Creative Rightsholders vs GenAI: Mediating Trust, Value and Ownership through Tokenised Licensing and Content Authenticity Tools

Recent debates demonstrate that traditional copyright and licensing models may be ill-equipped to both protect creative rightsholders, and support sustainable and ethical development and applications of AI. This talk explores how novel approaches to tokenized licensing, combined with provenance and content authenticity tools could be used to mediate trust, value and ownership In contemporary digital economies and AI supply chains.

In particular, through design prototypes and fieldwork we have undertaken with creatives and the general public, we introduced the ORA (Ownership, Rights and Attribution) framework – a decentralised protocol that provides the capacity to declare, embed and track creator’s rights and intentions. In recent work, we have explored the potential to produce highly bespoke, granular, and machine-readable licenses under which work may be used by others. With such a system, rightsholders could in theory not only directly opt-out of AI usage of their content, but express more granular preferences, which may for example be time-bound, allow pre-training but not post-training, or to allow AI to support discoverability of content, but not in training new AI models.

About the speaker:

Chris Elsden is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Service Design in the Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is a design researcher, with a background in sociology, and expertise in the human experience of data-driven services. Using and developing innovative design research methods, his work undertakes diverse, qualitative and often speculative engagements with participants to investigate emerging relationships with technology – particularly data-driven tools, FinTech and blockchain technologies. In so doing, he hopes to reveal the many nuanced relationships people and organisations have with digital technology in their everyday lives, and use these insights to identify new and future opportunities for design.