Dear Designer,

I didn’t really “celebrate” the Fourth of July this year, the 250th anniversary of the formal separation of the United States of America from Great Britain.

Somehow, it didn’t feel real or important, living in Montreal. Or, like many Americans, I didn’t feel like celebrating at a time when the country is in the process of denying and erasing so much of what makes it truly “great”.

But 250 years is a long time, even by the standards of nations far older. And a (mostly) democratic state that manages to hold up over 250 years is worth remembering.

I thought I might commemorate the occasion with a thought experiment that is closer to home. So, I ask the question:

What would a “Declaration of Independence for Designers” look like?

Most of us have heard the first sentence of the second paragraph of the 1776 declaration. It starts with the statement of (mostly) universal human rights fashioned by a universal being:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

But the first paragraph is equally interesting. It sets the terms for a natural and protracted social cleavage.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Invoking Rousseau, the paragraph presents the concept that our collective interests must predominate in the face of tyranny. We are individual beings, yes, but we belong to, and in, community that is acting for the common good — and we are to be governed with our consent.

Applied to today, I wonder if, underlying the deep uncertainty, sadness, and anxiety that I hear so many designers, artists, writers, programmers and others experiencing is this: that our creative work has been fundamentally and unwittingly stolen from us. The massive and non-consensual scraping of all of our work — and the works of millions of our artist ancestors — has yet to be acknowledged.

The AI companies and their backers — VCs, governments, and technology partners — trained their models on everything we have ever put into the digital sphere. Not only did we not get compensated for the theft of our intellectual property – but we are now paying to use the very tools that we helped build. Moreover, we are being told that we had better learn these tools or risk the prospect of being sidelined. More still, AI company CEOs warn that no matter our actions, we will be sidelined.

Do we, dear designer, just go about our business and say “what is done is done”?

Is there a way to compensate me, you, and the millions of others that contributed to the success of AI models?

Is it a matter of acknowledgment of the theft and some form of reparation?

Do we even want compensation? And what about the real emotional harms being done?

Maybe what we want is separation. Perhaps we, creative and knowledge workers alike, want to be simply left alone, to make our work and to continue without increasing corporate oversight.

Maybe a declaration of independence for designers could start here:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Creators are created equal, that they are endowed with Rights of Authorship, that among these are Integrity, Autonomy and the pursuit of Art making.

Yes, it’s a tall ask. AI is too big to fail…

But so are we, the creators of the internet and AI, of visual art and written history, of discussion boards, of websites and blogs, of photos and illustration, apps and applications. We, too, are too big to fail.

Perhaps it’s time to let the people we elected know.

Yours,

andrew signature