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Now an unease is sinking in across the creative community and the business ecosystem that supports and profits from it.  No one knows where AI will take content creation in the years ahead, but thanks to ChatGPT we are finally seeing that the genie is out of the bottle. Already, the technology has generated lawsuits: Two were filed last week against major AI players, one in California by a group of artists seeking class action status and another in the U.K. by Getty Images.

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We must embrace this reality and learn to leverage AI’s power, while preserving humanity at the center of the overall creative process. This moment of AI epiphany is even more poignant as we consider how AI’s power will grow exponentially in the years ahead.

AI can already write increasingly compelling stories, even full screenplays. Just add what technologists call “prompts” — basic plot points, characters and setting — and out pops an entire creative work. The bot won’t complain if you send notes: It will just iterate. Similarly, suggest some visual references — photographs, artworks, a style, even an artist’s name — and AI paints a canvas of images, like the one accompanying this column.

Think moving pictures are out of reach of AI? Think again. Full-length, 100% AI-created videos are coming soon to a screen near you. A purely AI-generated short, “The Crow,” recently won the Jury Award at the Cannes Short Film Festival. Soundtracks, too: AI can be your composer. Boomy is just one of the many AI-driven music-focused companies that market themselves as democratizing the music creation process. You can generate endless new songs and upload them directly to Spotify to compete with human streams.

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The only problem is that none of this “creative output” is entirely new. In fact, it is inherently derivative, based on millions of existing creative works scraped off the internet. An AI like ChatGPT takes this input, studies it, and produces seemingly novel works based on that material. Much of it is copyrighted, but the authors of copyright laws never contemplated this kind of derivative work.

And that’s the fundamental question. Does this kind of generative AI infringe our copyrights, our exclusive ability to commercialize our works, on a massive scale?

The simple answer is that we don’t know yet — at least not in the courts that will ultimately decide such matters that will have transformational impacts on everyone in Hollywood and across all of creativity and the arts. But we will see answers coming soon. This year, in fact. 

The central question in the lawsuits recently filed against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt is whether these AI machinations — call them “micro infringements” — add up to actual copyright infringement that warrants significant legal penalties and consequences. Should we consider AI output to be derivative works that transgress copyright and warrant compensation to the creative community which unwittingly enabled them? Or does AI’s mass scraping of those works instead constitute a defensible “fair use”? So far, the U.S. courts have been silent on this issue, and the U.S. Copyright Office has given no guidance. 

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The cases could take years to wend through the courts. But they signal that society is beginning to meaningfully grapple with these questions and their profound implications for the media and entertainment industry. 

Human authors at Scientific American recently asked ChatGPT if AI should be regulated. To be clear, the bot wasn’t speaking for its creator, OpenAI, but it conceded the point. And it even offered an unqualified “yes” when asked if human creators should be compensated. And it conceded that AI should be regulated. Here’s what it said:

“One possible solution… is to establish a system for compensating writers whose work is used in training models. Another solution could be to require companies or individuals using language models to obtain explicit consent from writers before using their work in the training process.” 

ChatGPT

In other words, even ChatGPT says it should pay up. It’s harder for OpenAI to argue that it can’t, with Microsoft’s billions rolling in and experiments apparently underway to charge some users for priority access to ChatGPT. 

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But how? What kind of royalty system could we humans create that is both fair and pragmatically possible? The complexity of identifying and compensating the specific creators among millions who contributed indirectly to the generation of a single AI work boggles the mind.

Yet there are precedents: Something akin to a performing rights organization in the music world, where artists receive payments based on estimates of the music played in bars, restaurants and other venues across the world. 

There’s another problem in compensating creators. The commercial exploitation of creativity depends on copyright protection. And courts haven’t decided whether AI-generated works qualify for copyright. 

The Copyright Office has weighed in, though. Its current policy is to grant copyrights only to human-assisted AI works, not wholly AI-generated ones. The intellectual basis of that stance isn’t clear, since the current generation of AI works produced by the likes of Midjourney and ChatGPT start with prompts written by humans. There’s already a lawsuit pending that challenges the Copyright Office’s conclusion.

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Are there any good answers? We certainly don’t have them yet, and I don’t think asking ChatGPT will get us very far. (I tried, and it offered generic suggestions about royalties or one-time payments.) Our systems of government aren’t well-equipped to address such seismic shifts in technology. But the pace of AI’s growth in both accessibility and sophistication is only accelerating, as is the disruption and transformation that flow from it.

I’ve taken a step by founding the AI Creative Forum, a think tank meant to consider these issues with leading creators, artists, executives, philosophers and technologists. I’m hoping it and other efforts like it  will spark real human conversations to match AI’s increasing sophistication. Make no mistake: AI is the central media-tech story not just of this year, but of this decade. 

If this sounds like a humanist’s call to arms to everyone in the creative community, then you are absolutely right. Consider it an AI reality check. We can stay on top of this massive wave of change, or have it crash over us. Our jobs, our lives, our identities as creative people depend on the choices we make.

For those of you interested in learning more, visit Peter’s firm Creative Media at creativemedia.biz and follow him on Twitter @pcsathy.

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