Please, take part in The Society of Authors Survey.
The Society of Authors (SoA), United Kingdom’s trade union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators, has been in conversation with the government to try and mitigate the potential damage that its plan to “turbocharge AI” would inflict on the livelihood of SoA’s members and other professionals throughout the country. If implemented in its current form, the plan is likely to “exacerbates the ‘value transfer’ away from creative professionals to the AI and tech sectors.”
The SoA is asking both members and non-members in the creative professions to share their “experience and thoughts on the issues” so they can evidence their response and “generate maximum possible impact.”
To learn more about the way in which AI has already affected authors and translators, you can listen to the conversation on The Advisory Clinic Podcast.
The SoA, together with The Creative Rights in AI Coalition and The Creators’ Rights Alliance (CRA), has been campaigning on this issue from the beginning, providing advise and recommendation to the government, who first tried to implement a broad copyright exception in 2022. The plan was put on hold following a report of the House of Lords’ Communications and Digital Committee, which hi-lighted some compelling facts and issued the following recommendations:
1.In recent years the creative industries have delivered more economic value than the life sciences, aerospace and automotive sectors combined. The government has a major opportunity to put the sector at the heart of its future growth agenda. It is failing to do so.
2.The Government should commit to placing the creative industries at the heart of its growth plans. It should explain its rationale for omitting the creative industries from its Autumn Statement priority growth sectors.
Also:
5.The Intellectual Property Office’s proposed changes to intellectual property law are misguided. They take insufficient account of the potential harm to the creative industries. They were not even defended by the minister in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport whose portfolio stands to be most affected by the change. Developing AI is important, but it should not be pursued at all costs.
6.The Intellectual Property Office should pause its proposed changes to the text and data mining regime immediately. It should conduct and publish an impact assessment on the implications for the creative industries. If this assessment finds negative effects on businesses in the creative industries, it should pursue alternative approaches, such as those employed by the European Union. The Intellectual Property Office should write to us confirming its plans and timelines in response to this report.
7.New technologies are making it easier and cheaper to reproduce and distribute creative works and image likenesses. Timely Government action is needed to prevent such disruption resulting in avoidable harm, or production moving to countries with better regulation.
8.The Government should ratify the Beijing treaty on audio-visual performances at the earliest opportunity. It should set out its timelines for doing so in response to this report.
9.The UK’s intellectual property framework is respected across the world. These protections underpin the success of the UK’s creative industry exports. The Government must not water them down when striking new trade deals.
10.The Department for International Trade should commit to maintaining the UK’s existing standards of intellectual property rights in all future trade deals.
11.Like other sectors, the creative industries are exposed to the opportunities and threats of automation and job replacement. Workers on lower incomes and insecure contracts are particularly vulnerable.
12.The Government’s Sector Vision must set out a clear plan for ensuring that its encouragement of technological change is accompanied by complementary plans to help the creative industries sustain quality jobs and promote a diverse workforce.
Reading that the government is in receipt of such valuable information should come as refreshing news to those who thought the government was out of touch. Now we can assume that they are well aware of the risks and we must let them know that we’ll hold them accountable for the consequences of their decisions.
Researchers and scholars across a number of disciplines have weighed in on the conversation, providing the government with educated advice in regard to the issues that may arise from a premature and ‘turbocharged’ adoption of AI. An arresting analysis comes from Dr Dan McQuillan, Lecturer in Creative & Social Computing at Goldsmith University.
Dr McQuillan’s Submission of Evidence to the House of Lords, dated 2023, offers captivating insight. In regard to the impact of AI on creative work, he writes:
The common dynamics here are extractivism and a transfer of control. Large language models are optimised by training on vast quantities of data extracted from the activities they are intended to emulate; resulting in, for example, artists paying to use AI tools which have been trained on the free and unlicensed capture of their own prior artistic output. The control of services that result from this is ultimately in the hands of the small number of corporations who are able to carry out operations at the necessary scale and whose revenue will then come from charging rents for those services, whether directly or through intermediaries who will build on top of the basic models.
(I am looking at you, Adobe.)
Shame that ‘experts’ are a little out of fashion at the moment. If, nevertheless, you’d like to find out more about Dan McQuillan’s research work, links on his Goldsmith’s webpage include published articles and podcast interviews - interesting stuff.
Pondering the weight of these reports leaves me with a question: if the government already knows all this, why have they launched a public consultation?
Call me cynical, but I am beginning to wonder whether the government interest in our views is genuine, or if they are rather hoping that a lack of engagement on our part and a hyped pro-tech narrative embraced by the media might just offer them the seal of approval to implement their plan with an impression of consent.
The consultation closes on the 25th of February. Let’s give them our informed views in no uncertain terms.