Irish creatives are hugely worried about how Artificial Intelligence will use their work and fear it will be used unethically. 

Limerick City and County Council’s Festivals and Events Team has been criticised by members of the public for its decision to use AI to promote Christmas in the Treaty City. 

Elected officials said they fear that using AI will mean fewer jobs for people who rely on creative work for a living. 

On Lunchtime Live, Laureate na nÓg and Chair of the anti-AI campaign group We Are Better Than This Chris Haughton said people in the creative industries are “horrified” by what AI is doing. 

“The main set of images that all of these generative AI models were trained on is this huge set of images, 5.6 billion images,” he explained. 

“You can go in and search it and one of my images is in there in duplicates 88 times - so, it's clearly trained on our work.

“They didn't ask permission to train on our work and they're effectively using our work in competition against us.” 

When asked to produce images in his own style, Mr Houghton said AI creates images that were created using technology that have “clearly been looking at my work”. 

“I used to work in advertising and I wanted to kind of get out of that,” he said. 

“You're sort of working for companies that don't always ethically align. 

“I thought, ‘Well, I want to use my work to do nice things, I want to make picture books.’

“So I did that and now all of my work can be used by advertising now anyway - there's so many issues with this.”

Mr Houghton also worries that people will use AI unethically and artists will have no right or recourse to stop that. 

“They could be used for a political campaign by Donald Trump or it could be used by fossil fuel companies or whatever,” he said. 

“And it's my work being used.”

Main image: AI. Picture by: Alamy.com.