Climate Emergency | Kate McCalmont-Woods

I’ve just been watching ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ and one of her guests was Baroness Beeban Kidron, a former film director who was appointed as a crossbench peer. She specialises in protecting children’s rights in the digital world, and is an authority on digital regulation and accountability.

The topic of conversation was Labour’s plan to change copyright law so that tech companies can scrape copyrighted work from the internet to train their generative AI tools free of charge, unless individual creatives decide to opt out. They are proposing what is, in essence, legalised theft.

Labour launched their AI Opportunities Action Plan two weeks ago. They intend that the UK should become a world leader in AI with the amount of computing power under public control being increased 20 times over by 2030. They will achieve this by making huge investments (£14bn provided by tech companies, of course!) in setting up the infrastructure needed to create AI growth zones, a ‘super computer’ as well as huge energy intensive data centres necessary to support it. Clearly this will have a significant environmental impact and is at odds with Labour’s election promise to hit its green target to create a clean power system by the same date of 2030, which some experts think was going to be difficult to meet anyway.

Apparently, this will result in the UK’s economy being boosted by £470bn over the next 10 years. This may well turn out to be Starmer’s figure on the side of the bus. Kidron commented that the small print reveals that the figure was sourced from a tech lobbying group which was paid for Google and which was arrived at by asking generative AI, and which, in any event, reflects the global, not the national, uplift in the economy.

Kidron is a vocal supporter of the option to opt-in rather than putting the onus on the individual creative to contact each of the AI companies, who are using their work, to opt out. In fact, opting-out is something that’s not technically possible to do at the moment. To this end, she has put forward amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill which will be debated in the House of Lords this week. She has also previously commented in the press that she can’t think of another situation in which someone who is protected by law must actively wrap it around themselves on an individual basis. I think she makes a good point, and I agree with her view that the solution is to review the copyright laws and make them fit for purpose in an AI age. The creative sector, which includes artists, photographers, musicians, writers, journalists, and anyone else who creates original content, is made up of about 2.4 million people and is hugely important to the country’s economy, generating £126bn. That money should be kept within the economy, and not be siphoned off to Silicon Valley.

Not surprisingly there has been a great deal of backlash from creatives including actors and musicians, such as Kate Bush and Sir Paul McCartney, since Labour announced their plans. As part of the segment, Kuenssberg interviewed McCartney who is very concerned as to the effect this will have, especially on young up and coming artists. He commented that art is not just about the ‘muse’ but is about earning an income which allows the artist to keep on creating. He fears that people will just stop creating because they won’t own what they create, and someone else will profit from it. AI is also a positive thing: he explained that they used it to clean up John Lennon’s voice from a scratchy cassette recording making it sound like he only recorded it yesterday, but he is, nevertheless, concerned by its ability to ‘rip off’ artists. He mentioned that there is a recording of him singing ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys. He never recorded the track; it was created by AI. He can tell it doesn’t quite sound like him, but a normal bystander wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. In a year’s time, even he won’t be able to tell the difference.

There is a petition which has been signed by over 40,000 creatives, and the Government is undergoing a consultation procedure which you can respond to with your comments online here. The consultation ends on 25th February.

So, what can we do in the meantime?

Short of going offline, which isn’t really an option, there is nothing which will ensure that our work is not used in training generative AI. Just from some cursory research, which incidentally was helpfully summarised by Google’s AI Overview, there is the possibility of using a watermark to protect images either physically (not so good for promoting work) or invisibly embedded in the image, using digital signatures, or a cloaking app such as Glaze, which was developed by the University of Chicago, which confuses the way AI sees your image by altering the pixels, or by using another of their apps, Nightshade, which alters the match between image and descriptive text.

For now, all I can do is to change my privacy settings on my Facebook and Instagram accounts to prevent Meta from being able to use data from my posts to train its own AI tools. I had to fill in a form explaining why I objected to them using the data, and I received email confirmation that they would honour my objection, but who’s to know if they do or not? Apparently, there is a website, Have I Been Trained?, which allows you to search for your work in the most popular AI image dataset, LAION-5B.

What’s possibly just as disturbing is the Government’s plan to allow big tech access to one of the biggest and comprehensive datasets in the world – the NHS. It’s all in one place, we all have an NHS number which gives access to a lifetime’s history of personal and health data. It will be done on an anonymous basis, but with enough data, even experts say it’s easy to re-identify people. No-one’s doubting the incredible possibilities that AI offers in terms of delivering healthcare, but proper safeguards are needed.

Anyway, I asked the WordPress AI to generate a header image based on its own prompt:

“Create a high-resolution, highly detailed image illustrating the theme of digital rights and AI regulation. Feature Baroness Beeban Kidron in a thoughtful pose, surrounded by symbols of creativity such as art supplies, musical instruments, and books. The backdrop should convey a digital landscape, with elements representing technology and copyright, like binary code and padlocks. Use soft, natural light to evoke a sense of seriousness, yet hopefulness. The image should be in a documentary style, capturing the urgency of the conversation about protecting creatives’ rights in the age of AI. Ensure sharp focus to highlight the intricate details in each element.”

Sorry, Jonathan – I will switch my mobile phone off for the rest of the day so I don’t have to recharge the battery, but, in the meantime, do we have much to worry about? It doesn’t even look like Beeban Kidron.

It was a colourful day yesterday.

It started with a bracing dog walk, first thing. It was the best start to the day.

Then a train ride to London to visit the Michael Craig-Martin exhibition at the Royal Academy before it closes in a little over a week. I have to say that going into a gallery has the same effect on me as going into a church – a sense of wonderment and contemplation comes over me: people even speak in hushed tones.

It was joyously colourful, but for me, that was just about it. I was left wondering to myself, if it wasn’t for the painted walls and the sheer scale of some of the works, would they still have been so impactful? If they had been A3 in size and hanging on a bare white wall, would I still have experienced chromatic overload? I used to be attracted to the graphic simplicity of his work, elevating everyday objects to something out of the ordinary, but I’m sad to say that I don’t think it does it for me anymore. I’ve changed. If anything, I was more intrigued by his earlier conceptual work.

The Oak Tree (1974) is a small glass filled with water to a specific level and mounted on a wall at a specific height of 253cm. It is accompanied by the text of a conversation in which Craig-Martin explains how he has changed the glass of water into an oak tree without changing the physical form of the glass – I don’t know whether it was meant to be amusing, but I certainly had a titter. In a short film for the RA, which I watched when I got back home, he explains that he was trying to find something that constituted the essence of art, in that art is based on the notion of transformation, and the most extreme proposition for transformation would be to have no transformation at all. Others have alluded to his Catholic upbringing and have suggested that it is to do with transubstantiation. I also read that it was seized by Australian customs officials on its way to an exhibition in the 1970s on the basis that it was illegal to import plants into Australia!

I was particularly drawn to ‘Conviction’, a series of mirrors on paper, as it directly relates to what I’m planning to explore.

’On The Shelf’ comprises 15 milk bottles positioned at a precarious angle on a shelf, but the varying levels of water create a level horizon. The four buckets on the table are actually supporting the table, rather than the other way round. Finally, ‘Box that never closes’ questions what makes a work of art: the box has lost all functionality, and does not even form something that is aesthetically pleasing.

I went into the shop but didn’t buy anything: instead I had a look at the wall which supports teaching art in schools. I put a post-it note up following on from our session a couple of weeks ago: ‘creativity will save the planet’, but I forgot to take a photo.

I was then going to nip into the National Gallery but the queue was half way down the street – probably caused by the extra security and bag searches. So I went round the corner to the National Portrait Gallery which I haven’t been in since its refurb.

I was pleased to see the portrait of zoologist and conservationist, Dame Jane Goodall, by Wendy Barrett, the winner of Sky’s PAOTY 2023. Compared to the photograph taken by Ken Regan, it gives the viewer so much more. I thought it was tremendous, and full of intelligence, sensitivity and humanity.

Lucian Freud’s letter to his grandparents, thanking them for the money they gave him, which he was going to use to buy a book of fairytales, reminded me of Miró with its coloured shapes and black lines. It took me back to a hot day in Sóller over the summer when we found relief from the sun in the train station, which happened to be exhibiting various ceramics by Picasso and works by Miró – can’t see that happening at Waterloo Station anytime soon. Freud’s self-portrait is a favourite: the way he applies paint and his minimal brushstrokes are lush.

Bearing in mind my latest experiments using a pen, I was fascinated by the mark-making in Eileen Agar’s drawing of the modernist architect, Ernö Goldfinger. Hockney’s portrait of Sir David Webster with Tulips is stunning: I was a bit perturbed by the size of his head at first, and the fact that the sole of his left shoe seems to be coming away, but I think I’m ok with it now. In any event, it’s all eclipsed by the beautiful rendering of the table and tulips, and the fact that the jacket hanging over the arm of the chair makes him look like he’s levitating.

Colin Davidson’s Silent Testimony was moving: a collection of 18 large scale portraits of individuals who have all experienced loss in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, although it is also more generally about everyone who is left behind after conflict. They are impartial: there is no reference to the sitters’ religion or politics. What is striking is that none of the sitters are looking directly out of the canvas; they look off to the side as though deep in thought, as if they are remembering. There is a real sense of loss and pain, and contemplation – it is etched onto their faces, quite literally in some areas. They are painted in thick paint which seems to be weighing them down. But it’s all about the eyes. They are painted with a much more careful and detailed application of thinner paint. They almost look haunted.

And then I walked back to Waterloo Station, over the bridge, with Ray Davies crooning in my ear, although, let’s face it, his voice isn’t what it is used to be. All in all, apart from my break-up with Michael, a good day.