Nick Clegg, former UK politician and Mark Zuckerberg enthusiast, said last week that it was “implausible” to ask permission from creators before using their content to train AI.
“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” he mused. “And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
AI promises to do everything from curing rare diseases to solving cold fusion, but it can’t figure out a business model that doesn’t rely on stealing stuff. Not what you’d expect from the great Intelligence of the future.
If you have created any kind of content yourself—a film, book, comic, drawing, blog post—odds are that it had already been digested by some data center where it will be used to make money for someone who is not you. Already, there are myriad anecdotes of creators having their work flagged as being AI, because their original content was used to train the models in the first place. AI promises to “democratize” creativity. But the word “democratize” should probably not be allowed anywhere near the term—like not even in the same hemisphere.
Not all of the promises of Gen AI are hollow however. It does promise to deliver an environmental catastrophe, an erosion of factuality, and a grinding, ruthless attack on copyright law. There’s no reason not to believe it won’t make good on those promises.
But before it does, we will have a few things to say about it at ¡AU!’s Content & IP Defense Summit on June 24.
We’re delighted to announce that AI content expert Graham Lovelace will be heading a discussion at the Summit on the immediate impacts of Gen AI on content, policy, business and your role as creator.
The session “Content by nobody for nobody: How to survive the Gen AI bubble” will probably make you very angry, but it will also arm you with the facts about what Gen AI is and is not—and how creative businesses can resist being pushed around by those who don’t have the media industry’s best interests at heart.
The Content & IP Defense Summit is a free day of discussion and networking designed to help the media & entertainment sector protect and keep control of its own content and IP.
- Date: Tue, June 24
- Time: 10am Eastern/3pm UK
- Location: Online (via Zoom)