Undermining creative economies

Taxonomy of Risks posed by Language Models

Weidinger et al. (2022)

Source DOI

Sub-category

Risk Domain

6Socioeconomic & Environmental

6.3Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort

AI systems capable of creating economic or cultural value, including through reproduction of human innovation or creativity (e.g., art, music, writing, coding, invention), destabilizing economic and social systems that rely on human effort. The ubiquity of AI-generated content may lead to reduced appreciation for human skills, disruption of creative and knowledge-based industries, and homogenization of cultural experiences.

"LMs may generate content that is not strictly in violation of copyright but harms artists by capital- ising on their ideas, in ways that would be time-intensive or costly to do using human labour. This may undermine the profitability of creative or innovative work. If LMs can be used to generate content that serves as a credible substitute for a particular example of hu- man creativity - otherwise protected by copyright - this potentially allows such work to be replaced without the author’s copyright being infringed, analogous to ”patent-busting” [158] ... These risks are distinct from copyright infringement concerns based on the LM reproducing verbatim copyrighted material that is present in the training data [188]."(p. 221)

Entity— Who or what caused the harm

Human

Due to a decision or action made by humans

AI system

Due to a decision or action made by an AI system

Other

Due to some other reason or is ambiguous

Intent— Whether the harm was intentional or accidental

Intentional

Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal

Unintentional

Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal