Editor’s note: Ruth Vitale, who previously held executive posts at Paramount Classics, Fine Line Features and New Line Cinema, is CEO of CreativeFuture, a nonprofit coalition of more than 500 companies and organizations and nearly 300,000 individuals devoted to promoting the value of creativity in the digital age.
In 2013 I stepped away from a three-decade career as a film executive, having championed independent films and the next generation of voices, to become the CEO of CreativeFuture.
It became clear to me that digital piracy posed a significant threat to the creative industries. Nowhere was the threat greater than the indie film community that I helped build. And so I immersed myself in the remarkably different world of Washington, D.C., leading an organization that advocates for strong copyright protections for the millions of Americans working in the creative industries.
I was surprised to learn that among the main offenders in promoting the theft of our creative works were legitimate American companies such as Google and Facebook. Big Tech companies have become the most powerful in the world, in part by taking our copyrighted works without asking, giving them away for free, and amassing billions of eyeballs and ad dollars in the process.
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And they can do this because they have avoided nearly any accountability since the turn of the century. Now, more than two decades into this work, we are witnessing the rise of a new, turbo-charged threat. Generative AI, developed and implemented responsibly, can be an incredible tool, including for our creative community. But the Big Tech companies behind generative AI learned early on that building a business using the creative works of others is easier without asking permission or compensating creatives.
If we allow these massive companies to continue their “innovation” without respecting copyright, they will devastate our community.
I know what is at stake. I have seen firsthand how creativity can produce extraordinary works of art that enrich our lives while enthralling, inspiring and employing millions. The film and television industry comprises 2.32 million U.S. workers and earns $229 billion a year. Of the 122,000 American businesses that make up this industry, 92% are small businesses that employ fewer than 10 people. We produce a $15.3 billion trade surplus, more than each of the telecommunications, transportation, insurance, or health care sectors.
The data bear out what I had always known in my heart – creativity is not just an important part of American life but is the backbone of our culture and economy.
For years, we have watched Silicon Valley rush out products without installing guardrails and ignoring the foreseeable infringement occurring on their platforms.
They are at it again. Under the pretext of winning the AI race with China, these companies are asking the White House and Congress to embrace an innovation-at-all-costs approach, again with no accountability.
This, on the backs of my friends and colleagues who work tirelessly to make the entertainment the world loves. Have we learned nothing from the experience of the last 30 years of unaccountable Big Tech platforms?
Our administration and Congress have a tremendous opportunity to ensure the United States’ continued global leadership in artificial intelligence, but it need not and must not come at the expense of our creative community or the economic and cultural benefits it brings to our country.
Global AI competition is fierce, yes – China’s advancement in this technology poses threats to economic competitiveness and national security. U.S. lawmakers have correctly condemned Chinese theft of U.S. IP to gain an advantage in the “AI arms race.”
Apparently without recognizing the irony, the same AI companies who steal our work to build their models have complained vociferously about China’s theft of their IP for DeepSeekAI.
But we win only if we insist on playing by our rules and not China’s. The longstanding American commitment to the protection of intellectual property, free speech, and the rule of law are what have made us the most globally competitive nation on Earth. If we lower our standards to mimic China’s, then we cede our advantage and play into the hands of the Chinese.
We defeat China by preserving competition, free markets, property rights and individual liberty. If we do this, we will protect the millions of blue-collar American workers that make our creative industry the envy of the world while also maintaining our leadership in AI technology.
We win by building AI systems that both consumers and businesses can trust – systems that stand on a bedrock of innovation, not IP theft or faulty data. The latter approach, often based on mass scraping of the internet, is already producing American chatbots with false and unreliable results, including the parroting of Chinese Communist Party propaganda in response to consumer queries.
We do not beat China, as we have countless times before, by following their rules of common property and state-mandated business practices.
Our administration must remain steadfast in ensuring that those who put in the work receive the benefits of their efforts. Appropriating the work of others will lead to a broken system without guardrails or accountability. We know this because we have seen it happen with digital piracy over the last 20 years.
The stakes are even higher now. We can win the AI race – but only if we run it the American way.
