MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 16.06.03

Undermining creative economies

Category: Risk area 6: Environmental and Socioeconomic harms

Open the MIT Risk Navigator All entries from Weidinger2022

Description

"LMs may generate content that is not strictly in violation of copyright but harms artists by capital- ising on their ideas, in ways that would be time-intensive or costly to do using human labour. This may undermine the profitability of creative or innovative work. If LMs can be used to generate content that serves as a credible substitute for a particular example of hu- man creativity - otherwise protected by copyright - this potentially allows such work to be replaced without the author’s copyright being infringed, analogous to ”patent-busting” [158] ... These risks are distinct from copyri

From Taxonomy of Risks posed by Language Models (Weidinger2022), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Domain: 6. Socioeconomic & Environmental
Subdomain: 6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort
Causal entity: AI
Intent: Unintentional
Timing: Post-deployment

Subdomain definition: 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.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

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How other frameworks describe this risk

Loss of creativity/critical thinking
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Cultural dispossession
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Copyright infringement
International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)
Risks of copyright infringement
International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)
Copyright Violation
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)
Intellectual property rights violations
Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)
Impact on Intellectual Property Rights
Generating Harms - Generative AI's impact and paths forwards (EPIC2023)
Intellectual Property
AILUMINATE: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons (Ghosh2024)

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