists. Paying a few people in great need to legally license their creative talent isn’t good either – and the statement doesn’t cover this.
Finally, though I worry that this is rather too Old School. Many of the artists who are signatories are in positions of huge privilege and wealth. Their livelihoods are not under threat. What worries me is that the position of the statement could be taken as wanting to cut off any benefits of AI in opening access to new and quite radical forms of creativity. They’ve done very well out of the system as it is; they don’t want the system changing.
There’s two dimensions to this. For Thom Yorke, for example, the biggest impact of AI is not going to be on him if his music is used to train AI models. The far bigger impact is going to be workflow automation systems further along in the pipeline that see people displaced. This is not about his creative talent being ripped off – it’s about someone’s labour being automated out, someone who is very likely a lot less visible, and a lot less well paid.
Secondly, what should the position be on how this impacts new artists, who are not yet established and don’t have the major labels / publishing houses etc backing them and funding their endeavours? What seems missing from this statement is about the creative power to take new advances in tech and make brilliant new things. What is the position on that? Where is the redistribution of wealth generated by the mega-tours of huge artists to support the smaller venues that are suffering?
And finally, the first signatory is Björn Ulvaeus. The man is actually now a hologram, performing twice a day in London! Can we hear a little about the economic disruption and innovation of that? Around £8m a year for a virtual, AI-driven show… £8m that’s not then going to other, less established artists? In twenty years, will we just have – playing in perpetuity – ABBA, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones… and nothing new under the sun?
AI is itself a Voyage. I hope that this statement isn’t just about pulling up the drawbridge.
Grab a copy of God-Like here. Or if you’re in the West Country, come see me speak in Frome on 22nd November – grab a ticket here.
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