(Un)read in the ledger
Elliott Bledsoe
I am the grumpy cat of arts marketing! ?? ATM doing stuff w/ BlakDance, CircuitWest + others. President of Wikimedia Australia and Co-lead of Creative Commons Australia. On Turrbal/Jagera land
Weekly reading list: Monday 15–Sunday 21 April 2024
Things I have been reading, stuff I have come back to for a re-read and things that I want to read but haven’t got to yet.
Read
What I’ve been reading the week:
I missed this when it came out, but Meta has announced it will add a content label for AI material across its platforms. It will introduce a 'Made with AI' label for content with "industry standard AI image indicators or when people disclose that they’re uploading AI-generated content."
Monika Bickert – Friday 5 April 2024
Meta
Last week Representative Adam Schiff released a Generative AI Copyright Disclosure bill which would “require a notice to be submitted to the Register of Copyrights prior to the release of a new generative AI system with regard to all copyrighted works used in building or altering the training dataset for that system.” If passed, it is also proposed that the disclosure requirements would apply retroactively to previously released generative AI systems. Lots of bills never go anywhere so we will wait and see if it gets up, but it is attracting support from industry groups in the US.
Emilia David – Thursday 11 April 2024
The Verge
The University of Melbourne has launched a STEM program called Return to Country which aims to help Aboriginal students stay connected to Country while studying and inspire them through examples of Indigenous engineering such as fish and eel traps. It sounds like an exciting program.
Jess McGuire and Jenaya Gibbs-Muir – Sunday 14 April 2024
ABC Western Plains and ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
ArtsHub reports that freelance creatives income is down based on the results of the most recent Hnry Sole Trader Pulse survey. Certainly, in my own experience as an arts marketing consultant, opportunities in the end of Q4 2023 and all through Q1 2024 were down on previous years. It is interesting the article suggests that, despire COVID-19 recovery money going into the arts, arts organisations are spending that in-house rather than bringing in external contractors.
Thuy On – Monday 15 April 2024
ArtsHub
Research has been released that suggests Australian media organisations introduce image-specific AI policies to help combat misinformation and disinformation. Currently over a third of media organisations don’t have such a policy.
T.J. Thomson, Ryan J. Thomas and Phoebe Matich – Tuesday 16 April 2024
RMIT
The recent granting of copyright registrations by the the US Copyright Office to a few creators who used AI may be unintentionally creating an AI arrangement right. The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Elisa Shupe was recently granted registration of a book that was drafted using ChatGPT, but the registration is only to the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This is what Professor Matthew Sag refers to a ‘thin’ copyright protection.
Kate Knibbs – Wednesday 17 April 2024
WIRED
A database published by Mozilla mapping social justice and human rights intersections with AI and its impacts. AI can generate a lot of hope and harm. Certainly the database is important work for documenting some of the points at which harm can and is occurring.?
Mozilla
领英推荐
It may have slipped you by, but Google is proposing to update its Terms of Service (ToS) effective from Wednesday 22 May 2024. The proposed updated ToS is available to preview now, including a colour coded comparison between it and the current version. A subtle but important addition clarifies that Google won’t claim ownership over content you generate using a Google service that allows you to generate original content. This is likely not some altruistic gesture to generative AI users but, seemingly, rather the move is designed to distance Google from content users generate using Google’s generative AI tools such as Gemini {as I have written about before, OpenAI seemingly does not take a copyright licence to content generated using its tools either. But I will publish a blog post about why I think this is happening sometime soon!}
Add it to the pile
New additions to the unread pile:
This came out last week but I am adding it to the read pile this week. Creative Commons have put out a speculative paper exploring “... a possible future in which a “books data commons for AI training” might exist, and what such a commons might look like.” CC has a blog post that explores the idea further. I am looking forward to getting more across the idea soon.
April 2024
Creative Commons
I haven’t read it yet, but from the abstract it seems Assistant Professor Kalpana Tyagi focus is on text and data mining (TDM) as a threat to copyright and that Generative AI substitutes the romanticised human author that sits at the centre of copyright.
Kalpana Tyagi – Tuesday 9 March 2024
Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, Oxford University Press, Oxford University
Of course, there’s lots of other stuff I have been reading that doesn’t make it into the weekly round up. If the long list is too much, I also group links into collections for AI, the arts, Indigenous Knowledges, copyright, cultural heritage, news, other IP and tech. (If you have a Google Account you can even share links with me.)
Disclosure
Conflict of?interest
I work part-time for the Australian Digital Alliance (ADA) and the Australian Libraries and Archives Copyright Coalition (ALACC). The ADA recently hosted Professor Matthew Sag as the keynote speaker at the ADA Copyright Forum 2024.
I am the Co-lead of Creative Commons Australia.
AI use
This blog post was drafted using Google Docs. No part of the text of this blog post was generated using AI. The original text was not modified or improved using AI. No text suggested by AI was incorporated. If spelling or grammar corrections were suggested by AI they were accepted or rejected based on my discretion (however, sometimes spelling, grammar and corrections of typos may have occurred automatically in Google Docs).
The banner image (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post) was generated by AI using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator.
Credits
Image: A pile of books with orange, blue and hot red covers. An adaptation of an image generated by Elliott Bledsoe using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator. Prompt: ‘pile of books uneven hand-drawn’.
Provenance
This blog post was produced by Elliott Bledsoe from Agentry, an arts marketing micro-consultancy. It was first published on 21 Apr 2024. It has not been updated. This is version 1.0. Questions, comments and corrections are welcome – you can get Elliott on [email protected].
Reuse
You can't keep a good idea to yourself. I believe in the power of open access to knowledge and creativity and a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. That’s why this article is licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons licence.
You can reuse the text of this article under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. Under the licence, you are free to copy, share and adapt this article, or any modified version you create from it, even commercially, as long as you acknowledge Elliott Bledsoe/Agentry as the original creator of it. So please make use of this article as you see fit.
Whether AI-generated outputs are protected by copyright remains contested. To the extend that copyright exists, if at all, in the banner image I generated using AI for this article (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post/article), I also license it for reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).