Al-Amn Magazine

CREATIVITY A A Catch 22 s i t uat i on I s i t poss i b l e to support bot h AI i nnovat i on and human creat i v i ty? rtificial intelligence no doubt offers great opportunities for human creativity. The UK is well placed to be at the forefront for relevant AI-development, but AI is also a highly disruptive technology which could pose risks to the livelihoods of human creators if not appropriately regulated. The rise of generative AI in recent years has heightened anxiety amongst creators and the public more widely: people are concerned for the future of human creativity given machines’ ever-expanding ability to generate text, images, video and code. While ‘AI-innovation’ and ‘AI-governance’ can often be pitted against each other in current political narratives, workable legal and ethical frameworks will help leverage the benefits of AI for human creativity and vice versa as well as building public trust. AI governance frameworks are developing rapidly, including the governance of AI and intellectual property. The UK government recently undertook a public consultation on proposals for amending existing copyright legislation to foster AI- innovation, but the proposals were met with widespread criticism by the creative industries. The government’s proposals force respondents into two opposing views, essentially creating an unnecessary division between the AI and the creative industries. This also comes at the expense of key stakeholders, like researchers and civil society, whose voices matter too. The focus of the government proposals is largely on copyright’s impact on creative industries and AI sectors, reinforcing a divisive “copyright wars” narrative instead of exploring wider ethical legal frameworks. This does not take into consideration that licensing of copyright works is a well- established route for many AI companies and that collaboration is taking place across many sectors – including with universities and their libraries. Likewise, the solutions that the government propose focus on an ‘opt-out model’ which would require creators to indicate that they don’t want their work to be used for training commercial generative AI models. Given the widespread concern about generative AI, it seems likely that most professional creators would choose to opt out of this provision, making implementation of this solution an expensive exercise with little benefit. Instead, the goal must be the development of