Even before the recent protest by a group of well-known musicians at the UK government’s plans to allow AI companies to use copyright-protected work for training, disquiet around artists’ rights was already growing.
In early February, an open letter from artists around the world called on Christie’s auction house to cancel a sale of art created with the assistance of generative AI (GenAI). This is a form of artificial intelligence that creates content – including text, images, or music – based on the patterns learned from colossal data sets.
Without giving specific examples, the letter suggested that many of the works included in the sale, which was entitled “Augmented Intelligence” were “known to be trained on copyrighted work without a licence” and suggested that such sales further “incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work”.
