There is a creative identity crisis brewing, and generative AI is behind it
In a few short years, generative AI techniques have suddenly exploded into a revolutionary new type of creative tool. Using mere text descriptions, it’s now possible to conjure creative works into existence, as if by magic. People have rightly been quick to compare this revolution to the invention of photography, the phonograph, synthesisers or the internet.
Like earlier creative technologies, AI is disrupting existing creative practices. But more than just competing with traditional creative methods, leading generative AI tools also exploit the creative labour and talent of previous creative work used to train them.
Thus, a fierce debate is underway about how rights relating to the material employed to train generative AI tools should be treated.
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One camp, including the emerging AI giants OpenAI and StabilityAI, argues that it is "fair use" to scrape the world’s creative archive to train generative AI models. Are these AI models not, after all, just like people, learning about art and aesthetics from history and the world around them?
Others with a stake in the issue tend to be artists and other copyright holders. Even if they might appreciate this view philosophically (and many do not), they still understand their existing intellectual property rights to include the right to refuse the use of their creative work as AI training data. In their view, companies need their permission.
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At heart, this division is confounded by the nature of generative AI: generated outputs do not directly reference training data inputs, but digest and regurgitate them. There is no given means of attributing individual sources.
Even for creative industries accustomed to disruption, the situation is a genuine crisis—in part because it unsettles an established socioeconomic consensus, albeit one that is far from perfect.
Creative attribution is itself a social construct. The existing means we have at our disposal to discern and honour the value of individual creative works are the products of collisions and compromise between technology, law and creative practice.