Sarah Harte: Why are we letting the richest men in the world steal our ideas?
Mark Zuckerberg at the 11th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony recently in Los Angeles. There is something disgusting about super-wealthy tech companies using writers' work for free, piggybacking on their creativity, skill, and graft to train generative AI models and algorithms without their consent. Photo: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
AI activates my gag reflex, firmly putting me in the Luddite category. No getting down with the cool kids for me. Try using Google, and an answer from AI pops up. Since the time of the printing press, gatekeepers have curated what content we see, but wow, talk about a ratcheting up of content domination.
It’s not the creeping fear of my AI replacement as a writer or the threat to my line of work that fuels my sceptical feelings about AI. I object to our collective consciousness being unthinkingly infiltrated by monetised parasitical digital networks. There’s probably no putting the genie back in the lamp, but there is a case for being more mindful about AI.
Do we always have to be like deferential wildebeests roaming the plains mindlessly, saying yes to every piece of technology that comes our way courtesy of billionaire venture capitalists? Yes, Sir; no, Sir; three bags full, Sir.
All my jobs involve writing. From a writing perspective, many of AI’s suggestions are, in my humble opinion, sterile. However, AI seems to be built into every piece of software now.
I read a column last week that mocked writers for having a problem with AI, although I agree with her that humans are essentially mimetic. I was in my 2 s0(not today or yesterday) in Cairo when this thought crystallised.
I was looking for the Egyptian Museum in the boiling sun. Overheated, almost certainly looking like a prawn in an Irish stew, I was bickering with the person accompanying me, arguing that we were in the wrong place. I was annoyed because we entered a room with furniture that I was convinced was Louis XIV.
I got pretty voluble, arguing that we were in a museum but not the right one. It turns out that I was wrong because the French aristocrats stole some of their ideas from the Egyptians, who lived over 3,000 years before. So yeah, I think all ideas are derivative.
I think the underlying implication of the article was that you are a flat-footed rube if you object to AI stealing your work, one of the hoi polloi — the type of regular Joe or Josephine who doesn’t get it.
Naturally, there are obvious positives to AI. Apparently, it’s the bomb for brainstorming. An academic friend of mine who is an original thinker burst out laughing when I was bitching about AI. She told me she had used it as a paradigm to write a report, then returned and dickied it up.
She also said that it was an absolute dinger at compiling footnotes and bibliographies. She had zero guilt whatsoever because it meant she finished her project in half the time. Result.
I also get that, greater efficiency aside, you can argue that AI could free people up to focus on other things, more strategic and creative work. However, it could also encourage massive intellectual laziness, diminishing human capabilities. The brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised.
People did get unhealthier when we stopped riding bicycles everywhere and slung our expanding asses into a car seat. On the other hand, even the most committed techno-pessimist couldn’t deny that it’s great to be able to use transport to get, for example, from Cork to Dublin instead of cycling there in the driving rain on your bike without gears.
But I guess it’s how you harness technology and critically evaluate it, considering what is lost and what is gained. The reality is that AI will profoundly alter many jobs, rendering many obsolete. You can argue that AI is just a tool like word processing or digital publishing.
In my heart, AI makes me wistful. In general, I’m not a sentimentalist. Hitler was mawkish and soppy; he loved dogs and children, but art in whatever form - painting, music, or literature - is fundamental; it’s the last thing computers will take away — stories, images, and notes that examine the human condition in an original way.
Anyway, this columnist wrote: “Novelists angry that a machine is learning from their work should be thankful – it is better to influence something than no one at all”.
I couldn’t disagree more. Writers are generally paid very badly. There are rock stars who, through genuine talent or luck, timing, and the art of knowing the right people, make it, but most people whose work is creative are scrambling to eke out a living.
I accept that it’s hard to quantify how other authors influence a writer’s style; they do and have.
Scraping unpaid for, unacknowledged, copyrighted work should not constitute fair use. It’s theft. We should be legislating to limit the ability of AI to troll online and steal work.
It reminds me of the legal common law tort or civil wrong of passing off. This is when a customer is misled as to the origin of a business’s goods or services, causing another business to suffer economically who has lost a customer due to the defendant business tricking the customer into thinking that their goods or services belong to the business they have copied.
They fool the customer; they damage the business from which they have stolen. It’s a sanitised form of stealing as opposed to shoving your hand through the window of a shop and stealing cartons of fags and naggins of vodka which I don’t condone but which in some way feels more honest.
I hope the many class action lawsuits in the USA brought by well-known authors against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, succeed. It’s been a long time since I practised law, but I would enjoy litigating these cases if I were still ploughing that furrow.
I picture myself with my quill pen, burning the midnight oil, squinting at dusty tomes (the print was always tiny), trying to construct arguments.
This isn’t that far off the mark because when I started as a trainee lawyer, we didn't have personal computers for approximately the first six months (a quaint term, but that’s what we called them). It's hard to believe now, but in a life before the internet, we used to sit in offices with dictaphones, pens, and paper.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the new tech bro look is to dress like a cowboy, which feels appropriate. The older I get, the more I believe that whether you wear a white collar or a pearl-snap shirt, you can steal whatever the hell you like.
There is a dirty capitalist monopolist underbelly to AI, where the definition of what is ethical is controlled by the techies who have the deepest pockets. But then, I am a middle-aged rube and, therefore, an out-of-the-swing doomsayer. Excuse me while I go off to smash a loom.
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