̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - creativity

Forcing UK creatives to ‘opt out’ of AI training risks stifling new talent, Cambridge experts warn

fpjl2 — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 07:56:32 +0000

̽��ֱ��UK government should resist allowing AI companies to scrape all copyrighted works unless the holder has actively ‘opted out’, as it puts an unfair burden on up-and-coming creative talents who lack the skills and resources to meet legal requirements.

This is according to a new report from ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge experts in economics, policy and machine learning, who also argue the UK government should clearly state that only a human author can hold copyright – even when AI has been heavily involved.

A collaboration between three Cambridge initiatives – the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and ai@cam – the report argues that unregulated use of generative AI will not guarantee economic growth, and risks damaging the UK’s thriving creative sector.

If the UK adopts the proposed ‘rights reservation’ for AI data mining, rather than maintaining the legal foundation that automatically safeguards copyright, it will compromise the livelihoods of many in the sector, particularly those just starting out, say researchers.

They argue that it risks allowing artistic content produced in the UK to be scraped for endless reuse by offshore companies.

“Going the way of an opt-out model is telling Britain’s artists, musicians, and writers that tech industry profitability is more valuable than their creations,” said Prof Gina Neff, Executive Director at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

“Ambitions to strengthen the creative sector, bolster the British economy and spark innovation using GenAI in the UK can be achieved – but we will only get results that benefit all of us if we put people’s needs before tech companies.”

'Ingested' by technologies

Creative industries contribute around £124.6 billion or 5.7% to the UK’s economy, and have a deep connection to the tech industry. For example, the UK video games industry is the largest in Europe, and contributed £5.12 billion to the UK economy in 2019.

While AI could lead to a new generation of creative companies and products, the researchers say that little is currently known about how AI is being adopted within these industries, and where the skills gaps lie.

“ ̽��ֱ��Government ought to commission research that engages directly with creatives, understanding where and how AI is benefiting and harming them, and use it to inform policies for supporting the sector’s workforce,” said Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning and Chair of ai@cam.

“Uncertainty about copyright infringement is hindering the development of Generative AI for public benefit in the UK. For AI to be trusted and widely deployed, it should not make creative work more difficult.”

In the UK, copyright is vested in the creator automatically if it meets the legal criteria. Some AI companies have tried to exploit ‘fair dealing’ – a loophole based around use for research or reporting – but this is undermined by the commercial nature of most AI.

Now, some AI companies are brokering licensing agreements with publishers, and the report argues this is a potential way to ensure creative industries are compensated.

While rights of performers, from singers to actors, currently cover reproductions of live performances, AI uses composites harvested from across a performer’s oeuvre, so rights relating to specific performances are unlikely to apply, say researchers.

Further clauses in older contracts mean performers are having their work ‘ingested’ by technologies that didn’t exist when they signed on the dotted line.

̽��ֱ��researchers call on the government to fully adopt the Beijing Treaty on Audio Visual Performance, which the UK signed over a decade ago but is yet to implement, as it gives performers economic rights over all reproduction, distribution and rental.

" ̽��ֱ��current lack of clarity about the licensing and regulation of training data use is a lose-lose situation. Creative professionals aren't fairly compensated for their work being used to train AI models, while AI companies are hesitant to fully invest in the UK due to unclear legal frameworks,” said Prof Diane Coyle, the Bennett Professor of Public Policy.

“We propose mandatory transparency requirements for AI training data and standardised licensing agreements that properly value creative works. Without these guardrails, we risk undermining our valuable creative sector in the pursuit of uncertain benefits from AI."

'Spirit of copyright law'

̽��ֱ��Cambridge experts also look at questions of copyright for AI-generated work, and the extent to which ‘prompting’ AI can constitute ownership. They conclude that AI cannot itself hold copyright, and the UK government should develop guidelines on compensation for artists whose work and name feature in prompts instructing AI.

When it comes to the proposed ‘opt-out’ solution, the experts it is not “in the spirit of copyright law” and is difficult to enforce. Even if creators do opt out, it is not clear how that data will be identified, labelled, and compensated, or even erased.

It may be seen as giving ‘carte blanche’ to foreign-owned and managed AI companies to benefit from British copyrighted works without a clear mechanism for creators to receive fair compensation.

“Asking copyright reform to solve structural problems with AI is not the solution,” said Dr Ann Kristin Glenster, Senior Policy Advisor at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and lead author of the report.

“Our research shows that the business case has yet to be made for an opt-out regime that will promote growth and innovation of the UK creative industries.

“Devising policies that enable the UK creative industries to benefit from AI should be the Government’s priority if it wants to see growth of both its creative and tech industries,” Glenster said.

̽��ֱ��UK government’s proposed ‘rights reservation’ model for AI data mining tells British artists, musicians, and writers that “tech industry profitability is more valuable than their creations” say leading academics.

We will only get results that benefit all of us if we put people’s needs before tech companies

Gina Neff

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Teaching pupils empathy measurably improves their creative abilities, study finds

tdk25 — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:50:16 +0000

̽��ֱ��findings are from a year-long ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge study with Design and Technology (D&T) year 9 pupils (ages 13 to 14) at two inner-London schools. Pupils at one school spent the year following curriculum-prescribed lessons, while the other group’s D&T lessons used a set of engineering design thinking tools which aim to foster students’ ability to think creatively and to engender empathy, while solving real-world problems.

Both sets of pupils were assessed for creativity at both the start and end of the school year using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking: a well-established psychometric test.

̽��ֱ��results showed a statistically significant increase in creativity among pupils at the intervention school, where the thinking tools were used. At the start of the year, the creativity scores of pupils in the control school, which followed the standard curriculum, were 11% higher than those at the intervention school. By the end, however, the situation had completely changed: creativity scores among the intervention group were 78% higher than the control group.

̽��ֱ��researchers also examined specific categories within the Torrance Test that are indicative of emotional or cognitive empathy: such as ‘emotional expressiveness’ and ‘open-mindedness’. Pupils from the intervention school again scored much higher in these categories, indicating that a marked improvement in empathy was driving the overall creativity scores.

̽��ֱ��study’s authors suggest that encouraging empathy not only improves creativity, but can deepen pupils’ general engagement with learning. Notably, they found evidence that boys and girls in the intervention school responded to the D&T course in ways that defied traditional gender stereotypes. Boys showed a marked improvement in emotional expression, scoring 64% higher in that category at the end of the year than at the start, while girls improved more in terms of cognitive empathy, showing 62% more perspective-taking.

̽��ֱ��research is part of a long-term collaboration between the Faculty of Education and the Department of Engineering at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge called ‘Designing Our Tomorrow’ (DOT), led by Bill Nicholl and Ian Hosking. It challenges pupils to solve real-world problems by thinking about the perspectives and feelings of others.

̽��ֱ��particular challenge used in the study asked pupils at the intervention school to design an asthma-treatment ‘pack’ for children aged six and under. Pupils were given various creative and empathetic ‘tools’ in order to do so: for example, they were shown data about the number of childhood asthma fatalities in the UK, and a video which depicts a young child having an attack. They also explored the problem and tested their design ideas by role-playing various stakeholders, for example, patients, family-members, and medical staff.

Nicholl, Senior Lecturer in Design and Technology Education, who trains teachers studying on the ̽��ֱ��’s D&T PGCE course, said: “Teaching for empathy has been problematic despite being part of the D&T National Curriculum for over two decades. This evidence suggests that it is a missing link in the creative process, and vital if we want education to encourage the designers and engineers of tomorrow.”

Dr Helen Demetriou, an affiliated lecturer in psychology and education at the Faculty of Education with a particular interest in empathy, and the other researcher involved in the study, said: “We clearly awakened something in these pupils by encouraging them to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. ̽��ֱ��research shows not only that it is possible to teach empathy, but that by doing so we support the development of children’s creativity, and their wider learning.”

̽��ֱ��gender differences charted in the study indicate that the intervention enabled students to overcome some of the barriers to learning that assumed gender roles often create. For example, boys often feel discouraged from expressing emotion at school, yet this was one of the main areas where they made significant creative gains according to the tests.

In addition to the Torrance Tests, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with pupils at both the intervention school and a third (girls-only) school who also undertook the asthma challenge. This feedback again suggested that pupils had empathised deeply with the challenges faced by young asthma-sufferers, and that this had influenced their creative decisions in the classroom.

Many, for example, used phrases such as ‘stepping into their shoes’ or ‘seeing things from another point of view’ when discussing patients and their families. One boy told the researchers: “I think by the end of the project I could feel for the people with asthma… if I was a child taking inhalers, I would be scared too.”

Another responded: “Let’s say you had a sister or brother in that position. I would like to do something like this so we can help them.”

Overall, the authors suggest that these findings point to a need to nurture ‘emotionally intelligent learners’ not only in D&T classes, but across subjects, particularly in the context of emerging, wider scientific evidence that our capacity for empathy declines as we get older.

“This is something that we must think about as curricula in general become increasingly exam-based,” Demetriou said. “Good grades matter, but for society to thrive, creative, communicative and empathic individuals matter too.”

Nicholl added: “When I taught Design and Technology, I didn’t see children as potential engineers who would one day contribute to the economy; they were people who needed to be ready to go into the world at 18. Teaching children to empathise is about building a society where we appreciate each other’s perspectives. Surely that is something we want education to do.”

̽��ֱ��study is published in the journal, Improving Schools.

Teaching children in a way that encourages them to empathise with others measurably improves their creativity, and could potentially lead to several other beneficial learning outcomes, new research suggests.

We clearly awakened something in these pupils by encouraging them to think about the thoughts and feelings of others

Helen Demetriou

Designing Our Tomorrow project

Child-friendly asthma treatment kits designed by pupils who took part in the study, which gave them various empathetic ‘tools’ to inform their D&T lessons

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Toddlers, knights and golden bears

cg605 — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 08:16:10 +0000

Inside the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Armoury and Renaissance galleries are alive with the sound of chattering children. Eyes wide in amazement, noses pressed against cool glass and little feet padding across polished floors, Cambridgeshire pre-schoolers are excitedly discovering treasures found close to home and further afield.

Thinking inside the box

sc604 — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 08:03:18 +0000

It’s a common occurrence: when faced with a problem which is similar to one which has been faced before, most people will default to what worked in the past. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But while this approach often works, it can also limit thinking and prevent alternate, and possibly better, solutions from being considered. In psychology, this phenomenon of being ‘stuck in a rut’ or failing to ‘think outside the box’ is known as fixation, or the ‘Einstellung’ effect.

Fixation occurs in all sorts of settings, such as with the interpretations that scientists make of their data, the decisions that managers make in organisations, and in the diagnoses that physicians make. It’s is also an issue in design and engineering, where knowledge of earlier solutions can inadvertently narrow the range of answers that designers explore when responding to new problems.

Since the phenomenon of design fixation was first demonstrated in experiments over 30 years ago, researchers have worked to understand how it is influenced by the types of example solutions that designers are aware of, the design methods that they use and the interactions that they have with other team members.

“Whether designing a new toy, a new bridge, or a new piece of software, fixation can stop the creative process cold: severely limiting the way in which we see a problem and the variety of solutions we explore,” said Dr Nathan Crilly of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “However, there is still a lack of in-depth research on fixation in the real-world settings that experimental research is meant to simulate. In particular, we have little knowledge of how fixation occurs in professional design projects that have conflicting objectives, long timescales and experienced team members.”

To address this gap in knowledge, Crilly recently conducted a qualitative study with designers working in innovation consultancies about their awareness of fixation and the strategies they use to overcome it. ̽��ֱ��study found that although various formal methods are used to promote creative thinking, reflecting on prior episodes of fixation is the most effective way of guarding against such episodes in the future. ̽��ֱ��analysis may help to build a framework for new strategies to combat design fixation – developing tools and training that help designers to avoid becoming fixated in future. ̽��ֱ��results are published in the journal Design Studies.

What causes fixation varies from person to person, and from project to project, but common factors include a commitment to initial ideas, project constraints that prevent exploration, and organisational cultures that give people ownership of their ideas, which gives them the incentive to defend them.

Common factors that prevent fixation include diverse teams, making and testing models and facilitation of the creative process by people who are familiar with fixation risks. However, experience can be a both a blessing and a curse when it comes to preventing fixation. As designers gain more experience, they learn how certain approaches succeed or fail, with the experience of failure particularly prominent in their minds. This accumulated knowledge can cause designers to become increasingly conservative, with experienced designers sticking to a restricted set of solutions that are known to work.

While experience of failure can lead to fixation, other forms of experience can help to prevent it. For example, by working on a variety of different projects, designers are exposed to the many ways in which any given problem can be solved. This experience of variety acts to remind designers that the current problem they are addressing must have multiple possible solutions too, even when they are seemingly stuck on one way of looking at it.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, as designers accumulate design experience, they also accumulate experience of fixation, either in themselves or in those they interact with. These episodes of blindness might only be recognised in retrospect, but by reflecting on them, designers can learn to recognise their biases and learn to resist them. Over time, designers become better at identifying the situations in which fixation is a risk and better at implementing countermeasures. For example, one of the participants described their own thought process as they work: “You always think your idea’s good, there’s psychology in that … And then you push other ideas to the side, mentally. … [But] the more projects you do then the more you … self-analyse.”

Despite their awareness of the risks of fixation and the steps they take to guard against it, designers also recognise that fixation is a difficult problem to control. In the creative process of developing new products, systems or services, designers must show commitment and persistence in the face of ambiguity and repeated setbacks. This makes it difficult to maintain the levels of openness and flexibility that are required to challenge previously accepted ideas or even ideas that are only just emerging.

This tension between persistence and openness is characteristic of many creative activities, whether in the sciences, the arts or in business. According to Crilly, to tackle this conflict it is important to gain a better understanding of the various creative behaviours that people exhibit and the barriers that block that behaviour.

“By understanding the nature of fixation, we’ll be able to develop the tools and techniques that effectively address it in the contexts where it occurs, and understand how these tools should be presented to the people who will use them,” said Crilly.

̽��ֱ��research has been funded by the UK Physical Sciences & Research Council (EPSRC).

New research into the phenomenon of design fixation – allowing prior experience to blind us to new possibilities – may help in the development of new tools and strategies that help to stimulate the creative process without inadvertently limiting it.

Fixation can stop the creative process cold: severely limiting the way in which we see a problem and the variety of solutions we explore

Nathan Crilly

Ars Electronica

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Creative research on musical performance

lw355 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:07:03 +0000

̽��ֱ��five-year AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) will address key questions about how musical performances take shape over time, how knowledge is transformed into practice in performance, and how understanding this creative practice varies across different traditions and cultures.

‘Scholarly interest in musical performance has practically exploded during the last 20 years,’ said Centre Director Professor John Rink. ‘Whereas musicologists once understood music primarily in terms of notated texts, the experience of music in sound and through time, as well as the creative processes behind it, now inform research of the highest quality and urgency. Performance studies are at the top of the international research agenda – one which CMPCP will shape for years to come.’

A grant of £1.7 million from the AHRC has provided ‘Phase 2’ funding to establish the Centre in Cambridge in partnership with King’s College London, the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford and Royal Holloway, ̽��ֱ�� of London, and in association with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Royal College of Music. CMPCP will build on the achievements of its predecessor, the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), which focused on musical recordings and was based at Royal Holloway.

Cambridge’s contribution to the Centre will be spearheaded by Professor Rink, who will lead a project on creative learning and ‘original’ performance, and Professor Nick Cook, who is investigating music as creative practice. Professor Cook, who previously directed CHARM, was elected last year to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s 1684 Chair of Music.

Cambridge is well placed to host CMPCP thanks to its outstanding performance environment. But as Professor Cook explained, its strengths as host institution go even further: ‘Because music is a central feature of everyday life, its scope extends beyond the arts and humanities into the social and even the hard sciences. Cambridge’s pre-eminence in all these areas, coupled with the possibility of creating working relationships between researchers in different disciplines, make it an ideal location to develop a musicology for the 21st century.’

For more information, please contact Professor John Rink (jsr50@cam.ac.uk) or visit www.cmpcp.ac.uk/

A pioneering research centre studying live musical performance as creative practice launches in the Faculty of Music in October with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

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Violin

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