Washington, DC— Today, House Small Business Committee Ranking Member Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) released a report exploring the impact of the increasing popularity of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on America’s small content creators. GenAI threatens the livelihoods of small creators, given the technology’s ability to generate content faster and cheaper than creative professionals and the use of these creators’ work, without their permission, to train their GenAI competitors.
“It’s already clear that artificial intelligence will usher in the technological revolution of our lifetimes. While AI technologies continue to develop and grow, it is the Committee’s goal to examine the positive and negative effects of AI on Main Street,” said Ranking Member Velázquez. “As Congress works to craft policy around AI, it is critical that small businesses have a seat at the table and I’m hopeful this report sheds light on their concerns when it comes to AI.”
GenAI can make written, visual, and audio content for users upon request. With GenAI software, users can specify what kind of content they want in writing and receive outputs that are statistically likely to fulfill their requests. Many GenAI firms extract content from as many publicly accessible websites as possible, a process called scraping. However, these firms often scrape the internet without licensing content from their owners.
GenAI firms’ unlicensed use of these creators’ work compounds the intensity of this competition and adds layers of unfairness. Small creators not only have their work used without compensation, but also see their work improve the software which could push them out of business.
The report outlines the number of ways in which GenAI can devalue the work of hardworking artists, writers, and musicians and unfairly compete with them in the creative marketplace.
The report also examines a number of policy recommendations to protect small creators from the negative impacts of GenAI, including requiring GenAI firms to disclose unlicensed contents of their training datasets, creating licensing and opt-out schemes for the use of online content in GenAI training, government-made training datasets, and watermarking GenAI outputs.
“The increasing popularity of GenAI tools, and their ability to make content more quickly and cheaply than small creators, poses a serious threat to their livelihoods. We can already see AI’s potential to threaten to push America’s small creators out of business,” said Ranking Member Velázquez. “It’s vital that Congress clearly understands the threat these technologies could pose to small businesses and take adequate steps to protect small creators.
