Jeffrey Katzenberg’s essay on AI and creativity, posted September 23, makes a useful concession. Writing about the theater musicians who fought recorded sound, he says they were right. “Those pit jobs did not come back.” He says much the same about the hand-drawn animators at DreamWorks who never made the move to computers. His conclusion is that each of these fights was settled by the terms.
That is correct, and it is where the harder part starts. A promise of fair terms leaves three questions unanswered. Who controls the use? Who receives the money? Who can enforce the bargain? In the history he cites, the answers were not always the people who did the work.
What he gets right
Katzenberg asks Hollywood to stop spending its energy on making AI go away and to spend it on the conditions of use. He asks the labs to build with credit, consent and compensation for the people whose work trained their models. He says plainly that the content of fairness is a debate still to be had, once everyo…
