As AI reshapes content creation and copyright laws remain unclear, are creators’ rights, incomes, and artistic ownership at risk?
Bryony Sier would often sing to the floor, struggling to summon the courage to perform before an audience. After three years of work, her debut album is finally set for release, but a new kind of anxiety looms.
This time, it’s not just stage fright. As AI-generated art floods the industry, artists like Bryony face an uncertain future, wondering how to compete with an invisible yet overwhelming force reshaping the creative world.
“It’s a personal thing, and that element gets taken away if it’s AI-made. The whole point of creating art is because it’s from your own perspective,” says Bryony, an Indie musician working on releasing her first album. She believes that AI-created music is not the same as the art made by people.
“It takes away from humans the ability to think about art themselves. AI lacks human nature because it is a robot. It is not going to think the same as a human. No matter how much we feed it with information,” says Bryony.
In the age of artificial intelligence, artists, writers, and musicians are facing an unsettling reality: their work is not only at risk of being overshadowed by AI but also quietly fueling its evolution.
From AI-generated paintings to books, AI programs are being trained on huge datasets, often without the creators’ permission. This is raising concerns about the issues of ownership, ethics, and the future of creative labour.
Jamie Noguchi, a freelance cartoonist who has worked with companies like Marvel and DC, says if an artist’s work is online, it is impossible to protect it from AI’s influence.
“The training data is just gobbled up from every source online, without any regard to whether it is legal to do so or whether it is ethical to do so, and none of us are involved in any of those conversations,” says Jamie.
AI generates new works that mimic human creativity, by identifying patterns and styles. Jamie says, that as AI becomes more advanced, creators face the challenge of protecting their work from being absorbed into algorithms that compete with them in the industry.
Jamie says that there are a lot of artists in the digital space who would have been supportive of giving their work to training data, but AI companies unfairly denied them the choice.
“I feel like there would have been a big enough population of those kinds of artists who would have been willing to work with these large language models and these systems to develop these generative AI systems. But instead of asking or collaborating with any of us, they just took it,” Jamie says.
Bryony believes it is even harder for indie creators to deal with their work being absorbed by AI. “I would be heartbroken. If another human steals it that hard enough, but for my work to be taken by AI without my consent, I would not know how to deal with that. It is so unfair. We wouldn’t even know my work was taken until much later,” says Bryony.
Concerns of the artists have made the UK government try to ensure the legal framework for AI and copyright support to the UK creative industries and AI sector together. The consultation also proposes new requirements for AI model developers to be more transparent about their model training datasets and how they are obtained.
Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, says, “This government firmly believes that our musicians, writers, artists and other creatives should have the ability to know and control how their content is used by AI firms and be able to seek licensing deals and fair payment. Achieving this, and ensuring legal certainty, will help our creative and AI sectors grow and innovate together in partnership.”
Concerns over the increased competition because of AI is a concern to creators. Jamie says, “When people say that generative AI is democratising art, I find that argument to be absurd. What is democratized is people making money off this and stealing money from people who have worked for years developing a skill. They are getting rid of entire departments at companies.”
AI competition threatens artists by devaluing human creativity, and flooding markets with cheaper, quicker-produced work. It leads to employment loss as companies opt for AI instead of hiring creators. Originality is lost as AI mimics styles, making it harder to be original.
Jamie is concerned about people not realising the content they are consuming is generated and manipulated by AI. “The regular viewer of TV or movies or reader of comics are not going to understand why it’s a problem, and they’re not going to notice, it is a very small subset of the viewing audience that has a problem with AI-generated content,” says Jamie.
According to surveys conducted, 83% of creatives have incorporated AI into their process, and nearly half (48%) rely on it for most or all their projects.
“What you’re missing, is the fun, the process of making a mark, making a mess, doing all this stuff, screwing up, throwing it out, bringing it back. The process is the best part, and you’re short-cutting it,” says Jamie.