A new report Brave New World? – Justice for creators in the age of Gen AI sheds light on the alarming and rapid damage being wrought upon the creative industries and asks how we can protect ourselves and our national culture against this onslaught. It lays out clear evidence detailing the negative impact of Gen AI on individual creators and the UK economy and offers solutions to redress the balance of power. It is thorough and detailed, but is mainly concerned with the immediate threat to creative sector jobs.
This is not a criticism of the report, which is excellent and essential reading. However in this blog post I want to expand the view little wider to look at some of the less-obvious issues which need to be mapped as this new technology advances.
Please don’t assume that in highlighting these issues I am not concerned about the impact on artists’ incomes or the degradation of copyright. I’m also not belittling the environmental impact of Gen AI* services (through their development and their use), or indeed the huge risk of the AI bubble bursting and crashing what’s left of the economy. All of these issues are massively important and they are all deeply troubling, but I also think it’s vital that we take a look at some of the less-mentioned problems which will (already are) the result of a shift into an AI-driven world.
Naturally this article will focus on the plight of photographers, but I’ll be looking a bit beyond the immediate financial concerns faced by those making a living from photography. Some of the points I raise will also have similar effects in other professional creative areas; I’ll leave others to comment specifically on industries in which I am not an expert. Some of my concerns go far beyond the economic and creative culture harms threatened by Gen AI.
There’s No Business Like No Business
The corporate or business photographer relies on a regular stream of client commissions. Taking photos for the company website, LinkedIn and other social media and printed material is this photographer’s bread and butter, but AI is already allowing the plagiarising of specific photographers’ styles in a way which is damaging their ability to make a living. More widely, it’s already possible for anyone to ‘spruce up’ an un-flattering ‘selfie’ using an AI service, again in preference to hiring a professional.
However, let’s not forget that the people who are using these AI services today could well be in the firing line as AI replaces traditional service sector roles. The very people who might want a decent photo for their LinkedIn profile or the About Us section of a business website could well be a disappearing market for the professional photographer.
To my mind, this is one of the greatest uncertainties and un-knowables of the advance of AI services. It’s certainly going to leave many photographers scrabbling to chase a dwindling number of viable clients. It’ll be a pincer movement of decline.
Who’s Afraid of AI?
Even before that day arrives, there could be a cultural shift which makes the online posting of portraits a less comfortable proposition for many people.
GenAI services are already being used by fraudsters and people with ill intentions. A profile photo you post online can be scraped by an AI service and used elsewhere, possibly innocuously, or it could be used to try to defraud or blackmail you. Elon Musk’s Grok service was quickly employed in the rendering of innocent images of women into sexualised content. Sexual abuse images and deep fakes are a genuinely terrifying aspect of the generative AI industry. The GenAI corporates are either unwilling or unable to prevent abusive and criminal use of their services and people are already becoming more wary of having their photo taken and used online where it will be vulnerable to being repurposed.
One of the key problems with how Gen AI models are trained is that they scrape content regardless of copyright (on the creator’s side) or usage restrictions (on both the creator’s and the subject’s side). Images which were destined only to be used in a single or restricted context can easily be scraped and repurposed for uses as-yet unimagined.
Will the About Us sections of corporate websites disappear in favour of anonymity?
Vanishing Culture
The natural wariness this generates in the minds of the general public extends beyond the question of allowing (or not) the use of one’s image in a professional setting. It’s already quite challenging to document news events or even everyday culture as people have become more inclined to say no to anything which might be used in ways they cannot imagine. If AI can be used to repurpose images for uses which have yet to be invented, I believe people will become increasingly hostile to having their likeness recorded in almost any setting.
It has felt for some time as though there was a golden age when photographers could document a street scene and, if not always welcomed, were at least mostly tolerated or ignored. We have a rich archive of historical photos showing people in everyday situations. From beach holidays to Sunday fairs, or simply out shopping, eating, drinking, entertaining or being entertained.
Photographing children in public spaces is an especially dangerous occupation now. The late Martin Parr and other documentarians covering everyday life simply couldn’t do today what they did until 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
The internet has already made people more sensitive to anyone taking pictures in these situations, but add the potential threat of AI abuse and I can see a time when not only will it not be possible to record public life at any level, but public life itself could start to withdraw into purely private spaces.
Where could all of this lead?
I could be wrong and I hope I am, but where social media has already caused harm to the traditional organs of democracy (I’m thinking specifically here of the demise of newspapers and professional journalism), the very hint of a threat of AI being at the service of criminals or government controls could very easily freeze the future expressions of our society and culture; both the ‘performative’ culture, such as public activities, protests and the like, and the documenting of these activities by photographers.
It’s not as if the warning signs aren’t already there, with journalists, and photo-journalists in particular, being targeted by states, the military, police and even citizens wishing not to be documented for any reason.
Conclusion
It’s tempting to only consider the immediate threats posed by Gen AI on one’s ability to earn a living. The Brave New World report also touches on the threat to UK culture and the future viability of the creative industries, and I won’t say anything to diminish the importance of the message contained in the report. The UK government would be unforgivably foolish to believe Gen AI can create sufficient jobs to replace those displaced by AI, but I wanted to set out a handful of other areas we must also be deeply concerned about. It’s not even an exhaustive list, but I’d exhaust myself if I tried to list and examine them all. Perhaps I’ll come back to this subject to take a further look at those issues.
If you think this article went awful dark awful fast, it’s probably not a bad metaphor for how AI could turn society and culture awful dark, awful fast.
*Gen AI refers to Generative Artificial Intelligence which requires continuous training on fresh data (words, photos, illustrations, music and so on) in order to be able to ‘create’ new ‘works’. I dislike the term ‘data’ in this context and the output of Gen AI services cannot be described as ‘creative works’.
