A recent study from the UK paints an alarming picture: “A third (32%) of illustrators report lost commissions or cancelled projects due to GenAI, while the situation is even more severe for photographers where 58% have been affected. Authors report similar disruptions, with more than half seeing work disappear. Among musicians, 73% say unregulated GenAI now threatens their ability to earn a living.”
In the late 80s a number of prominent cartoonists drafted a “Creators Bill of Rights” in response to the dreadful work-for-hire conditions at the big comic publishers. These cartoonists simply wanted to be properly credited and rewarded for the original work which they created. The impact of this document is debatable but it was followed by an explosion of creator-owned comics and even publishers like Image Comics that had creator ownership as their foundation. But today in the era of AI imagery, creator rights are more difficult and more important than ever if we want to have a creative future.
The major distributors aren’t publishing houses and brick and mortar stores, they’re massive tech platforms with a massive appetite for free content.
Big Tech is an not a friend of creator rights
Check out this line in the Instagram Terms of Service:
And in case you’re wondering, that includes training AI models on your work:
Making AI Work Harder for Europeans
And who can forget this little abomination in the bottom right hand corner of every image posted to X?
So some of the biggest platforms are taking everything creators give them and feeding it to LLMs that will in turn take work from them creators. This is not even ethical, much less sustainable.
The hardest part is that while social media is fairly openly sleazy about stealing creative work in their terms and conditions, the majority of these LLMs are trained by quietly scraping the internet. Have a portfolio site on Squarespace or Behance? Those are wide open for ChatGPT, Gemini, MidJourney and the rest. You have to explicitly block these robots from getting your data.
AI breaks the business model
Free platforms need cheap content: Twitter needs tweets, Instagram needs pictures, and TikTok needs videos in massive quantities. To incentivize creators to make this content they could hold out various rewards: Market access, audience, and even actual money for the popular creators. There are some perverse incentives to this model but, setting it aside, what happens if content becomes free for these platforms? What happens if they no longer have to reward creators with anything?
Platforms no longer have to incentivize creators to create original content. They can just make it themselves and tweak it to suit their algorithms.
Small tech can help creators
Big tech exists to get bigger. That’s what happens when you have shareholders and investors: they need a return on that investment; they need it to grow. I started Smmall with the notion of a digital small business, something like a local deli or coffee shop, something that made enough money to keep the lights on but didn’t want to dominate the globe. A business that provided a simple service for great customers. A human-sized business.
Notably companies that have curtailed their ambitions to something more human-sized seem to have weathered the AI onslaught with more grace than those who were committed to world domination from the beginning.
But how do we help creators?
The UK study, suggests a framework called “CLEAR” that might be a good blueprint for a creator bill of rights.
- Consent first. Ask before you take.
- Licensing not scraping. Creative works must be licenced if they are to be used to train AI.
- Ethical use of training data.
- Accountability and transparency. Creators need to know who is using their work and how.
- Remuneration and rights. People deserve to be paid for their work.
Out of all of these principles “Ethical use” is the most vague and just seems to be repeating what has been better stated elsewhere (but the “CLAR” framework doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?). Nevertheless, I think this is a great place to start.
Other certifying organizations like Fairly Trained also seem to be necessary for keeping platforms accountable. But people first have to become aware of the need before the certification becomes important.
At Smmall Cloud, we don’t use AI at all in our platform. We block scraping by AI bots on our CDN. But we also want to do more to help creators.
Let us know how. We're listing.
