Artificial intelligence for creative workers
Worker voice
It should be clear to people:
- how the technology operates
- what content or information (including‘training data’) the technology was built on
- what content has been generated or edited with technology
- how technology is used or deployed in relation to their work.
This information should be up to date, sufficiently detailed and made available in a clear and accessible manner.
This information is important for:
- workers who should know whether and how their work may be used to train technology, used with or be edited by technology. Without this information, it is impossible for workers to exercise their rights or provide informed consent
- everyone to prevent misinformation or truth decay by supporting our ability to contextualise or critically reflect on the information we encounter
- everyone to provide informed consent about when and how it is appropriate to engage with technology or the content it produces.
Consent and agency
People, whether they are workers, students or members of the public, should be given the freedom and opportunity to decide when, how or if:
- to use, or not to use, the technology in their work, education or personal lives, in particular where this may compromise their rights, their professional or ethical judgement
- content they created individually and collectively can be used to train or use technology.
Consent to engage with technology should be freely given, informed and express. In certain circumstances, workers should have the right and opportunity to withdraw their consent.
Workers should be free to adapt their use of technology to their individual needs or values. This is especially important to ensure professionalism, integrity and inclusivity at the workplace. Collectively bargained agreements on technology use should safeguard the right of individual workers to personalise their engagement with technological tools.
We stress that workers’ consent and agency related to technology can be oppressed by disparities of power existing in their relationship with employers, engagers and technology, or other digital service providers, employers and engagers.
Strong rights, fair contractual terms and practices accounting and mitigating for those power imbalances are essential to safeguard consent and agency.
Human creativity and connection
We restate the inherent value of human creativity, human involvement in the creative process and human-created content.
Human connection and human creativity are required to maintain the quality, authenticity and emotional resonance of creative, factual and educational content or activities.
While technology may be a useful tool at workers’ disposal when employed effectively and safely, maintaining meaningful human contact and involvement in the collection, creation and dissemination of information is crucial.
In particular, human engagement in the creative process is essential for professional and personal fulfilment, to meet the required standards of quality or care, or prevent deskilling. Human involvement is often necessary to ensure content generated with technology is context-appropriate and free from bias or errors. For example, human contact is essential in journalism to develop trust with sources and the public. In education, human contact is required to enable the emotional and relational dimension of learning and tailor the pace or outcome of learning to individual students.
Establishing robust rights and practices of attribution for human creatorship (eg, authorship, performership and craftsmanship) are key in safeguarding the value of human creativity and connection in creative, factual and educational content.
Rights protection and preservation
The development and deployment of technology should respect, preserve and support workers’ rights.
Relevant workers’ rights in the creation and use of technology can include:
- the respect and preservation of their intellectual property, name, reputation and likeness
- the respect of their personal data and privacy
- access to fair commercial and contractual terms
- the freedom from physical, emotional and commercial harm or coercion.
Workers’ rights protection and preservation is implemented by ensuring that individual creators:
- receive robust rights to protect their intellectual property, reputation, likeness, labour, and privacy, balanced with the right to freedom of expression
- yield fair and proportionate remuneration for the exploitation of their work
- form fair contractual terms for the exploitation of their rights
- effective and transparent collective administration of their rights where appropriate, and access
- have access to legal representation
- have access to collective representation
- have access to user-friendly and affordable means of rights enforcement and legal redress, also effective in the context of cross-border infringement.
A rights-based approach is supported by international standard-setters like the United Nations (UNESCO),4 and is at the core of most international agreements on the development of ethical or responsible AI.5
- 4 UNESCO (2022) Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
- 5 Council of Europe, Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law 2024; Seoul Declaration for Safe, Innovative and Inclusive AI: AI Seoul Summit 2024 (GOV.UK); G7 Guiding Principles for Organisations Developing Advanced AI System (2023).
We acknowledge and welcome the economic and democratic benefits technology may bring to our society.
Benefit-sharing, compensation and remuneration
We acknowledge and welcome the economic and democratic benefits technology may bring to our society, as a tool and as a sector of our economy. In particular, we acknowledge the efficiency gains technology can bring to workers’ activities, by completing tasks with less time or fewer resources.
Efficiency gains obtained from technology deployment should be redistributed to workers across the ‘value chain’ of the creative sector.
Legal and practical mechanisms should be introduced to ensure that the financial or technological value extracted from contributions by creative workers is shared with them.
In particular, workers should be financially compensated when rights-protected content they have created is used to develop or engage with technology for commercial purposes.
The deployment of technology to support information gathering, content creation or dissemination should not lead to the diminution or erosion of workers’ pay. The direct and indirect impact of technology on creative workers’ pay should be carefully monitored by the government to ensure careers can be started and sustained for workers of all ages and backgrounds.
Technology ‘for-and-by’ creative workers
Technology, in particular AI, should be designed for and with creative workers to ensure that its design and functions align with workers’ needs and values.
Today, most AI investment is focused on other industries than the creative and education sectors. The most commonly used AI systems and tools relevant to creative workers primarily target the consumer market. This creates a gap in the technology offering available to workers in the creative and education sectors.
AI systems designed for, and with the creative or education sectors may include the creation and use of AI tools:
- trained on fully licensed data or content free of rights
- capable of identifying or attributing sources accurately
- capable of automating highly specialised tasks or generating outputs to professional quality standards and with high levels of accuracy
- capable of integration with the most commonly used digital infrastructures or software within a given domain or profession.
Training and skills development for workers
Education and skills development in digital literacy and awareness of rights are essential for workers to use technology safely and effectively, while also managing the structural changes that technology may bring to their sector. Specifically, the ability to discern why, how and when to use technology is vital.
Maintaining the training and proficiency of workers, especially young workers, in traditional techniques, methods and tools relevant to their craft is also essential to ensure a well-rounded skill profile and avoid technology dependency.
Consultation and collective representation
Creative workers and their unions should be consulted about the design and deployment of technology within their sector with a view to reaching an agreement.
Collective bargaining is an effective way for workers, engagers, employers, technology developers, and users to adapt to fast-changing technologies like Artificial Intelligence. Collective bargaining agreements can be tailored to specific sectors, technology or commercial use cases and be updated more flexibly than statutory regulations.
Where necessary, creative workers should be supported by the government and industry leaders in collectively organising and negotiating with technology developers and engagers on AI.
Creative workers and their unions should also be consulted to shape proposals for regulation through industrial approaches or legislation. Regulators should adopt methods of consultation engaging for, and suited to, creative workers and unions. Creative workers often lack the resources to document and report the challenges they face in their sector to regulators as effectively as other stakeholders in the technology industries.
An over-reliance on technology, particularly AI systems, can lead to the standardisation and homogenisation of content, education and cultures.
Collaboration
We recognise that creative workers may face similar technological challenges as those experienced by stakeholders in other industries. This is the opportunity to work and stand together to make sure all interests are represented in technology design, deployment, and regulation.
We note the need to increase collaboration between stakeholders in the technology industry and creative workers. Collaboration should lead to reducing conflict (notably on data mining and the training of technology on rights-protected materials) and encourage technology development for-and-with creative workers.
Equality, inclusion and cultural diversity
Technology design or use should uphold equality and inclusion of workers as well as cultural diversity.
An over-reliance on technology, particularly AI systems, can lead to the standardisation and homogenisation of content, education and cultures that are created, shared, and consumed, resulting in a uniform view of the world.
The risk stems from:
- the dominant leadership of a few countries in AI innovation (primarily, the United States and China)
- the use of training datasets large in their size but non-diverse in their content
- the ubiquity of algorithmic recommendations for content consumption, which may be manipulated by a few market players or biased in its design towards dominant narratives, cultures or languages.
Transparency, combined with measures to see technology developed for-and-by the creative sector can safeguard equality, inclusion and cultural diversity.
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