Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Yes, which then casts the entire discussion into stark relief: does it matter, other than preserving an artist's livelihood and is this societally required, or is it sort of "tough luck," just like when robot automation changed factory life and all that? And everybody has to simply 'adjust'? Does not seem to have done Detroit much good.
Hard to know.
Hitch
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Well, realistically people will have to adjust. I'm hard pressed to find examples where the march of "progress" has been stopped just because a few livelihoods are being trampled on. I think most recognise that and it's part of the fear, "Am I going to be on the hit list?"
Publishers are obviously concerned at the moment of being "caught out" accidentally publishing AI produced material (without acknowledging it as such). But as your posts have already mentioned, much of the time it will not be as clear cut as that. It will be some portion, or some level influence or assistance.
Writers rarely acknowledge the software or hardware they use (although I do seem to remember reading someone's ode to their pen). However, AI threatens to change the ratio of human vs machine contribution. Our history with copyright and its related "fair use" doctrine, will inevitably excite questions in at least the writer's and publisher's minds of who is the actual creator. Did the machine create the work and the human merely adapt it? Or did the human direct the creation and so must be considered the creator?
We might look to photography. There is generally no question that some photographers are creators of art, even though the end result is arrived at entirely through technological means. And the same laws that protect such art also protect the family snap taken with little thought, and only the effort required to lift their phone and touch the screen, even though it might be argued that much of the artistic value (lighting, contrast etc.) has been chosen entirely by the machine. And the situation has been muddied further by animals taking their own selfies.
So in some respects the problems presented by AI generated text are not new. What changes, perhaps, is the idea that the deliberately creative part - up to now assumed to be the minimum human contribution - may get usurped by AI. It's not going to do that yet, but its attempts are close enough to make us fear that we humans will caught out as not quite so inspired and creative as we thought.