Responding to comments by First Secretary Louise Haigh at the TUC Congress that the UK Government must “heed the warnings” about artificial intelligence while recognising its potential benefits, Equity called for urgent legal protections to ensure that AI is not deployed destructively at the expense of creative workers.
The government can come good on the promise of extra safeguards for workers over AI by introducing personality rights.
Paul W Fleming, Equity General Secretary
Equity said ministers must go beyond broad commitments on AI safety and introduce a new regime of personality rights, which it says will “benefit everyone” by providing a framework of new personal rights over their voice, face, body and likeness that will provide protection in the face of unauthorised digital replicas.
Shortly before Louise Haigh addressed Congress, Equity moved a motion calling for the introduction of personality rights “to give performers a clear route to control and license digital replicas within agreed limits, and to give all individuals a clear right to object to a harmful digital replica”.
Equity’s policy is clear: performers and creative workers must have the right to informed consent, fair remuneration, transparency and enforceable protections when AI systems use their work, image, voice or data. Without these rights, technologies falling within the umbrella of AI will be tools of exploitation, replacing or replicating creative labour without permission, payment or accountability. It also leaves anyone open to the risk of deepfakes, sexualised digital manipulations of their likeness and other misuses.
Paul W Fleming, Equity general secretary, said: “We’ve heard really positive, warm words from Lou Haigh today about extra safeguards for workers over AI. The government can come good on that promise by introducing personality rights.
“If ministers want AI to serve the public good, they must put working people’s rights at the centre of regulation. Everyone stands to benefit from a personality rights framework. It’s important to stop deepfakes, it’s important to give people rights and dignity over content that’s created and to allow our members to protect themselves against the growing storm of AI.
“We hope that before the end of the year there will be a government consultation on personality rights to make them a reality sooner rather than later.”
Equity has warned that the scraping of creative work and personal data to train AI models threatens livelihoods across the performing arts and entertainment industries.
The union is campaigning for new personality rights to address the risks posed by AI-generated digital replicas.
Equity said the UK should learn from jurisdictions that already provide personality rights and act quickly to ensure that creators, performers and the wider public are protected from deepfakes, digital replicas and other forms of AI misuse.
