Professor David Leslie, Professor of Ethics, Technology, and Society at the Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI), and Dr Aoife Monks, Reader in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, School of English and Drama, and the Director of the new Queen Mary Centre for Arts, Culture, and Creative Collaboration (AC&C), lead CREAATIF, a project tackling the crucial issue of Generative AI's (GenAI) impact on creative industries. Funded with £275,000, it directly engages creative workers to assess impacts on their fundamental rights and working conditions in the face of these new technologies. The project fosters partnership between The Alan Turing Institute, University of the Arts London, and the Institute for the Future of Work, and crucial creative industry project partners, ensuring that diverse creative voices shape AI policy planning.
Highlights of CREAATIF:
Professor Leslie warns that the quick rush to market generative AI could threaten entire creative communities. "We urgently need to understand and mitigate these impacts, protecting the integrity of creative work," he emphasises. CREAATIF tackles this challenge by putting creators at the forefront, assessing the societal effects of GenAI with their direct input. By empowering them to shape their own digital future, we ensure opportunities for the artists of tomorrow to thrive and contribute to their communities."
Generative AI is defined as artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, videos, or other media and content using deep learning AI models that have been trained on very large multi-modal datasets. The public release of ChatGPT in 2022 introduced the capabilities of generative AI to a mass audience, and similar systems are also able to generate (or alter) video, images, music, speech and code. A major leap forward in technological capabilities, these developments have the potential to change the nature of work for many but, most acutely, workers in creative professions previously deemed immune to direct competition from technology.
These impacts require studying urgently, as technologically-mediated worker precarity is an ongoing concern. Reports from an initial workshop in September 2023 – hosted at Somerset House and attended by creative workers and representatives from wider bodies – found extensive concerns about changes to the availability and quality of work for those in creative professions, and anxiety about what the future holds across a number of creative sectors.
Worker resistance, as exemplified by recent industrial action by the Writers Guild of America, highlights that impacts go beyond ‘displacement’ of or access to work, and can impact established notions of authorship while also affecting worker dignity and discretion (i.e. a worker’s ability to choose their tasks and control their working conditions). The creative sector is at the coalface of the Generative AI transformation in which emerging technologies potentially devalue labour materially (wages) and socially (recognition of contribution).
Crafting Responsive Assessments of AI & Tech-Impacted Futures (CREAATIF) aims to bring the voices of creative workers into the foreground, particularly within policy guidance for the UK labour context.
We know that workers whose employment prospects and working conditions are at risk from harm by the adoption of Generative AI will benefit from labour policy, regulation, local employer agreements that focus on achieving high-quality creative outputs while minimising adverse working conditions.
CREEATIF will convene three focused workshops with creative workers, alongside linking with unions and other organisations representing the voices of those working in the creative industries, and publishing a survey across a wide population of UK creatives. The findings from these projects will contribute to the creation of policy tools and guidance.
In particular, CREAATIF will draw on two leading and relevant methods of algorithmic impact assessment: the Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law Assurance Framework for AI Systems (HUDERIA), and the Institute for the Future of Work’s Good Work Algorithmic Impact Assessment (GWAIA), which has a specific application to questions of worker dignity. Through the project cycle of March to July 2024, we will aim to cross-reference the GWAIA with insights from HUDERIA. Drawing on the experiences, testimony, and ideas of workers themselves, we will work towards novel structures of accountability in the relationship between individuals in these industries and technology producers, public and private.
This is one of ten scoping projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UKRI, under the Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) Programme.