Consent and Compensation in the Age of Generative AI
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58445/1x0cae31Keywords:
Generative artificial intelligence, Intellectual property & consent, Digital labor ethicsAbstract
This paper studies the current and future impact of generative AI on creativity, examining both its negative and positive effects. This includes repercussions of using the tool while also addressing its current benefits to the creative industry. The paper begins with a review of existing research on generative AI and creativity, surveying what has already been established about its effects on access, originality, and ownership. Using filmmaking as a central study, this project explains how generative AI’s core mechanism—producing new content from data given without consent—can show up at different levels of severity: from the labor dispute over AI “actress” Tilly Norwood to the disproportionate use of deepfake technology against women. This paper argues that while generative AI offers real efficiency and accessibility gains, these benefits may be largely given to companies rather than creatives themselves, and are only made possible by labor, likeness, and artistic work used without consent or compensation. The paper concludes that addressing this imbalance requires more than policy fixes like watermarking or disclosure standards, which address visibility of the issue rather than the issue itself.
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