U.K. Creative Industry Body Chiefs Call for AI Regulation: ‘This is Not a Doomsday Scenario’

variety.com:

Naman Ramachandran The governance of artificial intelligence (AI) is the subject of an ongoing debate in the U.K. with the government introducing a white paper proposing regulation in the sector in March this year.

The U.K. parliament’s science, innovation and technology committee is conducting a series of hearings into the subject and providing evidence on Wednesday were Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, CEO, U.K.

Music and Paul Fleming, general secretary of Equity, the U.K. trade union for creative practitioners. Fleming said that stable sources of income, such as radio advertisements, that allowed practitioners to work in the “more artistically fulfilling areas of the industry” like theater were increasingly taken over by AI and that the technology had already been replacing humans in crowd scenes in film and TV shows for some time. “That opportunity to earn is being reduced,” Fleming said. “This is not a doomsday scenario, we’re certainly not doom mongers about the technology itself.

It presents a lot of other opportunities for work creation,” Fleming added, saying that there were new opportunities in the form of video games and reanimation of actors, like Peter Cushing in the Star Wars franchise. “New opportunities have to exist within a platform or a framework of proper regulation to allow collective bargaining to thrive, but also to protect the moral and legal rights of our members,” Fleming said.