AI and the bigger picture – 3/3

In the previous blogs, we talked about how AI doesn’t directly threaten the creative industry and how it can actually help us. But let’s zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

AI doesn’t exist on its own; it’s going to affect a lot of things, some of which we won’t fully understand for years to come. Think about the internet and social media. Few people predicted the giant it has grown into today, affecting behaviours, politics, mental health, and destructive levels of consumption. Unlike the scientists in Jurassic Park, we hope that as we continue down this road we can all pause and take a wider look at how this technology will shape our lives.

The Sama Group, formerly known as Samasource and Sama, is a training-data company, focusing on moderating and annotating data for artificial intelligence companies and large language models. While it’s positive that companies like OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) recognised early on that content moderation was essential to protect people, the amount of work involved in doing so was huge, and so age old habits of outsourced labour and exploitation ran rife.

In Niamh Rowe’s recent Guardian article titled ‘It’s destroyed me completely’, she writes about some of the work the people ‘behind the scenes’ have faced. ‘The moderators say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.’

The Diary of a CEO podcast also has an incredibly insightful interview with Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google. In the conversation Mo shares lots of his insights working and developing AI at Google, which are both fascinating and scary. They also discuss how AI will radically change the world by 2025, the societal changes it will create and the solutions and responses we should be implementing now.

Remember, AI doesn’t exist within a vacuum; it’s part of a big chain of things and by using it as a tool there is also a responsibility to educate and advocate for ethical practice. There is much more awareness these days about labour exploitation in industries such as fashion, and we make informed decisions about the clothes that we buy and brands that we support. Whilst the AI industry is still relatively unknown, we need to adopt the same mindset. As designers and humans we shouldn’t just accept the status quo of what big corporate companies want us to think.

‘For AI to be genuinely ethical, we need to consider more than who is harmed after AI is deployed, we need to remember the people building it too’ (Bridget Tood).

Many artists have raised a concern about plagiarism in AI as algorithms need information to create and learn from, which begs the question: Whose work is being used? AI learns from the data set it’s handled. As you read this, AI bots are crawling across the web, ignoring opt out requests and scraping data indiscriminately. This means artists’ original works are being downloaded to train AI models without their consent. This is very clearly a form of plagiarism, which could very well be taking place to you. Therefore check out websites such as have I been trained which search for your work in popular AI training datasets, to ensure it’s not being stolen. Similarly there are programs such as Kudurru, which detect and block AI systems that show signs of this activity. They collaborate within the network to swiftly recognise scrapers to all the protected sites. Together, these sites under Kudurru’s protection jointly prevent the scraper from retrieving content from their respective platforms and stealing artists’ work. Sadly, this is an ongoing problem in the industry and people taking from artists is nothing new, just think the Mona Lisa was vandalised or stolen up to 5 times! That said, it definitely wasn’t a machine doing the stealing back then. Fixing the issue of plagiarism and AI isn’t simple, but the fact that there is a digital footprint offers more transparency and hope for artists. That’s why we urge everyone to make the most of the tools available to safeguard their work.