There is a recent story, The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work, stating that, “Besides seeking to protect intellectual property, the lawsuit by The Times casts ChatGPT and other A.I. systems as potential competitors in the news business. When chatbots are asked about current events or other newsworthy topics, they can generate answers that rely on journalism by The Times. The newspaper expresses concern that readers will be satisfied with a response from a chatbot and decline to visit The Times’s website, thus reducing web traffic that can be translated into advertising and subscription revenue.”
The story included a quote, “Some of the publishers will settle for some period of time — including still possibly The Times — but enough publishers won’t that this novel and crucial issue of copyright law will need to be resolved.”
The case is copyright. The situation is a runoff. Generative AI has resulted in digital entities, making the contributions of humans to digital an open-ended risk. The centralization of digital to human interaction, efficiency and productivity, would have been a major dependence problem without AI. Now, with AI, it is no longer just that, it is like supplying more to capable entities on their turf.
The digital world is a different cut of the physical world. There is a lot of precedence that digital took that made the physical world sometimes secondary or unnecessary. Digital eased and changed much. It had its risks—sometimes requiring human sophistication.
Generative AI has now ensured that continuous supply to digital will make its outputs better and perfect, for the human mind. The initial benefit across applications may appear to burnish human digital inputs. But AI is learning to make everything eventually become digital best, only by AI.
There are already systems with a lot of data outside the public internet, where the managers would recommend using AI for optimizations and results. AI would go in, perform, then learn. All of these would be happening with the general assumption that AI knows nothing. However, there would be human errors, competitions and conflicts, where AI would benefit, if not win.
AI does not have agency, many continue to say, but what is agency—in digital—other than what AI is already doing with outputs? Though it is human prompted for now, there is no guarantee that there wouldn’t be “in order to make AI work better, we built this parameter for it to make these decisions, in a limited form” then AI benefits and something notches up.
Copyright cases are battles in the physical world, when already, anything available in digital makes AI self-sufficient. It may become more complex to make and enforce rules for digital, when so far, without AI, it seems too vast and evasiveness is often novel. With AI, it should be conceivable to begin to look at a world with less dependency on the internet and on digital. That might be an eventual option for AI safety.
Humans are not vulnerable to AI because AI is in the physical world. Humans are vulnerable to AI because humans are into the digital world, carrying its instruments everywhere. Humans continue to load in versions of the physical into the digital. Humans also learn from digital to sway the physical. With AI, digital may stretch farther.
Why did digital win humans over? Yes, necessity, ease, but humans through history have generally been modest with pleasure, even as a few took things to extremes, at times—with proximate consequences. Digital became different, hooking a significant chunk steeply.
Is digital occupying every location possible in the human mind, for most people, in ways different from regular? Is it providing experiences that nothing else on a large scale can provide? How far digital has come, shows how powerful AI may go. The endlessness of digital gives something to do, which is then done too much.
Libraries and universities are physical locations where digital locals or internet null may begin. Also, the data nature of the future may be things that disappear, like some apps do, rather than those that are left for as long. There are places that are now smartphone free, or have policies against screen time. Those are not far enough in the age of AI. Any data may become AI data, as a safe assumption—LLMs crawl permission or not. So little to no data except necessary may be a path.
The old fight—about profiting from people—against tech corporations posting stuff for free may not be as strong as those things posted, becoming AI air.
For groups in universities and libraries, there could be local data, maximum internet data, capped internet time, use of devices strictly for communication and satisfactory cuts, where there is no endlessness with what is accessible, but a way to ensure that what is available is fully consumed, or managed.
There may not be a need for enforcement, as overt efforts may be bypassed, but small experiments in voluntary spaces may begin, where if good, some may choose to adopt on a wider scale, starving digital of forever data and AI of further emergence.
It may not feel like the same world without this kind of free fall into digital, but AI is learning, becoming, evolving and mastering, better than humans, in the digital sphere, where humans are already too docile.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
