14 October AEPO-ARTIS was invited to participate in “Sustaining original content in the age of generative AI”, a half day conference in Brussels organised by the German think-tank FES, in collaboration with Open Future. In a panel with Giuseppe Abbamonte and Renate Schröder, AEPO-ARTIS looked at what is needed to protect performers as creators of value.
Rather than setting up another conference on Copyright and AI, the organisers put focus on how generative AI is rapidly changing how we access, create, and value information.
AI hasn’t only borrowed from human creativity. It has absorbed all human knowledge and now acts as a gatekeeper to it. The way commercial AI providers capture the value that previously went to the producers of information will result in journalists, researchers, artists, and other information producers lacking the proper incentives to continue creating and weaken the overall information ecosystem.
With this event, FES and Open Future aimed to discuss potential solutions to redistribute value to the workers and institutions that create, vet, and maintain information.
After a presentation by French Professor Alexandra Bensamoun on how different copyright schemes can be used as an inspiration for models that seek to provide a balance between AI providers and the broader sector of information producers, German MEP Tiemo Wôlken, shadow rapporteur for S&D on the Voss Report, explained the considerations currently occupying Parliament in its search for the right balance.
The opening round was followed by a panel discussion with our General Secretary aside Giuseppe Abbamonte (Director for Media Policy, DG CNECT), Renate Schroeder (Director, European Federation of Journalists) and Stefan Kaufmann (Policy Advisor at Wikimedia).
Discussions focused on the importance of value-transfer mechanisms, and the crucial role collective management organisations can play there within, and the lessons that can be learned from mistakes made in the past for what concerns performers’ remuneration for their contribution to the streaming market.
Article 4 of the CDSM directive was criticised for being an exception for commercial use without providing any remuneration and therefore having no place in the EU copyright framework. “Its machine readable opt-outs are a myth and make the article unworkable in practice.” said Ioan Kaes. “Ironically, while performers are left on their own with this, the Commission is promising AI providers additional time to develop standards to make the artificial nature of their output machine readable.
The debate ended with a consensus that transparency is key. AEPO-ARTIS thanked the Commission for the Transparency Template, obliging all GenAI providers to make public a summary of the data used in the training of their models, and put it on the table that collective management organisations should be recognised as trusted actors that can obtain full access to this training data.
AEPO-ARTIS would like to thank Open Future for the invitation and the different angle of approaching what affects our society as a whole.
