Generative AI: What Can I Do?

Are you a creative in the UK? Are you concerned about generative AI and wondering what you can do? I have listed some actions you can take, even if you only have 5 minutes to spare.

I have 5 minutes, what can I do?

Sign the Statement on AI Training

Join over 40,000 other creatives and add your name to the Statement on AI Training.

The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.

If you agree with this statement, add your name and profession using the form on their website. You will receive an email to confirm. Click the button in the email and you’re done. Please consider sharing the website address with your peers and colleagues.

I have 30 minutes, what can I do?

Write to your MP

If you are in the UK you can find the details for your MP and contact them through the Write To Them website. Enter your postcode and the website will tell you who your local MP is. Click on your MP’s name to write them a message. Please be polite, concise and to the point; if you abuse your MP you devalue the service for all users.

If you have responded to the Government’s consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (see below) then this is an opportunity to tell them how you have responded and to ask them to support your preferred outcome.

You might choose to reference the polling carried out by YouGov and reported by the Creative Rights in AI Coalition (see the news story dated 16/12/2024):

Polling from Reset Tech and YouGov… found that the public overwhelmingly back transparency in the training of AI models and the payment of royalties to content creators by tech firms.  

Seventy-two per cent of respondents said AI companies should be required to pay royalties to the creators of text, audio, or video that they use to train AI models, while 80 per cent said AI companies should be required to make public all the information that their models have been trained upon.

You could ask your MP to communicate your concerns about generative AI to Feryal Clark, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Digital Government, and to Chris Bryant, Minister for Creative Industries, Arts, and Tourism.

I have a couple of hours, what can I do?

Respond to the UK Government’s AI Consultation

The UK Government has opened a consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence. Anyone is able to respond to the consultation and give their views on the impacts of their proposed options.

The consultation closes at 11:59pm on 25 February 2025.

With regards to the use of copyrighted material (eg the use of our art, music, and writing to train generative AI models), the consultation proposes four options:

  • Option 0: Do nothing
  • Option 1: Strengthen copyright requiring licencing in all cases
  • Option 2: A broad data mining exception
  • Option 3: A data mining exception with a rights reservation mechanism

You can read about all of these options in greater detail in the consultation’s Summary Assessment of Options (scroll to page 2 of the document).

To respond to the consultation you need to visit this website and click on Online Survey at the bottom of the page. You do not need to answer every question (I didn’t!) and you can save your progress and return to it later, meaning you don’t need to attack this all in one go.

The Government’s preferred option is option 3. Personally, I reject this option and have responded to the consultation in support of option 1. I know many of my illustration peers also feel this way.

If you would like to understand more about how the generative AI industry currently scrapes art from individuals and businesses to use in the creation of their generative AI models, I carried out a deep-dive into how hundreds of my illustrations ended up inside Stable Diffusion’s training process: Inside the Art Automaton.

While option 3 proposes an improvement to this current, pretty awful situation, I do not feel it goes far enough in strengthening copyright protection for creatives. By proposing what is effectively an “opt out” system, it puts the onus on us, the creators and copyright holders, to constantly monitor and respond to attempts to use our creations in generative AI training. Crucially, we can only opt out if we know someone is planning to use our work and the consultation is frustratingly vague about how such a mechanism would work. Personally, I feel it is unworkable.

Controlling the use and distribution of our artwork is already challenging, and expecting creatives to be able to police all instances of our artwork online is unrealistic. I paint book covers. In order for those books to be sold, the covers I create have to be shown on websites, online bookshops, social media accounts, and many, many more places. These are legitimate uses for a book cover. But, under an opt-out system, I would be expected to police all instances where a book cover appears online, to identify when one of those images is going to be sucked into the training process for a generative AI model, and to object if I wasn’t happy to allow this. That is an unrealistic expectation and it simply ensures that the status quo continues, with creatives having no or very little control over the use of their creations.

If generative AI companies were required to licence their training data in all cases (option 1) then it wouldn’t matter how widely that book cover was distributed around the internet. A generative AI company would not be able to grab that image from anywhere online and use it. Instead, they would need to identify the copyright holder (me) and actively approach me to licence the image first, before they took it and used it. The consultation argues that this approach will place unreasonable burdens on generative AI companies. Simply put, I am okay with that. If their business isn’t sustainable without the large-scale use of unlicenced art then that is a problem with their business model, not mine. Creatives are not required to subsidise the generative AI industry with our work, particularly when they offer very little tangible benefits to us or the wider world in return.

You are, of course, free to respond to the consultation in any way you see fit. Your views on the best way forward may be different from mine. But we should all give our views. We have been offered this opportunity and it would be wrong to ignore the chance to have our voices heard.

More resources

  • The Bookseller recently summarised the situation regarding the consultation with a call-to-action that mirrors some of what I have suggested here
  • The ALCS has a similar set of guidance, with suggestions on how they recommend you complete the consultation response
  • The UK Government’s 2023 Artificial Intelligence Sector Study, which gives details about the wider AI sector (please note this includes many companies and entities that have nothing to do with generative AI)
  • 2022 House of Lords report on the Contribution of the arts to society and the economy, which documents the £126bn generated for the UK economy by the arts while supporting employment for 2.4 million people