A privilege today to chair a fantastic panel at the AI Fringe event at the British Library in London, mirroring the AI Action Summit going on in Paris.
I was there both in my work role – helping lead the CREAATIF project along with the Turing Institute and Queen Mary University that’s been investigating how the creative industries are being impacted by AI – but also with skin in the game as a writer too.
Joining me were Baroness Thangam Debbonaire – former Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and Advisor at UK AI, Victoria Ivanova – R&D Strategic Lead at the Serpentine Galleries, Reema Selhi – Head of Policy and International at DACS (the artists’ copyright service), and Suhair Khan – ex-Google and founder of Open-Ended.
To quote from my opening comments:
As we get into this discussion, I’ve been minded of an article written in the last week or so that warned of ‘too much reaction, and not enough action.’ To avoid that – I’m keen for us to cover some contextual ground about where the pain points currently are, but also then get towards what the hell we’re going to do about it.
The UK’s creative industries are a powerhouse of the UK economy. Generating £108bn annually, over the last decade the sector’s output has grown at over one and a half times faster than the rest of the economy and its workforce has grown at almost five times the average UK rate.
When politicians talk of boosting productivity in the UK, our creative industries are a model for what is possible. Yet the offered solution to making our wider economy more productive – AI – is presenting very real threats to this major success story of UK plc. The AI ‘Action’ Summit needs action that looks to promote human growth, not just capital growth.
Beyond being a writer myself, part of my status on the panel is around a project with QMUL, Turing and UAL I’ve been involved in exploring how creative work is being impacted by AI.
To summarise quickly:
Creative workers are the canary in the mine on two counts.
- As freelancers, many are the original gig workers. Now we see gigification of lots of work. So their experiences tell us something about what’s coming.
- Having been long thought more protected from AI and automation (creativity is uniquely human) – with GenAI tools they have been the first to be impacted in a big way. But it’s not just a Generative Pre-trained Transformer, it’s also a General Purpose Technology and will quickly apply to many other roles, that rely on knowledge work.
Promoting and sustaining ‘good work’ in this context is more tricky, and the project has surfaced key issues:
- Existing rights are being undermined (eg copyright, but also less obviously – for actors GDPR, biometric data. GenAI platforms overlook this)
- The case for human creativity needs to be made even more strongly. To do this, collective representation is necessary. But freelancers don’t have many of the conditions for bargaining which prevent loopholes being exploited.
- The creative industries are a complex ecosystem of interrelated work. It’s not just about novellists, songwriters… it’s about the wider industries through the pipeline – and these jobs/roles are being eroded. The focus on celebrity creative figures standing against Gen AI content can mask this.
In short – we are all artists, because we are all human. And what is happening to the creative industries is coming – fast – in other sectors.
So the question then is: what kind of future do we want? And what are we prepared to do – together – to build it?
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