The Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) unveiled their Manifesto on the Value of Human Creativity last week at the Banff World Media Festival.
“This declaration calls on governments, technology companies, broadcasters, producers, funders, and audiences to protect human creativity, cultural expression, and creative labour in the age of artificial intelligence.
DCG’s manifesto is a response to the rapid expansion of AI technologies across the audiovisual sector and warns that the challenge exists beyond economics and jobs. It raises fundamental questions about authorship, cultural sovereignty, artistic expression, and the future of storytelling.
The manifesto affirms several core principles:
–Storytelling is human work, rooted in lived experience, judgment, imagination, and collaboration.
–Art is not content. A creative work is an expression of the human experience and not merely a product designed to feed algorithms and maximize engagement.
–Tools are not authors. AI systems may assist with creative work, but they cannot replace human authorship, creative labour, or cultural responsibility.
–The risks posed by AI are cultural as well as economic. Systems optimized for scale threaten to flatten culture, reduce diversity of expression, and undermine distinct national and regional voices.
– Creative innovation must also account for environmental sustainability, and the growing energy demands of large-scale AI systems.”