Given artificial intelligence’s increasing creep into our lives, it’s in some ways useful to think of the technology as deliberately invasive. That framing could help us answer questions like: If we give it an inch, will it take a mile? How rapidly will it change our lives, and should we welcome or resist those changes?
Of course, A.I. lacks consciousness and therefore intentionality. But if it were trying to act strategically, it would have made some serious blunders. Not long ago, there was broad consensus that creative work was relatively safe from automation, but—as we have discovered since OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 started generating at least superficially impressive imagery last year—that’s not the case.
As it turned out, A.I. came first for the creatives—and boy do we know how to speak out.
The thing is, generative A.I. is inherently plagiaristic, even if it often does a good job of covering its tracks. As my colleague Prarthana Prakash just reported, the popular science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has suspended all new short-story submissions, because its inbox was inundated with A.I.-generated content that aped previously published material, with minor changes.
“The number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month,” wrote publisher Neil Clarke in a blog post. “While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging.”
See also: Dow Jones and CNN complaining about OpenAI training ChatGPT—its A.I. chatbot that can author reports—on its writers’ articles; Getty Images suing startup Stability AI because its popular Stable Diffusion image-generation tool allegedly scraped Getty’s pictures; and artists expressing outrage at users of generative A.I. using such tools to copy their styles to create art.
I’ve been thinking about these ethical issues a lot recently, not just because I’m a journalist—whose peers have recently been caught publishing error-strewn, A.I.-generated stories—but also because I’m in a band.
Last year, we hit the stage for the first time since before the pandemic, and we needed to create a flyer to promote the event. Now, we’re just a hobby band and, being reasonably tech-savvy, we thought we’d make a flyer ourselves rather than paying someone to design the thing. So I fed some of our lyrics into Midjourney, an A.I. that can create art based on words entered into it, and got an image that I thought looked pretty cool; here it is. Months later, I saw some other band’s A.I.-generated thumbnail image that had an extremely similar figure in the foreground—and realized that both those images had to have been ripped off the same source.
So. Many. Ethical. Questions. Should we have paid someone to make real art for the flyer? We were unlikely to do so, but there are a bunch of graphic designers out there who are just starting out and have probably lost a substantial potential client base in the past year. Is it bad that our flyer ripped off someone else’s art, even unwittingly? Of course, and I’d apologize if I knew whose art that was. Might music-oriented generative A.I. one day rip off my creations? It’s quite possible, and I would not be happy about it.
As a musician, should I, therefore, draw a red line now and say I’ll never again use A.I.? I’m tempted to, though I also wonder if such resistance will one day look as futile as the rock band Queen promising to never use synthesizers, only to one day give in.
A.I.’s early “targeting” of the creative classes matters because, without meaning to sound pompous, artists and journalists have a loud voice and therefore play a significant part in shaping our collective consciousness. We’re not shouting about the latest developments in A.I. just because they’re fascinating, but also because we know deep down that our professions will soon be fundamentally changed by them. Yours is next, but at least society’s early warning system is sounding.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
