This article by Guy Gadney, CEO of Charisma.ai, is one of a series commissioned as part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England. We have commissioned writers, academics, creators and makers to contribute a written snapshot into how artificial intelligence is changing, enhancing and challenging creative writing and publishing practices.  

The UK creative industries are financial powerhouses, recognised internationally for writing, art, video games, film, television and other creative talent. For proof, you just need to look at the numbers. Government statistics show that the creative industries grew by 6.8% in 2022 and contributed £124.6bn to the national economy. That’s more than the UK car industry, or aerospace, oil and gas.The landscape for creators themselves, however, is not so bright.  

Socioeconomic factors such as the decline in cinema and television audiences, the impact of COVID-19, streaming models, social media advertising, and ironically, the US Actors and Writers strikes, are squeezing employment to the point where 75% of the UK freelance media workforce is out of work. The US Art Directors Guild has even paused its training courses, stating that it ‘cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed.’ Amongst all that, there was a global pandemic too. 

And then, generative artificial intelligence appeared. 

The People Behind the Code 

My journey with generative AI began in 2019, while I was conducting research for a South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN) Fellowship. I was investigating automation within the creative industries, with a specific focus on AI and origins of the data Google was using to train its systems. At the time, it felt like big tech companies were sneaking behind the counter and stealing all the sweets. I shared these concerns in Who Owns Digital Stories (2019) and co-wrote a white paper on Unconscious Bias in AI Data Sets, and proposed a sociotechnical approach to managing its inevitable appearance. 

Much has changed over the past five years, and yet in many ways, nothing has changed. Authors and artists are increasingly aware that large tech companies are using copyright materials to train their AI systems, often resulting in text and images that are remarkably similar to their own. But the legal precedent has already been set. In 2016, a ruling determined that while AI systems were absorbing copyrighted material, what they were doing with it was “transformative” and therefore not a violation of copyright law. In my non-legal opinion, this ruling marked the end of any subsequent legal challenges about training data against big tech companies. 

Another significant shift is AI’s transition from a game of innovation to one of political power. It is a technology capable of influencing elections, advancing nations, accelerating productivity, and making certain individuals very rich. It is simply too big to fail.  

A common question is whether it will take our jobs. The optimistic response is: “AI won’t take your jobs, but someone who knows how to use it will.” The reality is: “AI won’t take your jobs, but the people who make it will.” I emphasise the role of the people behind AI because the technology itself is not inherently harmful. AI is just computer code, without a moral compass. However, the people who run the companies, and the programmers who write the code, do have biases, and their code does precisely what they tell it to do. 

These biases become apparent when AI generates images of racially diverse Nazis or exclusively white businessmen. Such results reflect the biases of the predominantly white, male engineers in California who write the code, funded by white male venture capitalists, who use terms like ‘moonshot’, ‘kill the competition’ and ‘world domination.’ Anti-creative biases come from leaders like Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Open AI who recently said, ‘Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.’ Similarly, Eric Schmidt the ex-CEO of Google once remarked, ‘If nobody uses your product it doesn’t matter if you stole all the content. Don’t quote me on that.’ 

Creating an Alternative Future 

As Tolstoy asked in his short book on society and greed, What Then Must We Do? 

For me, digital ethics and philosophy must be at the core of every project. This can be simplified by the famous Jurassic Park quote: ‘Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.’ 

The pace of innovation in the digital world is faster than I have ever seen in my 30 years in the industry. It’s exciting, exhausting, motivating, and overwhelming all at once. From my SWCTN research, my answer to Tolstoy’s question was simple: “Something!” 

My conclusion was that merely criticising AI developments or blocking them was not the solution. A different narrative was needed. We built on our 2019 paper, AI Ethics in Data Sets, and experimented with generative AI through our art application, Project Electric Sheep. We also explored interactive storytelling using our immersive video game adaptation of John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi novel, The Kraken Wakes, and developed Charisma.ai as an interactive AI-supported writing platform. 

Then, in 2022, ChatGPT launched, and everything changed once again. 

 With ChatGPT, the power of generative AI became clear to everyone, and questions about how OpenAI gathered its data gained prominence. This was the inspiration to create “something” – an active response rooted in the values of the creative industries while harnessing the capabilities of generative AI. Our vision was not merely to create stories, but to create new forms of storytelling and generate new revenue streams for creators. We aimed to bring these stories to life through words, visuals, and soundscapes. 

This month, we announced R&D funding from Innovate UK to take the first steps toward this vision. We are achieving this through workshops with creators of all ages and backgrounds, partnering with companies such as Aardman Animations, Channel 4, and Sound Reactions, as well as research collaborations with Falmouth University’s Film & TV unit and the Creative Computing Institute at UAL. Importantly, we also ensure a digital ethicist, Lisa Talia Moretti, is present throughout, overseeing our ideas, decision-making, and impact. 

Mapping the Future of Creativity 

The Charismatic.ai project aims to provide answers for how the creative industries can evolve in a world where AI plays an integral part in the creative process. Some of the answers will be joyful and exciting, ushering in a new era of creativity. Others may present challenges. However, through Charismatic.ai, we will create a map to help navigate this next phase of creative thinking. 

The key insight I took from my SWCTN Fellowship was the relationship between cause and effect. AI is the cause, and automation is the effect. While the sheer volume of information about AI can be overwhelming, studying automation offers a valuable perspective on how we can improve our processes and create work that would not have been possible without it. 

The most exciting part of this journey is this: how can we tell new stories with this new technology, and become better storytellers along the way, exploring how the ‘industry’ in creative industries can be reformed and strengthened to favour creators.  

That is something worth fighting for! 

This is an abridged version of a keynote speech delivered at the MIX Conference 2019

With the increasing convergence between creative industries and artificial intelligence, there is an emerging misunderstanding of how the tech world sees creativity, and this is important for publishers, authors and the broader creative industries.

To frame this, it is important to understand the basics of AI. In essence, AI is like a child-computer. It can learn, be educated and trained, and just like a growing child, it needs feeding.

AI’s food is data and to train an AI you need to feed it on data. Lots of data. And like a child, it will grow well if you feed it on good food.

Looking for large datasets, many companies ‘scrape’ data from open public websites like Reddit, or download datasets from various bulletin boards and websites.

Some companies try to aim for quality, and turn to published books as sources for their data. In the world of natural language, there is value in the content of existing works.

Perhaps one of the first indicators of this was the legal case between the Writer’s Guild of the United States and Google. In 2004, Google started scanning and offering books as part of its Google Library project, now called Google Books. It hailed this as an enormous democratization project, expanding the reach of human literature and knowledge.

A year later, the Authors Guild sued Google for breach of copyright. The case continued – and so did Google’s scanning. In 2010, Google estimated that there were 130 million titles in existence, and stated its goal:  to scan all of them.

The concern from the Authors Guild, and of course from publishers, was that by offering copyright titles, Google would damage revenues to authors, publishers and copyright owners.

By October 2015, Google had scanned over 25 million book titles.

In 2016, after the US Supreme Court found in favour of Google, Authors Guild President, Roxana Robinson, summarised: “We’re witnessing a vast redistribution of wealth from the creative sector to the tech sector, not only with books but across the spectrum of the arts.”

Now, imagine I am a producing a film and want to quote a section of a book in the film, and use part of an audio track. As well as enhancing the story within the film, this will grow the value of the film product itself. So the process I take is to contact the copyright holders, do a deal and carry on with my production. Even if I base my film loosely on an existing text, I clear the rights. There are legal, moral and commercial reasons to do this.

In contrast, Google is using scanned copyrighted material to build its current and future products, and as far as we can tell from the settlement with the Writer’s Guild seven years ago, without any reference to authors being compensated for the use of their work.

For example, Google’s Talk to Books project allows users to: “make a statement or ask a question, and the tool finds sentences in books that respond, with no dependence on keyword matching. In a sense you are talking to the books, getting responses which can help you determine if you’re interested in reading them or not.”

Google has been similarly looking at the museum and arts sector. I wrote in a previous article that many museums are placing their images in the public domain as part of an advanced digital strategy to create worldwide creative usage of its content. While a museum’s public service approach is to allow commons access to its work, the 360 StreetView version of that museum that Google photographed has a discrete “copyright Google” at the bottom of the screen – so the virtual tour of the museum belongs to Google.

True, the marketing strength that Google brings to large and small art museums creates a global awareness that could only be dreamed of before digital media.

But look ahead: new developments in virtual reality are all about immersion, and Google is a key player in its development. As this technology improves, the experiential gap between visiting a museum in reality and visiting it virtually will diminish, and with it, the reason for people to visit the physical space.

VR will allow for the emotional connection with art to be recreated from the digitised versions. Once an artefact has been digitised, it does not impact Google’s service if the physical location exists or not.

Remember that Google is a search and advertising company. Its primary profits come from its unparalleled ability to tailor advertising to an individual segment of one – you.  And the advertising it displays is the trade-off that allows you to see its search results, its YouTube videos and its maps for free. As you use its services, it builds up a profile of you, which it sells to advertisers.

While this seems like the most enormous copyright abuse in history – and indeed it could be – it is more broadly symptomatic of a wider disrespect by the technology industry towards the creative industries.

Certainly there has for a while existed a valley of misunderstanding between the tech and creative world, and it is important for the health of both sectors, and humankind itself, that this valley is bridged as soon as possible.

When I joined Penguin Digital in the mid-nineties, our IT manager referred to all the books we published as “data”. You can imagine how this went down with the editorial teams at the time!  Yet with hindsight, his outlook was prophetic.

Later, working in TV, I found the engineers called the programme makers “coloured pencil people”.

This year, in his book The Creativity Code, the Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy proposes that computers can produce art like Rembrandt’s. It seems like art and creative writing have now become a summit for AI programmers to conquer.

This is dangerous.

Firstly, it makes the cultural supposition that Art is somehow a technical problem to be solved. It is not. This perspective belittles the creative industries and will have an impact on funding, perceived quality and indeed on the academic, practical and soulful journey that it takes to become an artist.

If Art is somehow perceived as something a computer can conceive better than humans, and infinitely replicable, what hope do the true artists have?

Du Sautoy cites Christie’s selling an AI-generated Rembrandt-style artwork for $350,000 as legitimization of the value of AI and art.  It categorically is not. Christies recognized a novelty, all within the highly commercialised world of international art auctions.

Secondly, there is no merit to humanity in getting AI to create Art. Indeed it is a waste of AI’s strength, to try to anthropomorphise it into recreating human creativity. It should be used to solve problems that are NOT able to be solved by humans, but whose solutions are profoundly needed by humankind – education, inequality, climate change, population growth, energy efficiency, new politics. These are valid and urgent challenges that AI can solve.

Thirdly, and regardless of any futuristic developments, existing works of art should not be used to create technology projects without recompensing the vast numbers of people who have contributed their works to it – whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Ultimately, and most importantly, we must recognize that as technology companies like Google and Amazon seek to engage audiences with stories, conversations and entertainment, they will be looking to the creative industries as fodder.

While some of the proverbial horses may have bolted due to decisions made in the past, this is not the end.

This is our time to define our own narrative and decide what we future we want for our stories. We need to understand that the major technology companies are not benign, and they think far into the future. Seemingly fun experiments with AI “talking in the voice of a book” have implications that will travel down to whether an author can afford a coffee.

So this speech becomes a call to arms. A call to words.

A call that control of the future of the creative industries should not rest with monolithic search and advertising companies.

So beware geeks bearing gifts. Pause before you partner. Don’t default to letting Google scan your libraries, museums and galleries. Don’t let Alexa listen in on your life, your love and your arguments. Do query your presence on Facebook.

Do understand that words are powerful, but also need protecting.

Do understand that, where advanced technology is involved, there are moral decisions that are being made, and without us at the table, these decisions will only have company objectives at their heart.

Be very sceptical of any company’s “AI Ethics Board”, which is a compromised jury.

As storytellers, we are smart, creative and economically vulnerable. But we have stories and creativity that are valuable.

To recognise this is the first step towards being aware of the value we have to technology monoliths, and why, as we head towards the dawn of a new phase of technology, we need to stop them trying to recreate us inside their machines, and instead work jointly to safeguard the importance that human creativity has in all our futures.