The Affiliation of Illustrators (AOI), alongside 4 main creator-led organisations, have in the present day co-launched a major new report calling for pressing motion on generative AI and creators’ rights.
Titled Courageous New World? Justice for creators within the age of GenAI, it is one of the crucial wide-ranging research but into how unregulated AI is reshaping inventive work within the UK, and never for the higher.
Constructed on proof from greater than 10,000 creators working throughout illustration, writing, music, pictures and efficiency, it paints a sobering image of an business already feeling the fallout. Artistic jobs are disappearing. Commissions are being cancelled. Work is being scraped with out permission. Many creators are left questioning whether or not their careers stay sustainable.
The report arrives at a crucial second. With out significant authorities intervention, we danger dropping the very individuals who energy the UK’s celebrated inventive industries, that are value £124.6 billion to the economic system. Creators should not a nice-to-have. They’re the beating coronary heart of tradition, storytelling, design, leisure, and all the pieces that shapes how we see the world.
AOI CEO Rachel Hill says the findings ought to act as a wake-up name. “The UK’s inventive industries are one in every of our biggest strengths, powered by the ability and labour of creators,” she explains. “This report reveals how unregulated generative AI is already harming that success, with work taken with out permission, jobs misplaced, and creators pushed into competitors with techniques constructed on their very own mental property.
“If the federal government is severe about supporting the inventive industries, it should act now to guard creators’ rights and guarantee human creativity stays central to our tradition and economic system.”
Courageous New World? is revealed by a coalition of organisations inside the Creators’ Rights Alliance, together with the Impartial Society of Musicians, the Society of Authors, Fairness, the Affiliation of Photographers and the AOI. Collectively, creators gathered in London’s tech hub at Granary Sq. in King’s Cross, to make one factor clear: this isn’t about rejecting expertise. It is about demanding equity.
CEOs from left to proper: Anna Ganley (SoA), Deborah Annetts (ISM), Isabelle Doran (AOP) and Rachel Hill (AOI)
On the centre of the report is the CLEAR Framework for AI, a name for consent, licensing, moral coaching information, accountability, and correct remuneration. In different phrases, a future the place innovation doesn’t come at the price of human inventive work.
As Baroness Kidron OBE places it, that is finally a query of justice. What’s being taken in plain sight is the non-public property of UK residents, protected by regulation. It isn’t the federal government’s to present away.
After all, this report captures just one half of a bigger, extra advanced shift. AI just isn’t going away, and a few instruments might be genuinely helpful for creatives after they help quite than substitute, serving to with sensible duties and day-to-day workflows.
However generative AI is a unique story. These techniques have been constructed on scraped inventive work, usually with out consent, and are actually getting used to compete with the very individuals who made that work potential. The problem is guaranteeing the way forward for AI is formed with creatives, not at their expense.
If you wish to learn the AOI’s report, you’ll be able to obtain it from the its web site in the present day.

