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Over the last nine months one piece of technology has dominated the news – artificial intelligence. Countless articles and opinion pieces have been written and broadcast discussing the potential for artificial intelligence (or ‘AI’ as it is often called) to change the world – for better and for worse. One field of AI, known as generative artificial intelligence, has caused all of this excitement. Generative AI is a collective term for any form of artificial intelligence that creates new data in the form of text, sound, music, video and pictures. Programs such as ChatGPT, Bard, MidJourney and DALL-E have become wildly successful with hundreds of millions of people exploring their capabilities. Many people are enthusiastic, almost evangelical, about the potential for artificial intelligence to drive creativity. Generative AI can quickly produce huge amounts of content and in a seemingly unlimited range of styles. Musicians, writers and movie makers are already experimenting with its abilities to not only create new material, but to support their own creative processes. However, there is another side to this revolution – could AI end up destroying human creators? Such concerns are one part of the strikes that crippled Hollywood film and television production in the Summer of 2023; writers and actors alike fear the consequences for their careers if AI is used to replace what were once thought to be human skills. There is also a dark secret behind generative AI – these incredible pieces of technology rely on human beings. These programs can write, draw and compose new material only because they have been trained on enormous volumes of data – text, pictures, sounds and music created by human artists. If an AI can impersonate the work of a single artist or compose a tune in the style of a songwriter, it is only because it has been trained on their work. The ethics and legality of using creators’ works to train their potential replacements are uncertain and somewhat frightening; it might be years before courts and governments can rule on what is, and what is not, acceptable and how the rights of creators can be protected. Like most technologies, generative AI is neither good nor evil – it has potential to make our lives better, or to create a world where giant corporations become even richer at the expense of human creators. It’s too soon to tell what will happen next – but we can be sure that the next few years will be exciting.