AI & Copyright: why does it matter?

Sarah McIntyre argues that authors’ work needs protecting.

Artificial Intelligence offers big gifts. Do you need a free poster? A book cover? Pictures for the children’s book you wrote? You no longer need to hire an illustrator or be able to draw. All you need to do is enter some written prompts and – hurrah! – you have it!

How does AI come up with these images? Large tech companies ‘scrape’ the Internet for existing artwork, including artists’ web portfolios and artwork they’ve shared on social media. The company then processes the artists’ work and reissues it. Often a new image look very much like the original artwork the company nabbed. But because the artwork has been processed, it’s no longer under that artist’s copyright. Something similar happens with words; you can enter prompts and AI will sift through authors’ texts it has scraped and give you a mash-up version that’s yours to use as you like.

This comes at a price. The AI user gets an illustration for free, or by paying a subscription fee that goes to the tech company, but the artists whose work has been used to train the AI get nothing. Margins are already very tight for almost all writers and illustrators, and if they are competing against their own work, repackaged by AI, they can’t make a living at all.

Do we really want books for children that are chugged out by a machine? The way AI works is to suppress anomalies and outliers and come up with a convincing-sounding average blend. But that uniform result gets things wrong, and sounds boring. Behavioural science expert Rory Sutherland argued that if, using AI, ‘you could produce someone who is the average of all your friends, you probably wouldn’t like them very much and they’d be extremely dull’.

Frankly, I think many risk-averse people in the children’s book industry are satisfied with stories that are average and bland. And many illustrators, instead of going out to develop their own visual take on what they encounter, are satisfied to copy other illustrator’s work they find online. In a sense, these people are acting like AI, and perhaps it doesn’t matter if they’re replaced.

But what does matter is losing those books of brilliance, created by a person with a heart, who has an eye for detail and can add quirky, brilliant and unexpected elements to the words and pictures of a story. These books take our minds to new places, and give us entirely new pictures in our heads. They don’t only comfort us with what we already know, but stretch us, and perhaps throw in absurdities that make us laugh.

Children right now are devouring stories by the likes of Jamie Smart and Dav Pilkey, and the humour of these writer-artists is built on unexpected and startling juxtapositions. Having pored over these books, many children are then inspired to write and draw their own stories, and they can imagine they, too, might be able to be writers or illustrators like Jamie and Dav.

We ought to be proud of our children’s book tradition, not give it away free. The government is currently considering AI policy measures that would make illustrators, as copyright holders ‘opt out’ if we don’t want tech companies using our work to train their systems. I can’t imagine tracking down the thousands of images I’ve made public, images which, until now, were protected by copyright law. Here’s my colleague Steve Antony’s description: It’s like allowing someone to break into my house and steal my belongings so that they can research, recycle and resell them, unless I stick a label on each and everyone of my belongings that says ‘Do not steal’, even though the objects are clearly not theirs and clearly within someone else’s house.

We’ll see what our government really values when they make their decision about copyright. Will they favour small business and freelance creatives or the big tech industry? Will I still be making Adventuremice books in a few years’ time? I very much hope so, I’ve been training hard for the last 20 years and I think it’s the best work I’ve ever made. But will I be undercut by an editor somewhere entering mouse-themed prompts? If that’s really what people want, I need to be looking for work elsewhere.

Sarah McIntyre co-writes and illustrates the Adventuremice books, her new series for early readers with Philip Reeve. Together with James Mayhew in 2015, she started the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign, showing how everyone wins when artists are properly credited for their work. Discover fun, free creative resources on her websites, Jabberworks.co.uk and Adventuremice.com.