SAA - Society of Audiovisual Authors

Introduction

The world's experts warned in March 2023 about Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatening human civilisation and pleaded for a pause to refocus “on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.” However, instead of slowing down, the development and use of AI raced.

In the audiovisual sector, AI tools have been used for years to improve visual effects and postproduction processes, enhancing the visual experience of the audience. Today, technologies ingesting datasets of audiovisual works can generate audiovisual products that resemble original works with animation being the most exposed genre to generative AI products. Showrunner can create 22-minute generative AI episodes of popular TV shows. These recent developments have triggered many discussions on the pros and cons of AI for the film sector .

As far as audiovisual authors are concerned, AI applications can generate ideas and concepts for screenplays and film plots; they can suggest dialogues, scenes and drafts that the authors can play with. AI can help authors to experiment with different tones, genres, and voices in their work, etc. … until AI technologies produce reasonably similar products to existing audiovisual works at a lower cost, and the industry decides that authors can be replaced by AI. This is already happening with translators, photographers, designers, music composers and many others in the creative industries. These risks have been clearly expressed by many creators’ organisations in Europe and the US and were part of the issues at stake in the strike of the Writers’ Guild in the US.

As the European association of the collective management organisations (CMOs) for audiovisual authors, we the Society of Audiovisual Authors (SAA) would like to contribute to the debate, clarifying the specific challenges for audiovisual authors and their CMOs, and making recommendations to policymakers. Our paper focuses on 4 topics:

1. The use of audiovisual works as training data for machine learning

2. AI generated audiovisual production

3. Principles for human-centred AI regulation that fosters creativity

4. Specific recommendations on the EU AI Act and copyright

We firmly believe that with the appropriate safeguards, AI can serve authors and society, enhancing creativity and cultural diversity. But this will only happen if policymakers and AI developers put human well-being at the centre of innovation. In the end, it is crucial that AI preserves and enhances human creativity, not replaces it.

Download our position paper to read more.