The Salzburg Statement on Artists Shaping Ethical AI Futures Creating Futures: Art and AI for Tomorrow’s Narratives occurred between May 6 and 10, 2024. Salzburg Global Seminar convened 50 artists, technologists, futurists, curators, activists, social and political scientists, leaders of cultural institutions, policymakers, and academics from 25 countries to explore the emergent possibilities at the intersection of creative expression, technology, and artificial intelligence. Discussions focused on the principles, processes, and practices of how AI can enable or dis-enable our collective human interest. This Statement reflects the diverse knowledge and perspectives of the participants. Since AI and technology are evolving rapidly, we do not claim that this represents the entire complex ecosystem or all the needs related to AI and society. Read more online: salzburgglobal.org/go/833-01
PRINCIPLES AND DEFINITIONS For clarity in this Statement, we use the following definitions: A Definition of Artifical Intelligence: AI is constantly evolving and has no singular standard definition. The OECD defines an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system as “a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments.” Other definitions focus on the historical human-based nature of AI and include “(...) AI is constituted not by the imitation of biological intelligence but by the intelligence of labour and social relations” (Pasquinelli, 2023). A Definition of Artists: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term “artist” as “a person who creates art (such as painting, sculpture, music, or writing) using conscious skill and creative imagination”. Coding, which requires a process of writing, thinking, and designing can also be considered art.
In a polarized, inequitable, and complex world, artists and cultural leaders play a crucial role in pushing the boundaries of how we understand ourselves and the world around us. As AI technologies play an ever greater role in our societies, artists must be actively engaged in informing, testing, and shaping the creation, use, and limits of AI and, thereby, the impacts it will have on humanity. The myriad tools, processes, and practices beneath the AI umbrella have the potential to contribute to a more sustainable, just, and equitable world in which all life flourishes; however, realizing this vision requires intentionality about how those tools and practices evolve today. Challenges of AI in the Arts, Culture, and Creative Sector AI has an unprecedented cultural and economic impact on the creative sector. With large language models (LLM) becoming ubiquitous, anyone can easily produce a realistic photograph, text, or code at the click of a button. Although the history of AI is much broader than generative AI models, the widespread implementation of these models today has refueled the conversation around the impact that AI is having and will have, on aesthetic, creative, and artistic output. Developed by scraping data predominantly from Western data sets, LLMs have the potential to create an aesthetic that resembles plasticity and presents Western standardized references as the norm. Thus, homogenized narratives perpetuated by AI systems threaten the diversity of global human cultures. In contrast, standardized AI systems for producing texts and images endanger our cognitive rights and creative and critical thinking. The latest technological developments also impact the labor market in various ways, including by threatening the integrity of jobs for creative professionals such as illustrators, copywriters, artists, and graphic designers and by relying heavily on the often invisible labor of „ghost workers“ from the Global South who perform crucial tasks like data labeling, classification, and moderation. Despite their essential contributions to training and refining AI systems, these workers are frequently paid meager wages and work under precarious conditions with little job security or recognition. An Invitation to Action We stand in solidarity with all creative worker movements and encourage all those involved in the arts and culture sector to join our mission of self-advocacy in policy spaces to ensure that AI practices, processes, and principles are developed and applied in a way that is beneficial for all.
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