AI is truly the moral/ethical issue of our time–and is an ugly echo of the state of modern politics itself. It’s an indication of how our society views its future.
I object to professional Institutions that encourage their employees/members/students to use, and train, their generative AI utilizing the intellectual property of others. No matter how inevitable it seems, it’s still theft.
But it’s all in the interest of public knowledge, right?
You know better than that. It’s in the interest of the people who own AI, and how they can use it to wring money from you, the consumer. Social media has already exploited the power of influencers. How much more can they sell you through AI ‘influencers’ of their creation, models based upon every face of every person who’s used ChatGPT to create an avatar (or stolen images from your phone and laptops)? And what will they sell you? Products? Ideas? Ideologies? Propaganda?
Some people are demanding intellectual property be free to the general public. Piracy sites abound. AI ‘authors’ produce multiple books a week, each based on the plots and characters created by genuine, human authors. Audiobooks are being narrated by mechanical voices, without human nuance. And the number of AI generated ‘translated’ versions of books is increasing daily.
For every one of you…
…who’ve paid for a copy of my books (thank you, by the way), another 20 of our fellow citizens have found a way to read without paying. Thousands of dollars have been stolen from me, and I’m such a small fish you can’t even see me in the pond. Other authors are losing much more.
Intellectual property is every bit as real as a house, a car, or White House ballroom. It takes time, effort, and not a little financial investment to write and produce. All human creators deserve fair recompense for their work, and the right to decide if they want to allow their products to be used in the training of any Artificial Intelligence.
Just because the author published in a scholarly journal does not erase the rights of authorship. Even if the author published a story on their public website, it still belongs to her. Just because some low-life, knuckle dragging, c-word figured a way to provide it for free, does NOT make it permissible to read it.
Creatives are the voice of discontent.
Authors stimulate thought, share the human condition, provoke a civic conscience, alert the populace to otherwise undisclosed information, remind us of the lessons of the past, suggest possibilities for the future, and potential for our present.
There are current laws about intellectual property, but like every other aspect of life right now – those do not seem to apply. And most of the creatives I know are seriously questioning whether to continue. Many have quit writing, performing, and/or creating art already. Many more are considering it.
When a society loses its creatives, or worse, silences them, the only voices and visions being received by the masses are controlled by rich and powerful policy makers, happily shaping your thoughts to their preferences. And they get you to pay for the privilege.
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