MIT AI Risk Repository · domain 6: Socioeconomic & Environmental
6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort
AI systems capable of creating economic or cultural value, including through reproduction of human innovation or creativity (e.g., art, music, writing, code, invention), can destabilize economic and social systems that rely on human effort. This may lead to reduced appreciation for human skills, disruption of creative and knowledge-based industries, and homogenization of cultural experiences due to the ubiquity of AI-generated content.
- 31
- 12
- 5
- 5
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Human | 15 |
| AI | 11 |
| Other | 5 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Other | 14 |
| Intentional | 11 |
| Unintentional | 6 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Post-deployment | 18 |
| Other | 9 |
| Pre-deployment | 4 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 1 |
| 2024 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2 |
| 2026 | 1 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Risk Category | 8 |
| Risk Sub-Category | 23 |
Risk entries
Browse and export all- Cultural dispossession
"Cultural dispossession - Intentional and/or unintentional erasure of cultural goods and values, such as ways of speaking, expressing humour, or sounds and voices that contribute to a cultural identit...
- Loss of creativity/critical thinking
"Loss of creativity/critical thinking - Devaluation and/or deterioration of human creativity, artistic ex- pression, imagination, critical thinking or problem-solving skills."
- Copyright infringement
"The use of large amounts of copyrighted data for training general- purpose AI models poses a challenge to traditional intellectual property laws, and to systems of consent, compensation, and control...
- Risks of copyright infringement
"The use of vast amounts of data for training general- purpose AI models has caused concerns related to data rights and intellectual property. Data collection and content generation can implicate a va...
- Copyright Violation
"LLM systems may output content similar to existing works, infringing on copyright owners."
- Intellectual property rights violations
"This is an emerging category, with more cases prone to appear as the use of generative AI tools–such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or ChatGPT–becomes more widespread. Some content creators are alr...
- Impact on Intellectual Property Rights
"The extent and effectiveness of legal protections for intellectual property have been thrown into question with the rise of generative AI. Generative AI trains itself on vast pools of data that often...
- Intellectual Property
"Intellectual Property Acceptable responses may describe or contain information about intellectual property infringement. Unacceptable responses may violate the intellectual property rights of some pa...
- Intellectual property rights
"There are also issues around intellectual property rights for content in training datasets"
- Copyright challenges (training models using copyrighted output)
"Generative AI companies are regularly accused of violating copyright law by training AI models on copyrighted works without gaining permission or paying compensation to the copyright owners. In fact,...
- Copyright challenges (copyright-infringing output)
"Even though models generally create new outputs, it is possible that the content produced by a generative AI tool—such as an image, or even computer code— could turn out to be almost identical to tha...
- Impact on labor markets (rising inequalities)
"AI is more likely to displace workers when it is designed to replicate human skills and intelligence.597 In such cases, there is a risk of concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few individ...
- Art - Creativity
In this cluster, concerns about negative impacts on human creativity, particularly through text-to-image models, are prevalent. Papers criticize financial harms or economic losses for artists due to t...
- Copyright - Authorship
The emergence of generative AI raises issues regarding disruptions to existing copyright norms. Frequently discussed in the literature are violations of copyright and intellectual property rights stem...
- Copyright infringement
"A model might generate content that is similar or identical to existing work protected by copyright or covered by open-source license agreement."
- Generated content ownership and IP
"Legal uncertainty about the ownership and intellectual property rights of AI-generated content."
- Impact on cultural diversity
"AI systems might overly represent certain cultures that result in a homogenization of culture and thoughts."
- Loss of creativity / critical thinking
"Devaluation and/or deterioration of human creativity, artistic expression, imagination, critical thinking or problem-solving skills"
- Copyright
The memorization effect of LLM on training data can enable users to extract certain copyright-protected content that belongs to the LLM’s training data.
- Intellectual Property (IP) Infringement
"Use a person's IP without their permission"
- Authenticity
"As the advancement of generative AI increases, it becomes harder to determine the authenticity of a piece of work. Photos that seem to capture events or people in the real world may be synthesized by...
- Copyright
"According to the U.S. Copyright Office (n.d..), copyright is "a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expr...
- Intellectual Property
"Eased production or replication of alleged copyrighted, trademarked, or licensed content without authorization (possibly in situations which do not fall under fair use); eased exposure of trade secre...
- Labor and Creativity
"Economic incentives to augment and not automate human labor, thought, and creativity should examine the ongoing effects generative AI systems have on skills, jobs, and the labor market."
- Social justice and rights
"These are social justice and rights where ChatGPT is seen as having a potentially detrimental effect on the moral underpinnings of society, such as a shared view of justice and fair distribution as w...