Laws, Capitalism, Creators and AI

It is a tumultuous time for creators. There is no denying that. ChatGPT is only approaching its first birthday and arguably it has already changed the world more than any other technology since the Internet.

And because of the Internet, the aggressiveness of the impact of generative AI is that much stronger. This leaves many people from the creative economy, people like me, journalists, writers, artists, authors, and really anybody with an artistic streak who has sought to make their work public, affected by the innovations.

With that premise, I have seen and read several statements that have come out recently, the most recent one entitled “For an Innovation and Creator Friendly AI Act”. You can find it here.

It was published on 23 November and 12 groups representing over 500,000 writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and other creatives signed it. As a supporter of collective action, I am really pleased to see this.

In the statement, the organizations are urging European policymakers to focus on transparency for their upcoming EU AI Act, specifically regarding the training data used for large language models. The statement takes a somewhat ambivalent position on whether damage has already been done, or could be done by those models and the AI tools built on them. That is a missed opportunity, I think…