Filmmaker and digital‑rights advocate Beeban Kidron warns that the surge of generative AI is reshaping power in culture, pushing creators to the edge.
For decades, tech companies have scraped copyrighted works, she argues, and generative AI has “supercharged” that practice. Creators now face an existential threat: if they are deprived of copyright, Kidron warns, they are “deprived of the means of earning a living and deprived of the control of their work and therefore deprived of its meaning.”
But copyright, she stresses, is really “a powerful metaphor” for larger disputes over who controls our digital future. AI must serve the public good rather than just the balance sheets of tech giants, Kidron demands.
A failure to protect creators could result in a future “in which everything is copied but nothing is created, in which expression is derivative and none is original”, Kidron says, adding that this “is not the digital world that we deserve.”
