We’re proud to announce Creative Commons’ Legal Tools have been reviewed and accepted into the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) DPG Registry. The DPGA is a multi-stakeholder initiative, endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, that is working to accelerate the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries. DPGA does this by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods (DPGs) in order to create a more equitable world.
Being recognized as a DPG increases the visibility, support for, and prominence of open projects that have the potential to tackle global challenges. To become a digital public good, all projects are required to meet the DPG Standard to ensure that projects truly encapsulate open source principles.
Creative Commons provides and stewards the CC licenses and public domain tools that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works. In addition, the licenses support proper attribution and enable others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works. CC legal tools are digital public infrastructure that make the legal sharing of DPGs possible.
At Creative Commons, we are thrilled to have our Legal Tools recognised as DPGs as they can empower people to dramatically improve access to open content. By advocating for the use and implementation of DPGs, global communities can work together in prioritizing and mobilizing resources to help solve global challenges. CC’s legal tools and our programs play a critical role in helping to advance the DPG ecosystem.
For any inquiries about CC’s involvement in the Digital Public Goods Alliance, please reach out to Cable Green. For more information on the Digital Public Goods Alliance please reach out to hello@digitalpublicgoods.net.
Join us by supporting this ongoing work. You have the power to make a difference in a way that suits you best. By donating to CC, you are not only helping us continue our vital work, but you also benefit from tax-deductible contributions. Making your gift is simple – just click here. Thank you for your support.
CC Welcomes Sarah Pearson Back as General Counsel
As part of CC’s renewed commitment to investing in the core open infrastructure it stewards, we are excited to announce several updates to our legal team.
Sarah Hinchliff Pearson is returning to Creative Commons as General Counsel. She will manage in-house legal work and play a leading role in shaping CC’s stewardship program and its work in emerging technologies. Sarah spent the last couple of years at DuckDuckGo, where she spearheaded legal risk management for the launch of the company’s first paid service. She brings a fresh perspective on distributed leadership and working in the open after her experience with DuckDuckGo’s unique company culture. CC has missed Sarah, and we are pleased she is back to once again serve as the organization’s General Counsel.
Kat Walsh will be transitioning from General Counsel to Copyright and Licensing Counsel, where she will focus squarely on stewardship of the CC licenses and public domain tools. We are delighted that Kat can bring her full expertise to matters of copyright and licensing, especially as questions arise daily about how the licenses interact with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. We are grateful to Kat for all of her work while serving as General Counsel these past couple of years. She is a mainstay in the open community, and on our team.
All of us are excited to be working together again. Kat and Sarah first worked closely together in the 4.0 licensing version process more than a decade ago! We could not be happier that we’ve been able to bring these two long-time experts of open licensing back together as CC faces hard questions around artificial intelligence. Between the legal experts on our team, our board, and in our global community, we are ready to move the dialogue forward.
If you are trying to reach the legal team and do not know where to direct your message, use the legal@creativecommons.org email address.
Six Insights on Preference Signals for AI Training
In these uncertain times, one thing is clear: there is an urgent need to develop new, nuanced approaches to digital sharing. This is Creative Commons’ speciality and we’re ready to take on this challenge by exploring a possible intervention in the AI space: preference signals.
At the intersection of rapid advancements in generative AI and our ongoing strategy refresh, we’ve been deeply engaged in researching, analyzing, and fostering conversations about AI and value alignment. Our goal is to ensure that our legal and technical infrastructure remains robust and suitable in this rapidly evolving landscape.
In these uncertain times, one thing is clear: there is an urgent need to develop new, nuanced approaches to digital sharing. This is Creative Commons’ speciality and we’re ready to take on this challenge by exploring a possible intervention in the AI space: preference signals.
Understanding Preference Signals
We’ve previously discussed preference signals, but let’s revisit this concept. Preference signals would empower creators to indicate the terms by which their work can or cannot be used for AI training. Preference signals would represent a range of creator preferences, all rooted in the shared values that inspired the Creative Commons (CC) licenses. At the moment, preference signals are not meant to be legally enforceable. Instead, they aim to define a new vocabulary and establish new norms for sharing and reuse in the world of generative AI.
For instance, a preference signal might be “Don’t train,” “Train, but disclose that you trained on my content,” or even “Train, only if using renewable energy sources.”
Why Do We Need New Tools for Expressing Creator Preferences?
Empowering creators to be able to signal how they wish their content to be used to train generative AI models is crucial for several reasons:
The use of openly available content within generative AI models may not necessarily be consistent with creators’ intention in openly sharing, especially when that sharing took place before the public launch and proliferation of generative AI.
With generative AI, unanticipated uses of creator content are happening at scale, by a handful of powerful commercial players concentrated in a very small part of the world.
Copyright is likely not the right framework for defining the rules of this newly formed ecosystem. As the CC licenses exist within the framework of copyright, they are also not the correct tools to prevent or limit uses of content to train generative AI. We also believe that a binary opt-in or opt-out system of contributing content to AI models is not nuanced enough to represent the spectrum of choice a creator may wish to exercise.
We’re in the research phase of exploring what a system of preference signals could look like and over the next several months, we’ll be hosting more roundtables and workshops to discuss and get feedback from a range of stakeholders. In June, we took a big step forward by organizing our most focused and dedicated conversation about preference signals in New York City, hosted by the Engelberg Center at NYU.
Six Highlights from Our NYC Workshop on Preference Signals
Creative Commons as a Movement
Creative Commons is a global movement, making us uniquely positioned to tackle what sharing means in the context of generative AI. We understand the importance of stewarding the commons and the balance between human creation and public sharing.
Defining a New Social Contract
Designing tools for sharing in an AI-driven era involves collectively defining a new social contract for the digital commons. This process is essential for maintaining a healthy and collaborative community. Just as the CC licenses gave options for creators beyond no rights reserved and all rights reserved, preference signals have the potential to define a spectrum of sharing preferences in the context of AI that goes beyond the binary options of opt-in or opt-out.
Communicating Values and Consent
Should preference signals communicate individual values and principles such as equity and fairness? Adding content to the commons with a CC license is an act of communicating values; should preference signals do the same? Workshop participants emphasized the need for mechanisms that support informed consent by both the creator and user.
Supporting Creators and Strengthening the Commons
The most obvious and prevalent use case for preference signals is to limit use of content within generative AI models to protect artists and creators. There is also the paradox that users may want to benefit from more relaxed creator preferences than they are willing to grant to other users when it comes to their content. We believe that preference signals that meet the sector-specific needs of creators and users, as well as social and community-driven norms that continue to strengthen the commons, are not mutually exclusive.
Tagging AI-Generated vs. Human-Created Content
While tags for AI-generated content are becoming common, what about tags for human-created content? The general goal of preference signals should be to foster the commons and encourage more human creativity and sharing. For many, discussions about AI are inherently discussions about labor issues and a risk of exploitation. At this time, the law has no concept of “lovingly human”, since humanness has been taken for granted until now. Is “lovingly human” the new “non-commercial”? Generative AI models also force us to consider what it means to be a creator, especially as most digital creative tools will soon be driven by AI. Is there a specific set of activities that need to be protected in the process of creating and sharing? How do we address human and generative AI collaboration inputs and outputs?
Prioritizing AI for the Public Good
We must ensure that AI benefits everyone. Increased public investment and participatory governance of AI are vital. Large commercial entities should provide a public benefit in exchange for using creator content for training purposes. We cannot rely on commercial players to set forth industry norms that influence the future of the open commons.
Next Steps
Moving forward, our success will depend on expanded and representative community consultations. Over the coming months, we will:
Continue to convene our community members globally to gather input in this rapidly developing area;
Continue to consult with legal and technical experts to consider feasible approaches;
Actively engage with the interconnected initiatives of other civil society organizations whose priorities are aligned with ours;
Define the use cases for which a preference signals framework would be most effective;
Prototype openly and transparently, seeking feedback and input along the way to shape what the framework could look like;
Build and strengthen the partnerships best suited to help us carry this work forward.
These high-level steps are just the beginning. Our hope is to be piloting a framework within the next year. Watch this space as we explore and share more details and plans. We’re grateful to Morrison Foerster for providing support for the workshop in New York.
Join us by supporting this ongoing work
You have the power to make a difference in a way that suits you best. By donating to CC, you are not only helping us continue our vital work, but you also benefit from tax-deductible contributions. Making your gift is simple – just click here. Thank you for your support.
CC strategic workshop reveals big opportunities for open access to cultural heritage
Open Culture Strategic Workshop Report Cover, by Dee Harris, CC BY 4.0
Last May, a diverse group of nearly 50 experts from every continent took part in Creative Commons’ Open Culture Strategic Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, to advance our TAROCH initiative — Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage. Over the course of two days, participants collaborated to co-create a strategic roadmap for future action, charting a course towards the elaboration by UNESCO Member States of an international legal instrument that would promote open solutions to enable equitable access to cultural heritage worldwide, in line with UNESCO’s broader mission on openness and heritage-related policy goals.
Today, we’re excited to share the workshop’s report, capturing the event’s highlights. Here are two of the main outcomes:
A narrower focus from “open culture” to “open cultural heritage in the public domain” — moving from TAROC to TAROCH.
Flexibility regarding the nature of the legal instrument: recommendation, declaration, or other type of UNESCO instrument.
The report also outlines anticipated developments, highlighting key milestones on the horizon. It concludes with a set of recommended actions to build on the momentum gained in Lisbon.
We are now in the process of building an architecture to organize future work and establish ladders of engagement. Watch this space!
In this interview, we were delighted to speak with Hanae Lrhoul, a graduate of the CC Certificate for Educators.
Launched in 2018, the Creative Commons Certificate program has trained and graduated nearly 1800 people from 66 countries. The Certificate program offers in-depth courses about CC licenses, open practices, and the ethos of the Commons. Our staff is constantly inspired by our community of Certificate alumni, accomplishing incredible things.
In this interview, we were delighted to speak with Hanae Lrhoul, a graduate of the CC Certificate for Educators.
Q: What inspired you to take the CC Certificate for Educators?
Q: You’re a professor in the school of information science. How has what you learned in the CC Certificate course informed your work?
Q: I understand that you’re an integral part of the CC Morocco team and helped establish that chapter back in 2020/2021. Can you tell us more about the state of open access and CC licenses in Morocco?
Q: I also know you’ve done some interesting work with the government – for example, you recently told me that the Ministry of Higher Education launched the first open science project as part of the Minister’s ESRI pact.
Q: What advice do you have for folks who are new to open science or open education initiatives and are looking to get more involved?
Q: Final words?
CC Certificate Alumni Interview with Hanae Lrhoul by Shanna Hollich is licensed via CC BY 4.0.
If you are a CC Certificate alum and would like to share your amazing work with our CC community, please reach out to us at certificates AT creativecommons DOT org.
The intersection of AI, copyright, creativity, and the commons has been a focal point of conversations within our community for the past couple of years. We’ve hosted intimate roundtables, organized workshops at conferences, and run public events, digging into the challenging topics of credit, consent, compensation, transparency, and beyond. All the while, we’ve been asking ourselves: what can we do to foster a vibrant and healthy commons in the face of rapid technological development? And how can we ensure that creators and knowledge-producing communities still have agency?
History and Evolution
When Creative Commons was founded over 20 years ago, sharing on the internet was broken. With the introduction of the CC licenses, the commons flourished. Licenses that enabled open sharing were perfectly aligned with the ideals of giving creators a choice over how their works were used.
Those who embrace openly sharing their work have a myriad of motivations for doing so. Most could not have anticipated how their works might one day be used by machines: to solve complex medical questions, to create other-wordly pictures of dogs, to train facial recognition systems – the list goes on.
Can we continue to foster a vibrant and healthy commons in today’s technological environment? How can we think innovatively about creator choice in this context?
Preference Signals
Preference signals for AI are the idea that an agent (creator, rightsholder, entity of some kind) is able to signal their preference with regards to how their work is used to train AI models. Last year, we started thinking more about this concept, as did many in the responsible tech ecosystem. But to date the dialog is still fairly binary, offering only all-or-nothing choices, with no imagination for how creators or communities might want their work to be used.
Enabling Commons-Based Participation in Generative AI
What was once a world of creators making art and researchers furthering knowledge, has the risk of being reduced to a world of rightsholders owning, controlling, and commercializing data. In this bleak future, it’s no longer a photo album, a poetry book, or a family blog. It’s content, it’s data, and eventually, it’s tokens.
We recognize that there is a perceived tension between openness and creator choice. Namely, if we give creators choice over how to manage their works in the face of generative AI, we may run the risk of shrinking the commons. To potentially overcome, or at least better understand the effect of generative AI on the commons, we believe that finding a way for creators to indicate “no, unless…” would be positive for the commons. Our consultations over the course of the last two years have confirmed that:
Folks want more choice over how their work is used.
If they have no choice, they might not share their work at all (under a CC license or strict copyright).
If these views are as wide ranging as we perceive, we feel it is imperative that we explore an intervention, and bring far more nuance into how this ecosystem works.
Generative AI is here to stay, and we’d like to do what we can to ensure it benefits the public interest. We are well-positioned with the experience, expertise, and tools to investigate the potential of preference signals.
Our starting point is to identify what types of preference signals might be useful. How do these vary or overlap in the cultural heritage, journalism, research, and education sectors? How do needs vary by region? We’ll also explore exactly how we might structure a preference signal framework so it’s useful and respected, asking, too: does it have to be legally enforceable, or is the power of social norms enough?
Research matters. It takes time, effort, and most importantly, people. We’ll need help as we do this. We’re seeking support from funders to move this work forward. We also look forward to continuing to engage our community in this process. More to come soon.
CC Is Refreshing Its Strategy. Here’s Why Your Voice Matters.
Over the past weeks, the CC board and team have been working behind the scenes on our strategy refresh. We are excited to share our progress as we enter the community engagement phase of the refresh and explain how you can contribute to the process.
Emerging Themes and Confirmed Priorities
Through a series of team and board workshops, as well as an assessment of our progress toward our current strategic plan, we’ve already begun to see themes emerge and priorities confirmed that will help to guide this refresh process. A few highlights so far:
The CC licenses are at the core of everything we do: Our programs and projects at CC are made possible because of the CC licenses and our legal, technical, and social infrastructure that underpins them. Through our program work, we are able to apply our principles and approaches to sharing in specific contexts, like education, climate science, or cultural heritage. While our program work continues to be a pillar of how we operate, we also need to ensure that our licenses and legal infrastructure are highlighted, supported, sustained, and fit for sharing today and into the future.
The CC story needs to evolve to better articulate the impact and value of the commons and connect with new audiences: There is so much meaningful and inspirational work happening around us that is enabled and strengthened by the CC licenses. Human creativity, access to culture, science, education, collaboration across disciplines and geographies, and so much more. We took our foot off the gas in terms of shouting from the rooftop the value of CC, our licenses, and the commons, and we think it’s time to tell our story in new ways.
The commons is changing, and so must our collective approaches and priorities: Through the CC licenses, we’ve enabled sharing and contributed to a growing and thriving commons. With generative AI drastically impacting the way we interact online, participatory governance (for example, better enabling collaborative and public decision-making), and strong community norms and practices are now more essential than ever.
Community Engagement Process
Now it’s your turn! At this point in the strategic refresh process, we want (and need!) to hear from our global community. We will be engaging with you over the next two months in two phases. Phase 1 consists of a survey that you can participate in and will be shared with our mailing lists and community platforms on July 10th, 2024. The goal of the survey is to gather input and feedback on the changing nature of CC’s strategy and hear what is most important to you.
Building on the information gathered in the survey, phase 2 will commence with a series of community calls held in August. Invitations to join the community calls are below.
Together there’s so much we can do to shape the future of CC and we are looking forward to connecting and engaging with you on CC’s future direction.
Moving Institutions Toward Open—Building on 6 Years of the Open GLAM Survey
How common is it for cultural organisations to permit the free reuse of their digitised public domain collections? Where are these materials published online, and under what conditions?
Since 2018, Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace’s Open GLAM Survey has been answering these questions and more, providing valuable insights into open access activity within the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector. The Survey offers a comprehensive overview of the landscape of open access policy and practice among cultural institutions and organisations, serving as a crucial guide for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of copyright and heritage.
Creative Commons’ Open Culture Platform is supporting 25 institutions in opening up access to their collections by the end of 2025. Members of the Platform community will be working together to create a policy template, conduct outreach, identify risk management strategies, and provide a guide for identifying which collections’ items to openly license first. Initiatives like Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace’s Open GLAM Survey and the GLAM-E Lab provide essential resources to the GLAM community who are working collaboratively top open access to our cultural heritage. Read on to learn more about the Open GLAM Survey and its contributions to open culture.
The Open GLAM Survey
Back in 2018, there was a lack of comprehensive, up-to-date information about open GLAM policy and practice at national or international levels – and no shared place for the growing open GLAM community to see or add relevant data. Motivated to better understand and share that global picture, Douglas and Andrea created the Survey and began collecting instances of digitised public domain collections released by GLAMs for any reuse purpose. From an initial list of around 40 organisations, the Open GLAM Survey was born, housed in a publicly accessible Google Sheet where it remains to this day.
Screenshot of the Open GLAM Survey, Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace, CC BY 4.0.
Today, the Survey includes over 1687 cultural institutions and organisations from 55 countries, focusing on open collections made available on their websites or external platforms. It offers direct links to almost 100 million public domain and openly licensed digital surrogates. Over the years, the Survey has expanded in scope and complexity, documenting a range of data points, including institution type, geographical location, rights statements, APIs, terms of use, open data volume, and many more. It is also comprehensively recorded in Wikidata.
In addition to an ‘About This Survey’ tab, users will find tabs containing informative visualisations on various aspects of the data, such as the one below.
Surveyed open licenses and rights statements in use (consolidated for simplicity), May 2024. Source: Open GLAM Survey, Douglas McCarthy and Dr. Andrea Wallace, CC BY 4.0.
Given the diversity of practice among GLAMs claiming new copyrights in digital surrogates of public domain works, Douglas and Andrea review all entries to ensure their policies meet the international standards of ‘open’. The Survey is guided by Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition and its statement that ‘open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share [content] for any purpose’. The Open Definition provides a list of licenses, rights statements, and legal tools that accord with this statement and the Survey’s authors have augmented the list with other statements (such as The Commons on Flickr’s ‘no known copyright restrictions’).
The Survey’s granular recording of the open licenses, public domain tools, and equivalent rights statements that GLAMs apply to digital surrogates and metadata means that it contains a treasure trove of information for a range of users, including:
students of copyright law, the digital humanities, art and cultural heritage, and museum studies
practitioners looking to design their own open access policy, using examples from the international landscape, or nationally if there are jurisdiction-specific issues at play
policymakers who want to find examples of good practice to reference
anyone who wants to reuse cultural heritage and digital collections without having to pay image fees
From the start, the Survey has been developed by, with, and for members of the Open GLAM community. In addition to the desk-based research that forms its foundation, the Survey has gained much from the contributions of open culture enthusiasts, heritage professionals, and Wikipedians. The Survey has been presented to international audiences by Douglas and Andrea, cited in numerous academic articles and, in 2018, was referenced in a UK Parliament debate on how museums and galleries balance public access with commercial reuse of digital content.
Using GLAM websites, data aggregators, third party platforms, and information circulated among the wider open GLAM community, the Survey tracks open access activity at all scales, ranging from a historical centre’s single CC0 image published to Wikimedia Commons, to a national archive’s publication of millions of images on Europeana. The Survey is constantly growing as new GLAMs are identified and verified as meeting the criteria for inclusion. This means that the Survey includes all known examples of open GLAM policy and practice; however, it is by no means exhaustive. Indeed, there are clear representation gaps in the data – which in themselves are important to document and highlight, as shown by the map below.
Surveyed instances of Open GLAM, June 2024
In this way, the Survey will likely never be complete – Andrea and Douglas are confident that there are undiscovered instances of open practice awaiting inclusion, alongside numerous new open GLAM participants expected to emerge in the years ahead.
Do you know a cultural institution or organisation that’s missing from the Survey? Are there other data points that would be useful to collect for the open GLAM community? Have you used the Survey data in some way? Are you a CC Open Culture Platform member that has helped an institution move to open? If so, Douglas and Andrea would be delighted to hear from you. You can propose a new entry using this Google Form or contact Andrea and Douglas via email at openglamsurvey@gmail.com.
A Quick Look at the CC Strategic Workshop on Open Heritage
One year after Creative Commons (CC) hosted an exploratory Open Culture Roundtable, in Lisbon, Portugal, which initiated the Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC) global initiative, nearly 50 stakeholders from all continents gathered again for a strategic workshop, in Lisbon, in May 2024. In this blog post, we share a snapshot of key highlights.
TAROC aims to support the international community in developing a positive, affirmative, and influential international normative instrument (possibly a UNESCO “recommendation”) enshrining the values, objectives, and mechanisms for open culture, notably open heritage, to flourish. Such an instrument would recognize the importance of global open sharing of cultural heritage as a means to activate and support wider cultural and information policy ambitions. Concretely, it would help remove undue barriers and promote equitable access to cultural heritage, especially in the digital environment, for a more inclusive and connected world.
The aim of the workshop was to build on the foundation previously laid and design a roadmap for future action. Over two productive days of collaborative work facilitated by Mona Ebdrup and Abdul Dube, a diverse collective of knowledgeable experts and driven activists articulated a shared vision for the elaboration of a UNESCO instrument.
Open Culture Strategic Workshop Group Photo by Filipa Alfama, CC BY 4.0
Véronique Guèvremont (Université Laval and UNESCO Chair on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions) opened the workshop with an inspiring keynote on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and Claire McGuire (IFLA) led an eye-opening discussion with Lutz Möller (German UNESCO National Commission), Fackson Banda (UNESCO Memory of the World Program), Jaco Du Toit (UNESCO Access to Information), Peter Scholing (National Library of Aruba and Memory of the World Latin America and the Caribbean), and Harriet Deacon (University of Hull) who shared valuable insights on the important considerations to account for in the process towards a recommendation. Andrea Wallace (University of Exeter) and Teresa Nobre (Communia Association) offered key practical and policy advice to anchor openness in the cultural heritage sector. All participants shared invaluable input and showed deep engagement throughout the two days in Lisbon. Thank you all!
Here’s what some of the participants said about the workshop:
“How can we improve access to cultural heritage? How can open licenses and technologies help? How could a UNESCO Recommendation help that regard? In Lisbon, Portugal, Creative Commons has assembled some 50 experts from around the globe to discuss next steps. At Goethe-Institut e.V. Lisbon.” — Lutz Möller, Deputy Secretary-General for the German Commission for UNESCO, Germany
“The TAROC Strategic Workshop was an intense, yet super inspiring time in Lisbon, empowering to witness how the idea of having values behind Open Heritage translated into UNESCO recommendations is shaping up supported by the right mindset, energy and expertise of an amazing group of advocates from all over the world and it allowed me to hope the goal is achievable.” — Maja Drabczyk, Chair of the Board, Head of policy and advocacy, Centrum Cyfrowe, Poland
“Two days of discussion in Lisbon brought out the complexities, challenges, and many points of unity among people and sectors seeking to make the world’s creativity more accessible. It also brought home the realities of engaging with inter-governmental processes that have their own momentum and language. But we have a plan, and I left with a lot of energy!” — Matt Voigts, independent, Netherlands
“Very happy to take part in such interesting conversations around open culture, public domain, and the digital world surrounded by colleagues that I admire and have followed since I began my advocacy work within the digital rights environment. Thanks so much to Creative Commons” — Patricia Diaz, Executive Director, Wikimedia Chile, Chile
“The workshop inspired me a lot and helped me think of some ideas — hopefully I can implement some and write to you all with a collaboration proposal!” — Medhavi Gandhi, Founder, The Heritage Lab, India
“We gathered as a diverse team of experts and activists from around the world to strategize how open culture values might be embodied in a future UNESCO recommendation. There is much work to do, but we left energized and optimistic.” — Douglas McCarthy, Head of Library Learning Centre, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Furthermore, Minister of Finance and Culture of Aruba, Xiomara Maduro, stated in an official press release: “The global experts who participated in the discussions emphasized the importance of Open Culture in strengthening social resilience and fostering an environment of knowledge and experience sharing.”
Overall, the workshop consolidated broad community support and mapped out concrete next steps for the TAROC initiative. We are currently assessing the event’s rich outcomes and will be sharing more in-depth insights soon. Stay tuned!
Recap & Recording: “Open Culture in the Age of AI: Concerns, Hopes and Opportunities”
With CC considering new ways to engage with generative AI, we are excited to share highlights from the conversation that demonstrate some of the complex considerations regarding open sharing, cultural heritage, and contemporary creativity.
Suzanne Duncan, Chief Operating Officer at Te Hiku Media, New Zealand, said that her organization was born out of the Māori rights movement. It is collecting an archive of Māori language samples on its own platform to maintain data sovereignty. Te Hiku Media is now working to use AI tools to teach the language to heritage language reclaimers. Suzanne recommended that the best way to ensure diverse representation in AI outputs is to have communities involved in the building and testing of AI models, ideally by communities, for communities.
Minne Atairu, interdisciplinary artist and doctoral student in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA, shared examples of her works using the Benin Bronzes, artworks from Nigeria stolen by the British in the 19th century, and the changes that happened in the visual representation of art after the looting took place. Using images of the stolen items, she used models to explore visuals and materials and convert text to 3D models. Minne hopes that better ways of attribution and compensation can be re-envisioned, and that the wealth generated by AI and other technologies should be spread among creators, not just tech executives.
Bartolomeo Meletti, Head of Knowledge Exchange at CREATe, University of Glasgow, Scotland, spoke about copyright law and copyright exceptions in the UK, EU and US, focusing on what one can do with AI and copyrighted works without permission from the copyright owner, especially for purposes of research and education. He works to create guidance about how to navigate those permissions with generative AI in mind.
Michael Trizna, Data Scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, has explored how generative AI can help to speed up processes like providing “alt text” (text descriptions of visual materials) to images, without compromising the accuracy of the audio or visual description of works. He has also worked on an AI values statement, including labeling AI generated content as such and mechanisms for the audience to provide feedback. Mike raised concerns about the fact that only a few large cultural heritage institutions are resourced to engage with generative AI responsibly.
Overall, panelists conveyed a need for greater AI literacy to enable people to interrogate AI and ensure it can be used for good.
CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate.
What is Open Culture Live?
In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on the topic.
