Justice for Creators
in the age of GenAI
You may remember the outcry from authors all over the world about Meta stealing their work for LLM AI training. I wrote my anger here.
Of course Meta have neither apologised nor offered reparation, nor promised to be more respectful and fair. Instead they have rolled out their AI with no shame.
Now, the Society of Authors have launched a ground-breaking report about the impact of Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), published in partnership with other creator-led organisations. It calls on the government to immediately “implement a new regulatory framework to protect the livelihoods of authors and other creators against AI, or risk the decimation of the UK’s £124.6 billion creative industries sector. “
GenAI is heralded as the next industrial revolution: promising an age of innovation, limitless productivity and economic growth.
But such change comes at a cost: the industrial-scale theft of the UK’s cultural riches.
The report uses evidence from over 10,000 creators and reveals the erosion of creators’ bread-and-butter work in an increasingly AI-driven world.
Here are the recommendations put forward by the trade associations behind the report:
The Clear Framework
They call on government to set a global standard for ethical, human-centred GenAI deployment, with a new CLEAR regulatory framework consisting of:
C – Consent first: clarify the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) to ensure creators’ works cannot be used to train GenAI models with explicit, prior consent
L – Licensing, not scraping: support a statutory licensing scheme for AI training that provides a lawful, transparent route for AI developers to access creative works, ensuring fair payment and attribution to creators
E – Ethical use of training data: create enforceable ethical standards for the sourcing, curation and application of training data
A – Accountability: about which copyright-protected works have been used, how they were obtained and whether they influenced outputs
R – Remuneration and Rights: creators’ work should be attributed and paid for.
The CLEAR framework is not a rejection of technology, but clear rules that allow innovation to develop in a way that respects creative work.
We creatives need you
Email your MP
Ask your MP to stand up for creators and the creative industry.
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