Focusing on AI Ethics

Using AI tools can feel like being handed a team of collaborators. Faster starts, more options, quicker iterations. But speed is not the only thing being exchanged, and the terms of the exchange were set elsewhere.
Most published AI ethics guidance comes from cities, companies, and civic bodies describing how they intend to use these tools. Very little of it was written with creative workers in mind. Almost none of it was written by them. Their practices and livelihoods are being reorganized faster than anyone else's, and their positions are the least represented. The Magnifier is an attempt at the missing document.

If you look for guidance to help you decide how to use these creative AI tools, you will inevitably find some of the essential readings and resources referenced in each of the 16 ethical topics described on this website. Among those, you may find frameworks (often called guidelines) that cities, companies, organizations, and other civic entities have published to explain how they intend to use AI tools. Few of these resources are geared toward creative communities or focus on how creative AI tools might affect artists, designers, musicians, and other creative communities and individuals. Their processes, practices, and futures are rapidly shifting because of these emerging tools, and their voices should be heard.

Being Shaped by AI Tools
How do we come to terms with the ways we use these tools? Do we agree with how creative AI tools are changing how we develop our projects? Do they make us more imaginative and creative? Or do they reduce our skills and motivation? How do we reflect on how these might affect us in the future?

We can point to some of the potential favorable changes in our creative practices:

• Enhanced Creativity: Unique combinations from AI can spur new directions for human creativity.
• More Time for Creativity: AI-driven task automation gives people time for higher-level creative work.
• Lower Barriers: AI tools can enable all creative communities to access high-quality production tools.
• Mentoring: AI tools provide instant feedback to develop skills.
• New Roles Emerge: Jobs related to curating, refining, and directing AI creations.
• Deeper Meaning: Curating AI outputs encourages focus on developing a personal vision and finding meaning.
• New Modalities: AI enables creatives to explore new mediums of expression.
• Refined Style: AI feedback helps creatives better understand and hone their own unique style.
  Inspiration: Exposure to AI creativity spurs new ideas.
• Reskilling: Creative individuals may learn new skills, like creative strategy, to complement AI.

And some of the potential adverse changes in our creative practices:

• Diminished Creativity: Relying heavily on AI can atrophy a person's own imagination and idea generation.
• Devalued Skills: Human creations are less valued with the proliferation of AI art.
• Disconnected: Less human teamwork and collaboration in the creative process.
• Comparison: Directly comparing one's work against perfect AI outputs could damage self-confidence and motivation
• Devaluation of the Process: Focus on quick AI outputs might undermine appreciation of struggle in the creative process.
• Limited Perspective: Exposure to AI art/writing shaped by data limitations could restrict creative perspectives.
• Disempowered: Creative individuals have less control.
• Poor Attribution: AI creations are disconnected from the humans from which the outputs are built, many of whom did not give permission and were not compensated.
• Loss of Meaning: Ease of AI content creation could reduce the special meaning of creative breakthroughs.

We should consider these potential benefits and drawbacks as we align our use of these AI tools with our personal values and goals as creative individuals.

Using the Creative AI Magnifier
The sixteen topics are grouped into four themes: Authorship and Origin, Costs and Tradeoffs, Control and Accountability, and Craft and Process. Responding to each produces a visualization of your position and adds it to a growing record of how creative workers see this moment.

Use it alone. It works better in a room. Studios, classes, unions, and organizations have used the Magnifier to surface disagreements that were already there and rarely said out loud.