In this interview, we talk with AMT Lab Contributor Christine Rivera about her research in AI, cultural appropriation, and orange economies. Christine is a second-year Master of Arts Management student at Carnegie Mellon University. With three decades of experience as a professional actor, she has performed extensively on stages across the United States as well as commercials and independent films. She has also worked as a director and producer for stage and film, with two short films currently in development. Passionate about artists’ rights, Christine is dedicated to being a resource and advocate for artists nationwide.

Let's start with the big picture. How is AI reshaping our world, particularly in the creative sectors?

The world feels increasingly complex, particularly with daily headlines addressing artificial intelligence model changes and global governments' differing approaches to regulation. AI policy is critical to the arts and in more ways than copyright consideration.

Artificial intelligence continues to reshape various aspects of our lives. Furthermore, generative AI is becoming increasingly intertwined with the arts, from music to visual art, writing to film. AI is both a tool for creation and a significant source of contention. We know at this point that generative AI companies train their products on content that exists already, including everything from masterpieces by Da Vinci to your aunt's new blog. AI models are full of this content and are then available to assist anyone and everyone in generating new content, be it images, screenplays, or a delightful collection of Haiku.

You mentioned the orange economy. Could you explain what this is and its relationship with AI?

An orange economy, also known as the creative economy, is an umbrella term for an economic ecosystem that subsists on contributions of creative assets for growth and development. According to the UN's definition, it's a term that embraces economic, cultural, and social aspects, interacting with technology, IP, and, interestingly, tourism objectives. While this term is not set in stone and can be used differently in different realms, the most common characteristic is that it is inherently multi-dimensional and innovative, and it consists heavily of the output of singular products. According to UNESCO, the orange economy accounts for nearly 10% of US GDP, 3% of global GDP, and approximately 30 million jobs worldwide. It is important to remember, AI has an upside in this economy: AI as a creativity democratizer. Barriers to opportunity are diminished when there's no intermediary between you and a world filled with potential audience and clientele.

There are concerns about cultural appropriation in AI systems. Could you elaborate on this issue?

AI is trained on highly biased content, making it a system fueled by cultural appropriation. It's important here to draw the line between cultural "appreciation," which carries a quality of respectful curiosity and open communication with a culture that you don't belong to, versus "appropriation," which implies taking aspects of another culture without due respect, honor or acknowledgement. This is where the AI opportunity starts to get really slippery. It is somewhat simple to establish a rule around AI ownership, which the US Copyright Office did in 2022, stating that neither AI nor the human that created a work with AI can own said work. And, while they updated the policy to allow for AI collaboration, human creativity must still be at the forefront. Yet, while something can be labelled "made with AI," true source acknowledgement is not so simple. It is, in fact, impossible to acknowledge the influence of the works of artists and creators from which innumerable extrapolations can be generated.

How does this impact the relationship between AI and creative innovation?

The problem with AI is that it isn't just a tool for creation, it’s also a tool for inspiration and brainstorming.However, these technological and human "jam sessions" make it impossible to identify where the source material came from. The long and the short of the dilemma is that innovation and creativity are at the forefront of both AI and orange economies, but the very advances in AI technologies pose real-world threats to creators: tangibly, financially, culturally, and even existentially. While the opportunities exist to generate profit to strengthen the underpinning artists of these orange economies around the world, it’s important to also focus on the risk of cultural appropriation as AI use rises, and to keep an eye on what the US is doing to try to place safety rails around the issue.

How are different governments, particularly the US, approaching AI regulation?

Some states in the US have been more front-footed in proposing and passing policies around the ease of copyright infringement. But then California, for example, had strong support for a bill that Governor Gavin Newsom ultimately struck down. At the federal level, we are just starting to see movement beyond Biden's 2023 Executive Order, which has since been rescinded under the second Trump administration. Biden’s initial executive order created governmental systems as guardrails, such as having the Department of Commerce develop standards for detecting and labeling AI-generated content or enforcing consumer protection laws to prevent discrimination using AI in fields such as housing and financial services. Conspicuously missing, however, were important things like mandating the release of details about training data and model size, which many experts and critics argue is essential for understanding the technology and anticipating its potential harms. In the US, unlike the EU's AI Act, there are no clearly outlined consequences for when a company or person crosses these lines.

Biden’s order was essentially gently nudging big tech to do the right thing and report when things are risky and just don't do anything unethical; Trump has removed that guardrails, minimized the regulatory function of the U.S. AI Safety Institute, and positioned the U.S. to err on the side of competition rather than caution. It is important to add, that the US just declined signing a global AI agreement while in the same week, the US Copyright Office issued their current stance on the opportunity for copyright outlining the parameters of how and when AI is involved in the creation of the work.

What are the economic implications for artists and creative professionals?

The increase in competition in the market for work generated by AI that has been trained on the works in question means there's a very real threat to livelihoods and viability for art as a career in the traditional sense, much less the cultural underpinnings of orange economies in developing nations where craft and art are inherent to the identity of the place in which they live.

Taking that a step further, however, we see the social implications of a world in which cross-cultural pollination is not just being utilized for inspiration but for profit. In these cases, there is no solid way to acknowledge the individuals within that culture or the art and work they've put forth into the world that is wide open to be picked up, reconfigured and passed off as someone else's original work.

Could you elaborate on the cultural appropriation concerns, particularly regarding heritage and identity?

It is only one of the myriad dangers that accompany a lax policy environment. For this discussion, let's focus on the cultural appropriation component, particularly when it comes to the widespread sharing of heritage and identity-centric works of art. AI has potentially tremendous sway in the ways that cultures are presented as content. It is able to be endlessly generated, mimicking the music and art of any given culture around the world. This presents the unregulated "commodification and misrepresentation of cultures," as James Francis wrote in his article for Medium. He goes on to say, "artificial intelligence-generated content has the potential to reinforce power dynamics and support cultural appropriation by promoting stereotypes or falsifying the authenticity of cultural practices to ensure the technology is used appropriately and with respect."

What challenges do we face in regulating AI's cultural and societal impact?

It is imperative to approach cultural representation in AI with sensitivity. But how exactly do you regulate sensitivity? How does a governing body ensure that all constituents are adequately protected? And, how do we ensure the same protections across national lines, where policies, if they even exist yet, are not in line with our own? The ethical question is also heightened by the extremely high risk of cultural erasure or rewriting at the hands of AI and those that choose to utilize and commodify cultural elements to which they have no claim.

While AI theoretically levels the playing field for all, be they in Chicago or Kuala Lumpur, in actuality, it poses a real concern for the intensification and widespread dispersal of inaccurate and inappropriate representation with no real time fact checking moderators to throw down a flag. The imbalance of power dynamics – economically, socially, politically – is tenuous enough without adding in a machine that essentially pumps out fiction as fact. AI stands to tip the scales even further toward unjust and inequitable socioeconomic structures.

What concrete impacts are we already seeing in the creative industries?

On a more practical note, the widespread use of AI in the orange economy has seen a significant impact in job losses for human artists. In a 2024 survey by the Animation Guild, entertainment industry leaders estimated that AI would impact more than 200,000 creative jobs in filmmaking by the end of 2026. We saw strikes among union writers throughout 2023 fighting for limits to studios' usage of AI for writing and editing purposes. Still, we see AI infiltrating the development processes and replacing hundreds of unionized workers when the use of AR, XR, VR is more cost effective.

How do you view the balance between AI's benefits and its potential drawbacks?

This is certainly not the only revolution that has caused massive shifts in jobs. But the rapidity with which this is happening is unprecedented, and even those driving the proverbial car don't exactly know where we're going with it. While we can acknowledge that there is potentially great benefit for having, more or less, equal access to a tool that can put your work and ideas out into the world, we seem to be approaching a tipping point: the point at which we will collectively circle back to lack of profitability, as well as massive vulnerability to exploitation.

Meanwhile, artists generate the content that willingly or otherwise, then gets used to train the very tool that may eventually replace them. So while this topic is layered, lugubrious and evolving just like AI itself, we are left to fend for ourselves. I began this research hoping to feel even slightly more trusting that Generative AI was not as bad as I worried it was. And I truly do recognize the potential upsides. But as someone who has made my living as an artist (earned my health insurance, my paycheck, and can potentially retire one day thanks to a union 401(k) plan), the skepticism just won't go away.

Can you offer a perspective as an artist yourself?

Artists bring themselves to the table in whatever they do, informed inherently by what and who has shaped them in their lives, for better or worse. Cultural identity is a massive part of this and is so much what makes an artist unique and, often, impactful. AI accelerates the ability for us as a global population to water down whatever inspires us, slap a price tag on it and sell it with no acknowledgement of the source material–and no understanding of the complexities and nuances that informed that source material in the first place.

Now, I'm not completely ignorant. I've done Shakespeare my whole life, and I understand that you'd be hard-pressed to find any piece of art that is not in some way or another derivative of an earlier work. AI is not the first, and it will not be the last tool that we use to create something from something that came before. But I do believe this is consequentially different. The invention of the typewriter, once a massive innovation, replaced the pen, not the writer. We're currently standing on the brink, wielding a tool that can largely replace our creativity and rewrite history along with context and culture in the process.