Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts

Who Owns AI?

Amy Whitaker — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800

While artificial intelligence (AI) stands to transform artistic practice and creative industries, little has been theorized about who owns AI for creative work. Lawsuits brought against AI companies such as OpenAI and Meta under copyright law invite novel reconsideration of the value of creative work. This paper synthesizes across copyright, hybrid practice, and cooperative governance to work toward collective ownership and decision-making. This work adds to research in arts entrepreneurship because copyright and shared value is so vital to the livelihood of working artists, including writers, filmmakers, and others in the creative industries. Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against OpenAI is used as the main case study. The conceptual framework of material and machine, one and many, offers a lens onto value creation and shared ownership of AI. The framework includes a reinterpretation of the fourth factor of fair use under U.S. copyright law to refocus on the doctrinal language of value. AI uses the entirety of creative work in a way that is overlooked because of the small scale of one whole work relative to the overall size of the AI model. Yet a theory of value for creative work gives it dignity in its smallness, the way that one vote still has dignity in a national election of millions. As we navigate these frontiers of AI, experimental models pioneered by artists may be instructive far outside the arts.

Arts Entrepreneurial Work in Changing Contexts

Rachel Skaggs, Molly Jo Burke, Kuo Guo, Erin J. Hoppe, Elizabeth C. Cooksey — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly shifted the context of artistic and creative work, forcing individuals to adapt to wide-reaching changes in the way they operated in both work and life. Relying on interviews with data from 66 U.S.-based arts graduates, this article speaks to needs in sustaining creative life and work after the first year of the pandemic. Interviewees related that their needs for a sustainable creative work and life were primarily that they needed the social and physical distancing restrictions of the pandemic to end, more time and capacity to be creative, and monetary support. Ultimately, we argue that the changing context of the pandemic required substantial entrepreneurial ability toward being adaptable, superseding capacity for creativity during the first year of the pandemic. Our findings reflect that when arts entrepreneurs’ self-structured careers required new or intensified effort toward non-arts aspects of their work, their feelings of, or capacity for, creativity may be diminished.

Editors’ Introduction

Olaf Kuhlke; Andrew Taylor — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Make Art as if your Life Depended on It: Trauma-Informed Care in the Creative Industries

Olaf Kuhlke — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800