Teaching A Computer to Steal

By Gordon Hopkins I am on a number of social media and online networking websites, mostly for my work. As a result, I do, on occasion, receive job offers. Recruiters (or their algorithms) read my profile and think I might be a good match. Mostly they see my prior experience in the insurance biz and want me to sell insurance policies, which I would enjoy almost as much as setting fire to my toes. Once in a while, though, I'm offered a writing or editing gig. I even got an offer to edit a Nebraska newspapers not too long ago.Recently, however, I've been getting offers like this, “(Company name) is looking for advanced english (sic) writers to help train AI systems and LLMs (large language models). Your profile stood out and we are inviting you to apply.”Clearly, they need some help, if only to explain to them that “English” should be capitalized.I've railed against artificial intelligence (AI) quite a bit in these pages. So much so that readers probably groaned when they realized I was going to do it again.Still, I feel the need to point out what is wrong with this sentence the recruiter sent me (beyond not capitalizing “English). Despite AI proponents describing what AIs doing as “learning,” and the people who feed AIs information as “training,” AIs don't actually learn. When you provide information to an AI, you aren't “teaching” it. You are simply adding to the pool of data from which it can plagiarize. When you ask an AI to write a poem about Mr. Spock's ears or fan fiction about Snoopy's battle with the Red Baron, you aren't getting something original. Instead, that AI is simply taking bits and pieces of real creators' works and mixing them together. Every single thing produced by an AI is merely a patchwork of works created by real people.A Chinese-language science fiction novel, “The Land of Machine Memories,” won second prize at the 5th Jiangsu Popular Science and Science Fiction Competition. Yes, the book was actually generated by an AI, with some editing by the “official” author, a journalism professor, who should know better.According to the South China Morning Post, “Journalism professor Shen Yang plans to detail his creation process so anyone can ‘create good fiction with AI’.”Wrong. Using AI is not a way to “create good fiction.” It is a way to steal good fiction. And that's the problem. This is not the only AI construction to win a literary award. The 170th Akutagawa Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in Japan, was won by an AI book. These books are winning prizes because, yes, they contain some truly wonderful, inspiring writing. Only, the AIs didn't create that writing. A real writer did.But, then, as the old saying goes, “If you are going to steal, steal from the best.”

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