Enclosing the Cultural Commons

Thoughts on artists and AI

Cover art for Is This What We Want?, an album of silent recordings released this year by 1,000 artists in protest at the UK government’s copyright plans. Image attribution(!!): isthiswhatwewant.com

I haven’t written all that much about AI – maybe I should. A short piece for UnHerd, reproduced below, allowed me to sketch some ideas about the significance of the technology for those of us who strive to produce culture.

I am curious about people’s attitudes to this new generation of machines (the word “tool” is misleading, I think). Are you eagerly embracing it? Wearily resigned? Unsure what the fuss is about? Do write and tell me, if you care to.

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On Thursday, British MPs voted against a proposal to limit the ability of artificial intelligence companies to violate copyright law. Introduced by Baroness Kidron, a filmmaker and peer, the amendment would have required firms to disclose any copyrighted work used to train their algorithms. It was the latest desperate effort by artists and creative professionals to protect their intellectual property from AI. The government, no less desperate to make Britain attractive to tech firms, plans to make it easier for them to use material without permission.

Technology secretary Peter Kyle has previously scolded protesting artists for “resisting change,” as though mass copyright infringements were an inevitable historical process, rather than a consequence of the tech industry having the British government over a barrel. (It comes as no surprise that Kyle made these remarks at a conference hosted by leading AI chipmaker Nvidia).

On the same day as MPs were rejecting Kidron’s amendment, a more honest assessment came from former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. Fresh from his 7-year stint as the cuddly face of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Clegg admitted it is “a matter of natural justice” that artists should be able to opt out of feeding their work into AI content mills. The problem with making firms ask permission to use existing work, Clegg said, was that they would simply threaten to leave: “If you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”

Clegg is quite right to speak in terms of justice. Though rarely followed to the letter, creative copyright reflects an ethical code that the makers of culture share with each other. By discouraging outright theft, it allows individual contributions to exist in public as a common pool of creative resources, one we can all borrow, adapt and draw inspiration from. By contrast, AI software seeks to soak up the entire cultural reservoir so that it can churn out artistic media on an industrial scale, turning a public good into private profit and degrading it in the process. It is not only a theft from individual artists; it is the theft of culture itself.

Yet Clegg is also right to suggest that creative practitioners are now essentially powerless to stop this development. The problem is that, over the past two decades, they have been duped into participating in a digital economy where their role has been to produce “content” for the benefit of Big Tech. Too many bought into the idealistic talk of creative industries and artistic entrepreneurship. A very small number became spectacularly successful, but most ended up sharing their work for nothing, or next to nothing, while helping to draw consumers to platforms like Spotify, Youtube and Instagram. These companies presented themselves as a new kind of artistic commons, but the crucial detail was that they now owned the commons.

Artists thought they were working for themselves, but they were working for the companies that owned the digital realm all along. Their music, films, images and ideas became a new kind of resource – data – that would, in due course, help to make possible the software that now threatens to overwhelm them with oceans of slop.

Creatives are right to make a stand on behalf of their copyright – they should fight for their interests as far as they can – but it is likely to be too little, too late. The trap has closed, and the exploitative logic inherent to Internet 2.0 has reached its predictable conclusion. As they consider what cultural paradigm might emerge in the post-AI world, they should also ask why they did not see this coming.