Artificial Intelligence and Other Natural Disasters

By Gordon Hopkins Should you be able to “opt out” of the coming AI (Artificial Intelligence) revolution?The big debate right now is about using AI to create “content,” be it visual or sound or text. However, it is important to remember that AI doesn't actually create anything new. AI simply takes existing data and “remixes” it in accordance with a set of instructions.“Creativity can’t happen without sentience,” as a human writer named Stephen King recently pointed out.In other words, if you ask an AI to write a new Sherlock Holmes story, you aren't really going to get a new Sherlock Holmes story. Instead, what you end up with is a patchwork conglomeration of already existing material. (To be fair, a lot of new Sherlock Holmes stories written by actual human beings could be described in the same way.)In order to do this, AI requires massive amounts of data. By data, I mean content created by human beings.Unsurprisingly, not every “content creator” is thrilled with having their work being reused by a machine, particularly without remuneration.So, should “content creators” (aka writers and artists and musicians) be allowed to opt out? A lot of writers certainly think so. According to a story in The Atlantic, nearly 200,000 books have been used without permission to train Meta’s (formerly Facebook's) LLaMa AI language tool. (I have no idea why LLaMa is written that way or what it stands for and don't care enough to look it up.)Outrage was instant and, unsurprisingly given the number of novelists involved, language rebuking such unauthorized use was exceedingly florid, with prose most purple.Adding to the histrionics, The Atlantic published a searchable database, so that writers can type in their name and see how many of their books have been used for this literary Frankenstein.That this is a blatant violation of copyright law seems obvious. Or is it? A number of authors have filed lawsuits, claiming the use of copyrighted books to ‘train’ an AI is blatant copyright infringement.“Plaintiffs and Class members did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training materials for LlaMA,” alleges the lawsuit, adding that the writers, “have been and remain the holders of the exclusive rights under the Copyright Act of 1976…to reproduce, distribute, display, or license the reproduction, distribution, and/or display the works identified.”So, should writers, and other ‘content creators,’ be able to opt out of having their worked used by AIs? The New York Times clearly thinks so. Last month, the venerable publication changed its terms of service to prevent AI companies from using the media organization’s content to train their systems.Google, the search engine so ubiquitous that I used it to research this very column, also thinks so. A court filing in Australia by Google states, in part, “Copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems.”The AI genie can't be put back into the silicon bottle. The best we can do is protect ourselves from the fallout. Keeping AI from stealing copyrighted works is a start.As to where this goes next, only time will tell. But I can tell you this. I checked out The Atlantic's database and not one of my books was in it. I'm not sure if I should be happy about that or not.

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