Make your creative voice heard

defend your copyright

A painting in progress in raking sunlight

Hello friends

If you’re an artist, writer or musician based in the UK, you may be aware that the government is consulting on a proposal that would allow AI firms to train their models on copyrighted work without seeking permission, unless the copyright holder has expressly opted out. It’s a proposal that artists have been challenging as opaque, unfair, unworkable and disastrous for the 2.4 million people employed in the UK’s creative sector.

In a thoughtful piece in The Thin Veneer

AGK

recently observed:

Tech companies spend enormous sums of money on the engineers to design the models, and computing power to run the training, but they spend very little, comparatively, on the vast amounts of data used to feed those models. We are giving away our creative and artistic works involuntarily to these training programs, and in turn, those programs are made into tools that directly compete with our own creative output.

In a barnstorming speech in the House of Lords last week, Baroness Kidron, who has tabled an amendment to the government’s data bill said:

"The language of AI - scraping, training data, modules, LLMs - does not evoke the full picture of what is being done. AI corporations - many of which are seeking to entrench their existing information monopolies - are not stealing nameless data. They are stealing some of the UK's most valuable cultural and economic assets."

She warns that tech companies fiercely defend their own intellectual property while denying the value of ours, building AI for free with our work, then asking us to rent it back from them. It’s worth watching her speech in full. Her arguments relate to the debate about new UK legislation, but they are relevant much more widely.

You can find out more about the data bill’s proposals and make sure your voice is heard through The Writer’s Union or, for visual artists, DACS, the Design and Artists Copyright Society. If you’re in the UK, I would urge you to pay attention, stay informed, and to write to your MP to make sure your voice is heard. Big Tech companies have the ear of ministers, with regular meetings since Labour came into power. We need to make sure they hear us in their other ear, persistently, loudly and collectively.

The links here are specific to the UK context, but I know this is an issue that affects everyone. If you have information or links that would be useful for creatives in your country please do share them in the comments.

Meanwhile, on my recent trip to London and Edinburgh I spent a lot of time in art galleries.

Paintings from Siena and the National Galleries, Ed Atkins at Tate Britain, Richard Wright at Camden Art Centre, Subai Zheng in RSA Open

In a world so mediated by screens and digital representations, it felt like sustenance to spend time with physical art works that embody real people making real things with real materials in real time.

Work in progress

Back in my own studio, I’ve returned to work on the painting I left on my wall while I was away. There’s a good bit still to go, a couple of weeks’ work at least. But I think the title might have arrived: ‘Moon Glow’.

Maybe ‘Moon Glow’?

It’s a painting that evades digital capture. The pearlescent finish shifts with the light and your angle of view. The detail of the layering only becomes evident when you spend a bit of time looking. Then you start to notice the unevenness of the hand-drawn lines, the slight changes in surface texture, and the play between matt and sheen.

Angled view…

Increasingly, both as maker and as viewer, I find I’m drawn towards the sheer presence of painting, the one-off, the hand-made, the trace of a real person’s hand. AI can scrape all it likes but it can never capture these qualities.

The Life Raft Co-Creating Community

Join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us.

That’s all for this week!

Sam