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With the lack of laws governing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) Ohh Deer cofounder Mark Callaby has an interesting solution: “Maybe AI could write them!”

Joking aside, AI is throwing up worries as well as opportunities for the greeting card industry.

PG hears from real voices around the greeting card industry on the art versus artificial intelligence debate…

“I am concerned that while the AI image generation is not perfect yet, it will be very soon, given how fast the technology is developing. The ability to create high-quality images from a few prompts, in seconds, is worrying for the greeting card industry.

However, I don’t foresee we'll all be signing on at the job centre anytime soon. You still have to have a good and original idea in the first place which, believe it or not, does take practice. Also, an understanding of what works on a card and what doesn't, both in terms of design and content.

AI development is not going away, so it's best to try to focus on coming up with original ideas that AI, by its very nature, can't manage - worst case scenario, your future robot overlords will hopefully keep you around because you make them laugh.”

Above: Iain Hamilton says he won’t be at the job centre soon.

Left: You need a brain like Iain Hamilton to come up with a Bewilderbeest card like this!

“We've looked at AI for generating artwork, but we definitely feel that it's not quite there yet and there are definitely questions around the integrity of where these images are actually coming from.

I think AI can definitely help in business in general, whether it's helping with spreadsheets or similar as, ultimately, if something can make a job easier or more efficient then why wouldn't a company be looking into it?”

Above: Mark Callaby thinks AI will help business in general.

Right: An Ohh Deer card which accepts the uncertainties of life.

“Does AI pose a threat to our industry? In a word, yes - but it also poses a threat to humanity unless we learn to coexist, the human and the AI.

The topic needs to be taken seriously and regulated carefully if we are to use it to our advantage. Creative industries have spent years shouting into the void to be protected and supported - I’m sure we all remember the awful advert during Covid of the ballerina being told she could retrain so she had skills that were actually needed. As creatives we’re already needed!

Recent estimates suggest AI will eliminate 300 million jobs worldwide, and in China it has already replaced some video game artists and illustrators based there.

Left: Life marches on…a design by Andrew Thornton, who is represented by Creative Sparrow.

Being an illustrator is already an incredibly difficult career, with plagiarism rife, cheap stock images used instead of skilled photography and now AI potentially threatening the creative way of life even further.

As Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian in Jurassic Park so rightly stated: “Scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think whether they should.”

The issue is that, as yet, there is no ownership and no regulation of AI. Many artists claim AI is the opposite of art, which is fundamentally about interpreting something you see and feel within you so that it exists externally for the world to see.

An online campaign #NoToAIArt highlights that AI generators are illegally using images claimed to be in the public domain because they exist on the web - in 2023 everything exists on the web but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong to someone. The IP always belongs to the original creator who is now being plagiarised by these generators, in some cases even citing the artist’s name to encourage anyone to create an image in their style.

But the finished product isn’t the whole part of the journey. When paying a creative for their services your payment includes their knowledge, their experience and training, their life lessons and all of the hard work they have put into becoming who they are at the point you employ them.

On a personal level I know my artistic journey started long before I ever knew what I wanted to do in life, as it draws from everything that makes me who I am - my childhood, my love of colour, my family’s retail business, childhood storytelling, zest for life, fine art degree, love of reading, my first job, my second and third, my love of people, of connections and collaborations, the launch of my agency and my desire to keep learning.

I’m not finished and never will be, you get the best of me because I’m constantly learning, soaking up everything I see, hear and read and distilling it through human emotions and feelings. AI can never replicate that as the tools are neutral, it’s what you put into them that makes humans creative.

Having been in the greeting card industry for many years I know the level of skill needed to create the perfect card doesn’t come easy to all illustrators but, since the release of the Procreate app, clients have taken a real shift to requesting hand-generated artwork while steering away from anything that looks too digital.

There’s no doubt some manufacturers will try out AI-generated images as, unfortunately, cost is the biggest factor for them over the skill and beauty of a design created by a human.

AI will no doubt change the way we live, interact and thrive and will be hugely beneficial in many fields but there does need to be some regulation especially in the creative industries.

This is the sort of topic that should be discussed as an industry, because the artist is rarely recognised and, in a lot of cases, not even credited as the creator of the work, which is something that needs to change - perhaps the dawn of AI will persuade publishers to all start crediting the creative so we know there was one!”

“AI, and its development at an exponential pace, is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, with its uses spanning the gamut of ground-breaking and enabling technology through to the unauthorised use of machines plundering others’ intellectual property with little or no regulation.

Some may say plundering is a sanitised word for stealing, the consequences of which threaten many with the greeting card sector.

Inevitably, there will be plethora of legal cases that will determine IP ownership and create case law, but at what cost?

As many in the UK’s creative industries are lone, micro or SME businesses, in the fast-moving world of greeting cards, the cost and time involved in taking legal action to determine ownership is not an option, but help may be at hand as some of the behemoths such as Disney begin bringing cases which help to define the law more clearly.

Under UK law you are the owner of any work you produce - if you’re employed the copyright belongs to the employer - and that copyright lasts, generally for the life of the author plus 70 years, with that copyright having been created automatically whatever you’ve produced, be it an artwork, painting, poem, sculpture, or story.

However, currently works created by AI are not protected by copyright in the UK even if produced from a text prompt written by a human, so they can be used by anyone for any purpose.

ACID’s Faith Capstick said: “The question is where the anxiety and fear resides for artists, and understandably so. For an artist who has built up years of experience through trial and error to create

their style, it would be an awful feeling to know a computer has amalgamated segments of your work and spat out something which resembles your individual, original, and unique style. Worryingly, it may come down to what the US calls the Fair Use doctrine, whereby using copyright material is justified as freedom of expression.”

Daniel Gervais, professor at Vanderbilt Law School, added: “Two factors have much, much more prominence, what’s the purpose or nature of the use and what’s the impact on the market. Another burning question is, will copyright law allow robots to learn?”

The government is intent on creating the UK as a Global AI Superpower but, following its consultation on AI, they were thwarted recently when a group of major IP creators and rights-holders campaigned and were successful in limiting the use of text and data mining. This may be a short-term reprieve, but it demonstrates the collective power of campaigning.

While some are treating AI as the third industrial revolution, it could be a doubleedged sword. The IP minister is intent on creating the right balance between an economy that protects the interests of the

How can you combat unauthorised use of your work by AI? There is no silver bullet, but here are some suggestions from ACID: l Research effective use of a digital watermarking tool. l Support the creation of an industry-standard licensing model accessible by all from micro to macro. For example, picture agency Shutterstock say: “We’re powering the future of AI, the right way,” with use through a licensing business model. l Sign the ACID IP Charter promoting IP ethics, compliance, and respect - and tell everyone you’ve signed it. l Support a move to create a universal code of conduct for companies that create AI models to be trained ethically. l The greeting card sector is a national asset so include an additional statement on the back of the card, saying: “All artwork is originally created by (insert your name). Any infringements in my copyright will be pursued vigorously,” and ACID members add the member of the organisation logo as a deterrent. l The ACID IP Databank provides a useful tool as a safe and trusted deposit bank to lodge new designs which helps create an audit trail behind original creative work - essential evidence if you must prove IP ownership. creator while also ensuring that the digital economy has the freedom to operate. For creative workers to get fair remuneration from those who use their work without permission, this continues to be a challenge.

Nimble thinking translated into visionary futureproofing of creative work via carefully thought-out policy and agile regulation is essential to establish the relationship between IP and generative AI.

While balancing the needs and expectations of consumer choice and the UK’s government ambition for digital growth, there must be safeguards to provide confidence to innovators and investors.”

“It’s hard to escape the impact of AI right now, particularly in the creative industry. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content including text, imagery, audio and synthetic data. The tech isn’t brand-new though - it was first introduced in the 1960s in chatbots.

Now in 2023, the open source and user-friendly nature of AI programmes such as Dall E, Midjouney and ChatGPT make AI an exciting - and sometimes slightly scaryventure as we all look at how it could help us do things differently and more efficiently.

At Hallmark, we’re always keen to explore new ways of working, AI included.

We’re starting to use and research ways in which AI could be a useful tool for all our teams across the business, including how it could support our brilliant creative team by generating inspiration for mood boards, trend research and writing prompts.

By minimising these types of tasks, and other repetitive or admin-based work with AI, our creative team could focus on the more complex and imaginative aspects of their work. They’d have more time for creativity and exploration to continue our aim of creating meaningful products for the consumer.

While AI is a fantastic resource, we continue to be extremely mindful of privacy and ownership. We have a strict policy to not share any confidential information with AI tools - and we take our intellectual

“The advancement of AI technology over the past five years has been extremely exciting but also mildly terrifying at the same time. However. the thought of, essentially, having access to a supercomputer in your pocket can greatly increase efficiency and delivery of projects, scenarios and information gathering for both personal and business purposes.

Recently I’ve been making use of AI technology for long terms and conditions documents, contracts, instruction manuals, land registry and that sort of thing. You simply input the document and ask the AI to analyse and summarise this document into a 2,000-word synopsis - saving me hours of reading, while still getting all of the important information I require. It’s extremely handy, indeed!

I suppose the question most people in greeting cards, myself included, are asking is: “How is AI going to affect the creative industries?”

After quite a bit of research and testing, I'm pleased to say that, in my opinion, AI will not overtake or replace the human creative skillset because it features a lot of key property very seriously, so AI is no exception.

AI is everyone’s favourite new toy so is here to stay, and we believe its impact and use will grow. However, we also believe future generations will continue to seek out handcrafted and human-made art and writing too - just look at the continued rise of craft fairs with Gen Z for example!

AI has the potential to bring exciting opportunities to the greeting card industry, yet we’ll always remember that we are people creating products for people, and that's what connects us as human beings.” aspects with two major ones that AI - for the time being anywayjust can’t replicate.

These are having actual feelings, which are a building block of all creative fields, and originality. AI will always have to look at previous data in order to process the task it’s given, meaning that nothing original and unique can be created from it which, of course, is extremely important in our sector.

AI is a computer programme that will complete any task you give it, in the most efficient and statistically positive way, which is great for data-based, research and information-gathering tasks, but not for the artistic or creative side.

The unique talents of artists, designers, illustrators, musicians and other creative professionals will be safeguarded and superior, at least for now.

Mind you, with the UN creating an AI technology think tank earlier this year, along with all major governments investing in the tech, the other question I have is: “How will other powers use it?”