Govern or Be Governed: Protecting Creativity is Protecting Democracy

Baroness Beeban Kidron, filmmaker and member of UK House of Lords, joins the Govern or Be Governed conference via video from London. She notes that we are in a generation of “supercharged” scraping, that has sent rightholders alight. In losing copyright, she argues, we see an existential threat to creators who might lose the ability to earn a living, and to lose control over the meaning of their works.

Baroness Kidron via zoom at Govern or Be Governed

The UK government, she argues, has been to sacrifice the rights of creators to the desires of US AI companies. Along with Kate Bush, Elton John and Paul McCartney, she’s organized resistance to this legislation, and she assures us that “hostilities will soon resume”. That said, copyright is not the most urgent issue in tech governance, but it stands as a symbol for the rest of these issues. The stealing of the labor of creators, the repacking and selling it back to us threatens to kill creativity as an industry. In the UK, creative industries are the second most productive sector, and the source of a great deal of soft power.

I’m not against innovation, Kidron offers, but she suggests that there’s a difference between learning from art and looting it. The creative industries are not standing in the way of innovation – they ARE innovation. The creative industries have been imagining futures and steering us towards empowering visions. “The meaning of art is not a phrase for the pretentious or the privileged” – it’s an economically vital industry that gives £120b to the UK industry a year. Above that, it is the way we understand ourselves and each other. “Creativity is the mirror in which society sees its reflection.” Seeing that as a strip mine for machine learning, a set of resources that can transfer value from those who make culture to those who monetize it, is a transformation we must fight.

“Machines can imitate style, but they cannot produce meaning.” A world in which everything is copied but nothing is created is a world we have to avoid. The idea of technological inevitability is driving this field forward – we need to resist the idea that creativity is a nostalgic relic and accept that the creative industries are a real and powerful sector in a contemporary economy.

“When art becomes data and artists become invisible, we risk losing sight of what creativity actually is: a conversation between human beings based on empathy and understanding.” Respect for creators must be the foundation: without the author, no story, without the composer, no soundtrack. Being AI ready means being arts ready, respecting the creativity that has brought this world about.

The fight ahead will be about the very infrastructure of the digital world ahead. Who gets to sway public opinion, who is the collateral damage? Tech has learned to play democracy, but it captures the infrastructures beneath our feet, she says. We experience a perilous dependency on these platforms and tools, and the battle for creativity is a battle for democracy itself.

The post Govern or Be Governed: Protecting Creativity is Protecting Democracy appeared first on Ethan Zuckerman.