Nicole believes that “the greatest advantage of open cultural heritage is digital equity,” which is a guiding principle for many cultural institutions around the world. In this episode Nicole talks about how making collections open greatly increases accessibility across global demographics and interest groups which makes an institution more relevant to a wider audience.
Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Nicole is at the time of the recording the Director of Global Strategic Initiatives at CLIR which is the Council on Library and Information Resources where she works to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
Nicole responds to the following questions:
What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
What are the barriers?
Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?
Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.
“Better Sharing With AI” by Creative Commons was generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform with the text prompt “A surrealist painting in the style of Salvador Dali of a robot giving a gift to a person playing a cello.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.
Over the last year, innovation and use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded, providing new ways for people to create content of all sorts. For example, it’s been used to help create award winning art, develop educational materials, expedite software development, and craft business materials. Recently, three artists filed a class action lawsuit in the USA against StabilityAI and Midjourney, two companies that use the Stable Diffusion tool to enable people to generate images using simple text prompts. It follows on the heels of litigation brought by the same attorneys and other plaintiffs against GitHub and OpenAI for their Copilot and Codex tools for generating software code.
AI is an area that Creative Commons has longfocused on, including most recently in a webinar series we held last fall. We are going to expand on our views in future posts, including exploring why we think the legal arguments in the US court case against StabilityAI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt are ill-founded. (Getty Images also subsequently filed a similar suit against StabilityAI in the US, as well as apparently commencing litigation in the UK, but we have yet to see that complaint.)
But before digging into all of the legal issues, we wanted to take a step back and restate our general approach to generative AI.
CC on Generative AI
Creative Commons has always sought out ways to harness new technology to serve the public interest and to support better sharing of creative content — sharing that is inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal and sustainable. We support creators to share their works as broadly and openly as they want, so that people can enjoy them globally without unnecessary barriers. We also advocate for policies that ensure new and existing creators are able to build on a shared commons, while respecting creators’ legitimate interests in control and compensation for their creative expressions.
A founding insight of Creative Commons is that all creativity builds on the past. When people learn to play the cello or paint a picture, for instance, they necessarily learn from and train their own skills by engaging pre-existing works and artists — for instance, noticing the style in which cellists like Yo-Yo Ma arrange notes, or building on surrealist styles initiated by artists like Dali. Similarly, while Star Wars invented the character of Luke Skywalker, it built on the idea of the hero’s journey, among many other elements from past works. People observe the ideas, styles, genres, and other tropes of past creativity, and use what they learn to create anew. No creativity happens in a vacuum, purely original and separate from what’s come before.
Generative AI can function in a similar way. Just as people learn from past works, generative AI is trained on previous works, analyzing past materials in order to extract underlying ideas and other information in order to build new works. Image generation tools like Stable Diffusion develop representations of what images are supposed to look like by examining pre-existing works, associating terms like “dog” or “table” with shapes and colors such that a text prompt of those terms can then output images.
Given how digital technologies function, training AI in this way necessarily involves making an initial copy of images in order to analyze them. As we’ve explored in the past and will discuss in future posts about these recent lawsuits, we think this sort of copying can and should be permissible under copyright law. There are certainly nuances when it comes to copyright’s interaction with these tools — for instance, what if the tools are later used by someone to generate an output that does copy from a specific creative expression? But treating copying to train AI as per se infringing copyright would in effect shrink the commons and impede others’ creativity in an over-broad way. It would expand copyright to give certain creators a monopoly over ideas, genres, and other concepts not limited to a specific creative expression, as well as over new tools for creativity.
Copyright, and intellectual property law in general, are only one lens to think about AI: It’s still important to grapple with legitimate concerns about this technology and consider what responsible development and use should be. For instance, what impact will these tools have on artists and creators’ jobs and compensation? How can we ensure that AI that is trained on the commons contributes back to the commons as well, supporting all types of creators? What about the use of these tools to develop harmful misinformation, to exploit people’s privacy (eg, their biometric data), or in ways that perpetuate biases? More generally, how can we ensure human oversight and responsibilities to ensure that these tools work well for society?
These are just some of the tricky issues that will need to be worked out to ensure people can harness AI tools in ways that support creativity and the public interest. Along with other policy and legal approaches to governing AI, it’s important to look to community-driven solutions that support responsible development and use. Already, StabilityAI will let artists opt-out of its training data set, as well as opt in to provide greater information about their works. While this precise approach raises a variety of views, indexing of the web has functioned well using a similar sort of opt-out approach — set through global technical standards and norms, rather than law. Creators of some generative AI tools are using licenses that constrain how they are deployed, which also carries various trade-offs.
What’s Next? Community Input
Supporting community-driven solutions has also always been at the heart of Creative Commons’ approach to creativity. If you’re interested in this subject, we are going to be holding meetings with the Creative Commons community, and we also plan to continue meeting with diverse stakeholders to explore what sorts of solutions may be helpful in this area. As we go along we’ll continue to report on what we’ve learned and seek out more community feedback.
Join the CC team at a community discussion about generative AI: How can we make it work better for everyone and support better sharing in the commons?
To enable participation around the world, we’ve scheduled three times for this conversation. Come to the one that works best for your schedule, or join as many as you like. We’ll be focused on the same questions and issues at each meeting, but different participants will bring different perspectives, reshaping each conversation. To enable participants to speak freely, these meetings will not be recorded, but the CC team will be taking notes to share outcomes from the conversations.
Curious about Creative Commons licenses? Join Creative Commons staff for an overview of the six CC licenses and two public domain tools. We will describe the CC license and tool elements, their legal, machine-readable, and human-readable layers, as well as show practical use cases for each of the licenses and tools. Participants will engage in discussion around contemporary challenges for creators, and have the chance to discuss questions with legal experts in copyright.
Join us for this introduction to CC licenses and tools to get your basic questions answered and practice sharing content to the commons: 10 February 2023, 2–7pm UTC (see the schedule in your local timezone).
As part of our #20CC anniversary, last year we joined forces with Fine Acts to spark a global dialogue on what better sharing looks like in action. Our #BetterSharing collection of illustrations was the result — we gathered insights from 12 prominent open advocates around the world and tasked 12 renowned artists who embrace openness with transforming these perspectives into captivating visual pieces available under a CC license.
Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For February, we’re excited to showcase “Sharing Brightens The Future” by Bulgarian illustrator and graphic designer, Teo Georgiev. The piece, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Biyanto Rebin, an open knowledge advocate and Indonesian Wikipedian:
“Sedikit demi sedikit, lama-lama menjadi bukit (meaning: many a mickle makes a muckle).
An Indonesian proverb with the meaning of collaboration spirit, when we do a continuous effort little by little, it will eventually become bigger in the future. This is what happens when we share our resources, our works to the public, they will have a greater impact, since sharing can empower other people, sometimes the ones who are left behind, the underprivileged.”
Meet the artist:
Photo courtesy of Teo Georgiev
Teo Georgiev is a Bulgarian illustrator, designer and artist based in Helsinki, Finland. He has received a BA in Graphic Design from Coventry University (UK) and is currently pursuing an MA in Visual Narrative at Aalto University (Finland), where he explores the intersection of comics and migration studies. From children’s books through to editorial illustrations and advertising, Teo draws playful characters, surreal stories and whimsical environments, which he then intertwines with inspiration collected from nature, culture and history. His style is a combination of naïve shapes, organic forms and bold colors. His list of past clients includes WWF, Habitat for Humanity, Converse, InVision and Ladybird Publishing, as well as boutique businesses and NGOs.
The full #BetterSharing collection is available on TheGreats.co to be enjoyed, used and adapted, and then shared again, by anyone, forever. View the full collection >>
¿Ya escuchaste la emocionante noticia de que el CC Global Summit 2023 será en la Ciudad de México? Ahora tiene la oportunidad de ser voluntario para unirse a los comités que ayudarán a dar forma al programa y evaluarán las solicitudes de becas para participantes.
Los voluntarios son esenciales para garantizar que la Cumbre CC refleje la rica diversidad de personas involucradas en el movimiento de bienes comunes abiertos. Los miembros anteriores del comités de la Cumbre informan que el voluntariado es muy gratificante, energiza su compromiso con los bienes comunes y expande sus conexiones en la comunidad de CC. ¡Te animamos a que te involucres para que esta Cumbre brille!
Ofrecerse para el Comité de Programa
El Comité de Programa es responsable de ayudar a dar forma al aspecto impulsado por la comunidad del programa de la Cumbre. El comité revisará las respuestas a la convocatoria de propuestas de la Cumbre (CFP, la sigla en inglés) y trabajará en colaboración para invitar a aquellos que mejor se adapten al tema, las vías y el cronograma del programa de la Cumbre.
Compromiso de tiempo: reuniones del comité a continuación (aproximadamente 5 horas) MÁS período de revisión (aproximadamente 5 a 8 horas según la cantidad de solicitudes)
Miembro de la comunidad CC: Para ser seleccionado de los miembros del comité comunitario
Compromiso de tiempo: igual que otros miembros del comité MÁS dos reuniones de preparación adicionales de 1 hora con el equipo CC (probablemente en mediados de febrero y principios de mayo)
Reuniones y fechas clave (provisional)
Fecha
Hora
Actividad
22 de febrero
Para ser arreglado
REUNIÓN: Bienvenida y resumen del programa
8 de marzo
Para ser arreglado
REUNIÓN: Revisión del formulario de solicitud de CFP
16 de marzo–20 de abril
Aplicaciones abiertas
21 de marzo
Para ser arreglado
REUNIÓN: Resumen del proceso de revisión y estructura del programa
21 de abril–2 de mayo
El comité revisa las solicitudes
4 de mayo
Para ser arreglado
REUNIÓN: Finalizar envíos aceptados
8 de mayo
Notificaciones de aceptación enviadas
10 mayo
Para ser arreglado
REUNIÓN: Reunión final
15 mayo
Confirmaciones de aceptación vencidas
Ofrecerse para el Comité de Evaluación de Becas
CC financia a decenas de personas para que asistan a la Cumbre Global CC para apoyar la participación diversa. Este comité de voluntarios es responsable de revisar las solicitudes para el Fondo de Becas de la Cumbre Global CC.
Compromiso de tiempo: reuniones del comité a continuación (aproximadamente 4 horas) MÁS período de revisión (aproximadamente 6 a 8 horas según la cantidad de solicitudes)
