The Ethics of AI in the Cultural and Creative Industries

Guests: Andrew Melchior & Parvathy Nair

This episode focuses on the topic of Creative Ownership, exploring whether and how creatives and artists can retain ownership of their work given the current AI landscape and regulations in place.

Andrew Melchior is a British-German creative technologist with over 25 years at the intersection of music, technology, and art. As CTO of Massive Attack and founder of Genotone Ltd, he has spent his career building the infrastructure that connects creative practice to emerging technology, from pioneering work on one of the world's first artist websites with David Bowie in 1999 to encoding Massive Attack's Mezzanine into synthetic DNA with ETH Zürich. He has been recently appointed as Honorary Professor at the Department of Computer Science.

Parvathy Nair is a PhD researcher in Law at the University of Manchester examining how European patent law addresses foundation AI models, with a focus on sufficiency of disclosure, competition policy, and open-source frameworks. Funded by an AHRC–UKRI Studentship, her research explores how the sufficiency of disclosure criteria under the European Patent Convention (EPC) is equipped to handle complex technologies like foundation AI models and how this requirement interacts with the transparency requirements under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act and the provisions of the Digital Markets Acts, in relation to training data accessibility.

Andrew visited the University of Manchester in May and gave a keynote lecture titled "Proof of Human: AI, Copyright, and the Fight for Creative Authorship", which took place at Sister, Manchester's innovation district. In that talk, he presented a compelling case for strengthening creative authorship in the era of generative AI. The day after that lecture, he sat down with Parvathy and Duncan Hull (host) to discuss in further detail the opportunities and challenges that generative AI poses to the creative sector, including the reasons why current regulations cannot sufficiently protect creative ownership.